Obama, in Mosque Visit, Denounces Anti-Muslim Bias - nytimes

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday embraced Muslims in the United States as part of “one American family” and implicitly criticized the Republican presidential candidates in a warning to citizens to not be “bystanders to bigotry.”

In a visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, his first to a mosque in the United States as president, Mr. Obama recited phrases from the Quran and praised American Muslims as a crucial part of America’s history and vital to the nation’s future.

“And so if we’re serious about freedom of religion — and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country — we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths,” Mr. Obama said.

Although Mr. Obama never mentioned Republican presidential candidates like Donald J. Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, the targets in his remarks were clear. “We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion,” he said.

The speech served as a bookend to a 2009 address Mr. Obama delivered at Cairo University, where he called for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” In Baltimore, the president did not talk about intractable international conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and focused instead on the more prosaic reality of vandalized mosques and bullied American Muslim children.

“These children are just like mine,” Mr. Obama said. “And the notion that they would be filled with doubt and questioning their places in this great country of ours at a time when they’ve got enough to worry about — it’s hard being a teenager already — that’s not who we are.”

Although President George W. Bush visited a mosque in Washington within six days of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to reassure American Muslims, Mr. Obama, a Christian, brushed aside requests for a visit for years in part because 43 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Americans think he is a Muslim, according to a CNN/ORC poll last September. Aides feared a mosque visit would feed into that perception.

In an aside that drew considerable laughter, Mr. Obama told the crowd at the mosque that controversy over a president’s religion is not new. “By the way, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim — so I was not the first,” he said, adding: “I’m in good company.”

A portion of Mr. Obama’s speech in Baltimore was a kind of primer, in which he offered “some basic facts” on Islam and the United States that he said the news media had failed to communicate.

Among those facts: Islam is a religion of peace. Some of the earliest Americans were Muslim. Jefferson and other founding fathers sought to guarantee the freedom of Muslims to worship. Muslims are everywhere in American society as doctors, teachers, soldiers and sports stars.

Mr. Obama said that too many Americans heard about Islam only after terrorist attacks, and that this must change. “Our television shows should have some Muslim characters that are unrelated to national security,” he said. “It’s not that hard to do. There was a time when there were no black people on television.”

Mr. Obama also said that anyone who suggested that the United States was at war with Islam not only legitimized such groups as the Islamic State but also played into their hands. “That kind of mind-set helps our enemies,” he said. “It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential scholar, likened Mr. Obama’s visit and warnings against anti-Muslim language to warnings made by two other presidents at the end of their terms.

“George Washington warned his countrymen against the increasing power of factions which kindle animosity of one against the other, while Eisenhower warned against the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex,” she wrote in an email.

Mr. Obama ended his speech by reminding Muslim Americans, “You are not alone, your fellow Americans stand with you.” And he reminded others that the country’s diversity “is not a weakness, that is one of our greatest strengths.”

“We are one American family,” he said. “We will rise and fall together.” - Read More at the NYT

Watch: Clips of the President’s Speech - More

Obama at Mosque: Islam Is ‘Part of America’

Obama, in Mosque Visit, Denounces Anti-Muslim Bias