Pittsburgh-area Muslim leaders said President Donald Trump needs to use actions — not just one conciliatory speech on Islam — to make a convincing case he’s abandoned his longstanding targeting of all Muslims for the work of violent extremists claiming to act in the name of their religion.
“There were a lot of encouraging aspects which sharply contradict the rhetoric, which was very anti-Muslim during the election campaign,” said Safdar Khwaja, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Pittsburgh chapter. “If it’s sincere, it’s encouraging.”
But he said Mr. Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia on Sunday to numerous heads of Muslim-majority states needs to be followed by changes toward his own Muslim citizens.
Mr. Khwaja called on Mr. Trump to speak out forcefully against anti-Muslim violence in the United States and enforce civil-rights protections for them. He called on the president to rescind his proposed travel ban, now held up by federal judges.
Numerous mosques have been targeted by arsonists and vandals since the start of the 2016 president campaign. As a candidate, Mr. Trump said he thought “Islam hates us” and called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
But in a shift in tone Sunday, Mr. Trump praised Islam as “one of the world’s great faiths.” He called for an alliance with Muslim leaders against violent extremists and for clerics to tell terrorists they are forfeiting their souls, clearly implying what Muslim leaders have said all along — that such killers are deviants from their faith rather than champions of it.
Wasi Mohamed, Pennsylvania state director of Emgage, a group seeking to mobilize political participation among Muslim Americans, said “it’s hard in one speech to outweigh years of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy proposals.”
He added: “There are so many tangible steps that could be taken, like condemning Islamophobia, stepping up to protect civil rights of Muslim Americans, ending profiling in airports.”
He said Mr. Trump was playing to his audience in Riyadh.
Mr. Mohamed said he would have been more impressed if he praised Islam while speaking to the same audiences of supporters who once cheered his broadbrush denunciations of Muslims. Mr. Trump’s 100th-day address in Harrisburg last month was more typical, when he spoke of keeping “radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country.”
If the president were to praise Islam and the vast majority of Muslims in Harrisburg, not just in Riyadh, “that’s what I would like to see,” said Mr. Mohamed.