"Let me say this as clearly as I can," Obama said. "The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."

The U.S. president is trying to mend fences with a Muslim world that felt it had been blamed by America for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.


From AP via Breitbart via Drudge. Full story.

Islam is by its nature expansive through conquest. Both the Qu'ran, the life of Mohammad, and history demonstrate this. Those closest to the core of Islam are those who recognize jihad as an imperative. Periodic revivals of Islam result in violence.

If Muslims wish to demonstrate good faith in proving to the world their peaceful intentions, then I post this challenge that I wish Obama had made while in Turkey. Return Hagia Sophia to the Christian Church and end all restrictions on Christians. That would be a start.

For more that 1000 years Holy Wisdom [Hagia Sophia] served as the cathedral church of the Patriarch of Constantinople as well as the church of the Byzantine court but that function came to an end on May 29, 1453, when the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror seized the Imperial City and converted the Great Church into his mosque. It remained a mosque until 1935 when Turkish head-of-state Mustafa Kemal converted it into a museum. Years later the plaster which had been applied by the Muslims to cover the icons was removed revealing for the first time to modern eyes the extent of the desecration perpetrated by the Muslims in their effort to render the structure appropriate for their own purposes.