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Obama Reaches Out to Muslims in Istanbul at End of Europe Tour |
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Written by Bloomberg
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Tuesday, 07 April 2009 09:34 |
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US President Barack Obama is expanding his attempts to reach out to the Muslim world today, meeting with religious leaders and visiting mosques in Istanbul on the final day of his weeklong tour of Europe and Turkey.
The president is touring the 400-year-old Blue Mosque and the Haghia Sophia, an Orthodox church for nearly 1,000 years before Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II converted the site into a mosque some 500 years ago. Obama will then hold a town-hall meeting with young people at a cultural center.
“We have begun the process of the United States re- engaging the world,” Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary, told reporters in Istanbul today.
By ending his tour in Istanbul, which straddles Asia and Europe across the Bosphorus Strait, Obama is reinforcing his central message to build bridges with the Muslim world and break with the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Even as Obama was touring Istanbul, David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, and other top aides began portraying the trip as an unvarnished success. While all the president’s meetings throughout the tour have been productive, Axelrod said, “his meetings here have been extraordinarily productive.”
The president is being accompanied today by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama met yesterday with Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul in the capital, Ankara, where he delivered a speech to the Turkish parliament.
The president’s two-day visit to Turkey is intended, as he stated yesterday, to deliver a clear message that the U.S. wants to ease tensions with Muslims. The U.S. is not “at war with Islam,” Obama said in his speech.
‘Model Partnership’
Earlier with Gul, he mooted a “model partnership” with Turkey that can help bridge the religious and cultural divide often apparent between the predominantly Christian West and the Muslim world.
Earlier on his European tour, his first as president, Obama attended a Group of 20 economic summit in London, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit on the French-German border at the Rhine River, and a meeting with European Union leaders in Prague.
Along the way, he held individual meetings with leaders including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He also mediated disputes that cleared the way for a new NATO secretary- general and a G-20 summit declaration that had been held up because of a disagreement over offshore banking regulations between Sarkozy and Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Consult and Cooperate
At each stop, Obama adhered to one central theme that he drove home at every opportunity, in private as well as in public: America is ready to consult and cooperate.
“We must listen to one another,” Obama said in Ankara. His mantra: the U.S. is prepared to “listen, learn and lead,” while adhering to the principle of “mutual respect.”
“That will be the approach of the United States of America going forward,” Obama said.
While the public has flocked to see Obama deliver his message of a new start after the Bush administration, European leaders may not have registered an important caveat: In exchange for getting America’s ear, allies will have to share more responsibility and change their own attitudes.
The new partnership will be one “where friends and allies bear their share of the burden,” Obama said on April 3 at a campaign-style town-hall gathering in Strasbourg, France.
“We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK,” he said, using his middle name for only the third time in his presidency.
“All in all, we accomplished everything we had hoped on this trip,” Axelrod said. Obama is “very pleased” but also “eager to get home: there are a lot of things to tend to.” |