On Wednesday, President Obama makes the first visit to a US mosque during his administration.
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Obama was set to meet with Muslim community leaders at the Islamic Society of Baltimore and also deliver remarks shortly after noon.
The Islamic Society of Baltimore has about 3,000 congregants, according to The Baltimore Sun, and runs a K-12 school, summer camp and health clinic.
Last week, Obama became the first sitting president to speak at the Israeli Embassy.
Obama’s message at the mosque will follow a similar tack. The White House said he will focus on the need to speak out against bigotry and reject indifference.
While the president has visited mosques during his official trips to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, he had not accepted previous invites made by Muslims here.
“For some time, we’ve been asking for pushback”.
In a separate interview with Al Jazeera, Robert McCaw, a CAIR spokesperson, said that in 2015, the Muslim community saw “unprecedented number of attacks” on individuals and houses of worship.
A majority of those polled by Pew said U.S. Muslims face a lot of discrimination: 59 percent agreed with that statement, and even more, 76 percent, said that discrimination against Muslims is on the rise.
A top Muslim rights organization has issued a scathing response to US presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s latest announcement, calling for a halt to all Muslim immigration.
Republicans such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have criticized that linguistic choice, and called on the president to denounce “radical Islam”.
Obama has said he refuses to describe the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other such groups that way because the term grants them a religious legitimacy they do not deserve.
Obama has spoken out against anti-Islam sentiment before, and there is ample precedent for visiting a mosque to help combat Islamophobia: former president George W. Bush also visited a mosque in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, declaring that “Islam is peace”. During a speech at Cairo Univeristy, he declared that the United States would never be at war with Islam.
“I don’t think there’s ever been this level of fear and apprehension in the Muslim-American community”, Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Associated Press.
In 2009, Obama toured the Sultan Hassan mosque during his visit to Cairo.
Obama plans to encourage US citizens to embrace religious diversity in a speech at the mosque, which is one of the mid-Atlantic region’s largest Muslim centers. 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.
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For years, Trump was also a vocal force behind the so-called “birther” controversy that challenged whether Obama was born in the U.S.
