We have roughly 4.5 million Muslims in the US. We wouldn't even break the top 40. I don't know what Obama was thinking on this, but I would imagine this will get a lot of air play in the middle east.
The Weekly Standard
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The Weekly Standard
As we noted earlier, and as ABC now confirms, Obama's speech in Cairo will focus on his Muslim roots and the unique perspective it provides him. Obama also teased the contents of the speech in an interview with a French television station:
What I want to do is to create a better dialogue so that the Muslim world understands more effectively how the United States but also how the West thinks about many of these difficult issues like terrorism, like democracy, to discuss the framework for what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and our outreach to Iran, and also how we view the prospects for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.
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1 comment:
I expect he was pointing out that there are many predominately Muslim countries with few actual numbers of Muslims than the U.S. Which is true.
From NationMaster, which uses CIA Factbook statistics:
# 41 United States: 4,140,277 1.4%
# 42 Kyrgyzstan: 4,117,024 80%
# 45 Sierra Leone: 3,610,585 60%
# 49 West Bank: 3,159,999 84%
# 50 Mauritania: 3,083,772 99.9%
# 52 Oman: 2,971,567 99%
# 53 Lebanon: 2,678,212 70%
# 54 Albania: 2,494,178 70%
# 57 Eritrea: 2,280,799 50%
# 59 Kuwait: 1,985,300 85%
# 60 United Arab Emirates: 1,948,041 76%
# 65 Gambia, The: 1,433,930 90%
# 74 Qatar: 819,898 95%
# 80 Comoros: 664,534 99%
# 85 Bahrain: 585,093 85%
# 89 Djibouti: 471,935 99%
# 95 Maldives: 348,756 99.9%
# 99 Western Sahara: 272,461 99.8%
# 101 Brunei: 249,481 67%
Source: click on the country's name on this list:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/rel_isl_pop-religion-islam-population
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