Obama sparks row with his Muslim comment ahead of tour to Arabian Gulf
As the American President tries to reset his country's relationship with the Islamic world, Barack Obama has sparked a row with his assertion that the
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"If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world," Obanma told French television station Canal Plus on Monday, as he prepared for his landmark five-day, overseas trip with stops in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in an effort to bridge the chasm between America and the Islamic world.
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Michael Rubin, a scholar at the
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"All politicians pander. Obama is raising it to a global level," he said. "First of all, it's false: Even if you take the inflated numbers that Islamic advocacy organisations claim, Muslims are a tiny, tiny minority in the United States," he underlined.
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"Obama should also not fall into the extremists' trap of using Muslim as a unitary adjective. There is no more a Muslim world than a Christian world," he said.
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Though there is no