Obama acknowledges Pakistan’s terror woes

US president says Muslims around the world have stood up for protection of minorities in their countries

President Barack Obama on Thursday said the Taliban have long conducted a campaign of terrorist violence against the Pakistani people, including the horrific massacre of children in December 16, 2014, attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar.

“Pakistan’s Taliban has mounted a long campaign of violence against the Pakistani people that now tragically includes the massacre of more than 100 schoolchildren and their teachers,” he remarked, citing Pakistanis’ sufferings at the hands of terrorists, during a speech at a summit on countering violent extremism.

He also referred to Pakistan while underscoring that Muslims around the world have stood up for protection of minorities in their countries.

The Muslims “have risked their lives as human shields to protect Coptic churches in Egypt and to protect Christians attending mass in Pakistan and who have tried to protect synagogues in Syria”, he said.

Representatives from 60 countries are attending the summit, an attempt to find ways to combat radicalization. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan is representing Pakistan.

While discussing ways to fight radicalization and extremist violence amid ISIS violence in the Middle East, Obama said in countries, including the United States, Muslim communities are still small, relative to the entire population, and as a result, many people in don’t always know personally of somebody who is Muslim.

“So the image they get of Muslims or Islam is in the news.  And given the existing news cycle, that can give a very distorted impression.  A lot of the bad, like terrorists who claim to speak for Islam, that’s absorbed by the general population.  Not enough of the good — the more than 1 billion people around the world who do represent Islam, and are doctors and lawyers and teachers, and neighbors and friends.”

“The world hears a lot about the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo in Paris, but the world has to also remember the Paris police officer, a Muslim, who died trying to stop them.  The world knows about the attack on the Jews at the kosher supermarket in Paris; we need to recall the worker at that market, a Muslim, who hid Jewish customers and saved their lives.  And when he was asked why he did it, he said, “We are brothers.  It’s not a question of Jews or Christians or Muslims.  We’re all in the same boat, and we have to help each other to get out of this crisis,” he noted.