Majority of Americans want next president not to criticize Islam

It was in these mosques, he said, where an overwhelming majority of Muslims worked to build “bridges of understanding with other faiths, Christians, Jews” and ran health centres and taught their children.

“We have a president who refuses to use the term”. “We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate bigotry”, Obama said.

Obama also said Muslims, too, are concerned about the threat of terrorism but are too often blamed as a group “for the violent acts of the very few”. “And they shouldn’t be subject to ridicule or targeting by anybody, let alone somebody who aspires to leading the country”.

President Obama made his first visit to a us mosque and addressed the issue in a speech at the Islamic Society of Baltimore.

CAIR has tracked a growing number of attacks on mosques and on individuals in the months following the Paris terrorist attacks and the shooting rampage in San Bernardino, California. Do you agree with his assessment that the Quran and Muslims are not promoting violence but rather a small minority of extremists? “So I was not the first”, Obama said, sparking laughter.

During his discussion of the history of Islam in the United States, the president employed some humor in addressing the rumors about his faith that have dogged him since before his presidency.

Obama seemingly calls out GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as well, saying he has recently “heard inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim-Americans that has no place in our country”.

Certainly the leaders in the Muslim community have a strong interest in preventing that from happening, Earnest said.

Moreover, despite the absence of any evidence, some Obama critics insist the president is a Muslim himself.

“Our television shows should have some Muslim characters that are unrelated to national security because it’s not that hard to do”, he said.

But it was the president’s reference to the impact that rhetoric is having on young Muslim Americans that Dr. Elfass said would have special meaning for his community. “We will rise and fall together”, Obama said as he concluded his 45-minute speech on the outskirts of the US Capital. “They’re not defending Islam”, Obama said. “It is an attack on that golden rule at the heart of so many faiths – that we ought to do unto others as we would have done to us”. President George W. Bush did so days after the Sept 11, 2001, terror attacks to reassure American Muslims. So I’m not the first.