Obama, in Mosque Visit, Denounces Anti-Muslim Bias
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.
President Obama Speaks at Maryland Mosque
Mr. Obama said Wednesday that Muslims
don’t hear “thank you” enough and that there was no tolerance for the
recent “inexcusable political rhetoric” against them.
By REUTERS on Publish Date February 3, 2016.
Photo by Drew Angerer for The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
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.
But
in the final year of his presidency, Mr. Obama has lost much of his
reticence in addressing issues like race, addiction and religion, often
in very personal terms. Administration officials said there had been
little internal debate about Mr. Obama visiting an American mosque since
talk about it began at the White House last fall.
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.”
For
Mr. Obama, the remarks were also an admission of how little progress
has been made since the speech in Cairo, where he called for “a
sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to
respect one another, and to seek common ground.” In his speech on
Wednesday, he suggested that his hopes for a reconciliation had been
dashed, but he called on all Americans to stick by the country’s
founding ideals.
Muslims in the audience hailed the address.
“I
think it was one of the best speeches he’s ever given,” said
Representative André Carson, an Indiana Democrat. Representative Keith
Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, said the speech “hit me in the heart” and
was a vital antidote to growing intolerance.
“I
have a 19-year-old daughter who is a Muslim and wants to contribute to
her nation, and it bugs me that someone who says he wants to be
president would want to exclude her,” Mr. Ellison said.
But
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, one of
the country’s oldest and largest pro-Israel organizations, denounced Mr.
Obama for visiting a mosque whose leaders, Mr. Klein said, have among
other issues criticized Israeli military actions. “Going to such a
mosque only encourages radical Muslims to harm Americans,” Mr. Klein
said.
White
House and Islamic Society of Baltimore officials did not respond to Mr.
Klein’s criticism. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, said that “any mosque would have been
attacked similarly.”
Concerns about Muslims and Syrian refugees in the United States grew after terrorist attacks in Paris
in November claimed the lives of 130 people and after a mass shooting
by a husband-and-wife team in San Bernardino, Calif., in December left
14 people dead and 22 seriously wounded.
Since
then, attacks on American Muslims and mosques have spiked, according to
the Council on American-Islamic Relations. At a meeting at the White
House last month, prominent American Muslims pleaded with senior
administration officials to have the president visit a mosque in the
hope of stemming such attacks.
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.”
/http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/us/politics/obama-muslims-baltimore-mosque.html?_r=0
