Obama visits US mosque, says impression of Muslims distorted

President Barack Obama will focus on religious tolerance and tempering anti-Muslim prejudice when he makes his first presidential visit to an American mosque on Wednesday morning.

“We’ve heard inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim-Americans that has no place in our country”, he said, lauding Muslim-Americans who were sports heroes, entrepreneurs and members of the U.S. military. John McCain and fellow presidential candidate Jeb Bush, condemned Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, candidate Ben Carson noted past year that someone who belongs to the Islamic faith is unfit to serve as US president. “Thank you for lifting up the lives of your neighbors and helping keep us strong and united as one American family”.

The president, who is a Christian, said it was important to have more Muslim characters portrayed on television unrelated to national security themes, and he said engagement with Muslim-American communities must not be a cover for surveillance.

There are Muslims in the American army, in the emergency services and in homeland security, he said.

“I am not the first”, he said.

Social media users had all kinds of issues with the president’s mosque visit.

Meanwhile, some Republicans have criticized Obama for not linking attacks like the one in Paris to “radical Islamic terrorism”.

“I think the president’s own timidness in engaging with the Muslim community has done a fair deal of damage itself”, he said.

Groups such as the Islamic State “are desperate” to gain legitimacy and “we must never give them” that legitimacy, particularly by “playing in to terrorist propaganda” that the United States is “at war with Islam”, he said. “I don’t know, maybe he feels comfortable there”, Trump said Wednesday on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren”. The meeting included Suzanne Barakat, the sister of a man killed in a North Carolina shooting past year that many see as a hate crime.

Mr Obama acknowledged that this was a time of “concern and frankly of some fear” for Muslim Americans.

It was Obama’s first official appearance at a mosque in the US. Two-thirds of Americans said people, not religious teachings, are to blame when violence is committed in the name of faith.

Its campus contains a mosque and school that runs from kindergarten through 12th grade.