President Obama calls for Americans to fight Islamphobia

He also talked about the basic tenets of Islam, which he said he believes many in the United States are not familiar with.

“We’ve seen children bullied, we’ve seen mosques vandalized”, the president said.

“Think of your own church or synagogue or temple, and a mosque like this will be very familiar”, said Obama, who, following Islamic custom, took off his shoes to enter the hall.

“Like all Americans, you’re anxious about the threat of terrorism”, said Obama.

“President Bush visited a mosque after September 11”, he said, “and President Eisenhower opened a mosque [the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.] in Washington in the 1950s”.

POTUS later spoke privately with 12 Muslim-American leaders, which included students, activists, Quran scholars and doctors.

Although he never mentioned Donald Trump or other Republican presidential candidates, Obama called for an end to invective that confuses millions of patriotic Americans with a “radical, tiny minority” who engage in violence.

Since then, attacks on American Muslims and mosques have spiked, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

For Obama, the visit reflected a willingness to wade into touchy social issues that often eluded him earlier in his presidency. Many criticized Obama for waiting until his previous year to make the visit by using the #TooLateObama. Obama, a Christian, was born in Hawaii.

Obama, who is a Christian, mocked Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, saying that Trump probably thinks the US government also faked the moon landing and rattled off other conspiracy theories.

“I don’t have much thought”. “No, it’s true. Look it up”. There was a time when there were no black people on television.

In 2009, a freshly elected Obama traveled to Cairo to call for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. “This is the truth”, Obama said.

“An attack on one religion is an attack on all religions”, Obama said in his remarks. “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”. They say communication at the community level fosters change in how they’re perceived. “The vast majority of the people they kill are innocent Muslim men, women and children”.

“I know that in Muslim communities across our country, this is a time of concern and, frankly, a time of some fear”, he said citing it as one reason for his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a 47-year-old mosque in Maryland outside Washington. Among the participants was fencer Ibtihaj Muhamma. “We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias and targets people because of religion”.

“Like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity”.