In Turkey, Obama Says U.S. ‘Never’ at War With Islam

ANKARA, Turkey — President Obama formally began his outreach to the Muslim world on Monday when he spoke before Turkey’s Parliament, telling legislators that the United States “is not and never will be at war with Islam.”“America’s relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not just be based on opposition to Al Qaeda,” he said. “We seek broad engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.”Showing more self-confidence each day on his maiden overseas trip, Mr. Obama, in addressing a majority Muslim country for the first time, appeared to have prepared carefully for one particular line in his wide-ranging speech.“The United States has been enriched by Muslim-Americans,” he said. “Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.“I know,” he said, “because I am one of them.”And then he paused. Throughout his speech, he had moved swiftly from passage to passage, but this time, he waited for the translator to catch up. After about five seconds, the applause came.The line was a bold one for Mr. Obama, who has been falsely accused of being a Muslim. The accusations persist on some right-wing Web sites, which may try to interpret his remarks as proof of that view.But Mr. Obama is calculating that the benefits of demonstrating to the Muslim world that Americans are not antagonistic toward it outweigh the potential political fallout back home. His calculus may also reflect an increased belief that he has enough political capital that he can spend some of it in pursuit of strengthening ties between Muslim nations and the West.Introduced as “Barack Hussein Obama,” the president told the assembly that he plans to push for a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis, despite the view of many foreign policy experts that such a goal will be even more difficult to reach given the makeup of the new Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not to mention the fractured state of internal Palestinian politics.In a direct rebuttal of comments made last week by Israel’s hawkish new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that agreements reached at an American-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis in 2007 have “no validity,” Mr. Obama said: “Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.”He added: “That is a goal that the parties agreed to in the roadmap and at Annapolis. And that is a goal that I will actively pursue as president.”Turkey is crucial to American interests on many fronts. It borders Iraq and Iran, and has deep influence in Afghanistan. It is also helping to forge a possible peace deal between Israel and Syria.In choosing Turkey as an example of the type of relationship that can be struck between the United States and an Islamic population, Mr. Obama also seemed to be pushing for more acceptance of the separation between religion and the state. Turkey is a secular Muslim democracy that has recently seemed at war with itself over its own religious identity. The country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has roots in political Islam, a worry to secular Turks.On Monday morning, Mr. Obama went to pay his respects at the Ankara mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a secularist who established modern Turkey, and wrote at some length in a guestbook at Ataturk’s shrine.“It is also clear that the greatest monument to Ataturk’s life is not something that can be cast in stone and marble,” Mr. Obama said during his speech, “His greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong and secular democracy, and that is the work that this assembly carries on today.”
White House officials say they still plan for Mr. Obama to make a major speech to the Muslim world from an Islamic capital in the early months of his presidency, and were quick to say that Monday’s Ankara speech was not that. There will be another, they say, in which Mr. Obama will try to define, at length, his view on America and Islam.
Mr. Obama also threw his weight solidly behind Turkey’s accession to the European Union, an issue that has split Europe, with France and Germany lobbying against Turkey’s entry.“Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European Union,” he said. “We speak not as members of the EU, but as close friends of Turkey and Europe.”The president also waded into the fraught issue of Turkey’s relations with Armenia, and the genocide of more than a million Ottoman Armenians beginning in 1915. Turkey acknowledges the killings but says they did not amount to a systematic genocide, and has vehemently opposed the introduction of a bill in the United States Congress that would define it that way.Back when he was a senator, Mr. Obama said he supported that view, but during a press conference with President Abdullah Gul before the Parliament speech, he did not use the word genocide and said that Turkey and Armenia had made progress in talks.Armenian-Americans were quick to voice their ire. “In his remarks today in Ankara, President Obama missed a valuable opportunity to honor his public pledge to recognize the Armenian genocide,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement. Mr. Obama’s remarks, he said, fell “far short of the clear promise he made as a candidate that he would as president, full and unequivocally recognize this crime against humanity.”During the Parliament speech, Mr. Obama did speak of the Armenia issue, saying that “history unresolved can be a heavy weight.”“Our country,” he said, “still struggles with the legacy of our past treatment of Native Americans.”In another similarity between Washington and Ankara, Mr. Obama was mobbed by legislators angling for a handshake as he tried to leave the chamber at the end of his speech. In many ways, it resembled the scene in the United States Congress after a State of the Union speech.