Obama to make first visit of his presidency to a US mosque

Seeking to rebut what he views as perilous election-year bombast about Muslims, President Barack Obama heads Wednesday to a mosque in Baltimore, his first visit to such a site in the United States.

A senior administration official said the president will celebrate Muslim-Americans’ contributions to the nation.

During a roundtable discussion with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, Obama “is looking for the opportunity to have some dialogue, to talk to leaders in the community about what’s on their minds, what their concerns are, and the president’s certainly looking forward to that discussion”, spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.

“It has been a transparent strategy on the part of Republicans to play on people’s anxieties, to target religious minorities to advance their political ambition”, Earnest said.

“It’s just offensive to a lot of Americans who recognize that those kinds of cynical political tactics run directly contrary to the values that we hold dear in this country”, Earnest told reporters. “That’s not keeping America safe”.

A top Muslim rights organization has issued a scathing response to USA presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s latest announcement, calling for a halt to all Muslim immigration.

Obama plans to encourage USA citizens to embrace religious diversity in a speech at the mosque, which is one of the mid-Atlantic region’s largest Muslim centers.

Many insiders believe that before leaving office, the president will visit Cuba, where he is working to normalize diplomatic relations as well as close the Guantanamo Bay prison. With less than a year left in his tenure as president, he has “left it literally to the last”, said Akbar Ahmed, an American University professor specializing in American mosques. During a speech at Cairo Univeristy, he declared that the United States would never be at war with Islam.

Those plans have earned Obama’s ire. In December Trump proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country until better anti-terror measures were enacted.

Ahmed said the visit will be reassuring to U.S. Muslims amid the heightened rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign.

To some, however, Obama’s visit appears somewhat late in coming.

“We’re not going to strengthen our leadership around the world by allowing politicians to insult Muslims or pit groups of Americans against each other”.

“America and Islam are not exclusive”, he said at Cairo University after touring the Sultan Hassan mosque in Egypt in June 2009.