Trump on Obama mosque visit: ‘Maybe he feels comfortable there’

The study was released on the same day President Barack Obama visited an American mosque for the first time during his presidency, offering a high-profile rebuttal of harsh Republican election-year rhetoric against Muslims.

“The President’s first visit to an American mosque is a significant step in the right direction and will hopefully encourage our nation’s political and religious leaders to join him in pushing back against rising Islamophobia”, Zainab Chaudry, outreach manager for CAIR Maryland, said in a statement.

In his historic first visit to a mosque since assuming office, President Obama on Wednesday pressed for tolerance toward the Muslim community, stressing that members are deeply interwoven with American values and society.

A whole faith and a religious minority would be brought into disrepute, it should not be.

For most of his national political life, Obama has been been dogged by rumors that he’s a Muslim and he’s declined to visit an Islamic place of worship in the US until now.

Ibrahim Hooper from CAIR said: “I don’t think there’s ever been this level of fear and apprehension in the Muslim-American community. As we protect our country from terrorism, we should not reinforce the ideas and the rhetoric of the terrorists themselves”. John McCain and fellow presidential candidate Jeb Bush, condemned Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, candidate Ben Carson noted a year ago that someone who belongs to the Islamic faith is unfit to serve as US president.

“We’ve seen children bullied, we’ve seen mosques vandalized”, he remarked. You’re part of America too.

According to The Guardian, Obama did not mention any dramas by name but may have had Showtime’s hit series Homeland, starring Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, in mind when he pleaded for Muslims to appear in series not about terrorism. This is the biggest public display of support for the Muslim American community – cited by White House aides as a response to the anti-refugee and anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail from Republicans like Donald Trump. We must never give them that legitimacy.

Obama, a Christian born in Hawaii, has long fought incorrect claims that he is actually a Muslim and was born in Kenya.

In a moment of levity, the president also jokingly drew a parallel to himself and American founding father Thomas Jefferson. “I don’t know, maybe he feels comfortable there”.