It's Always Better to Go Directly to the Horse's Mouth

The President is being accused of calling the United States a "Muslim country."

This quote is directly from the transcript of his interview with a French media company:

Q    Tomorrow we're leaving for the Middle East.  It's going to be your first trip there.  What do you want to achieve with this trip?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, we're going to be traveling to Saudi Arabia; I'll be having discussions with King Abdullah.  And then we'll travel to Cairo, in which I am delivering on a promise I made during the campaign to provide a framework, a speech of how I think we can remake relations between the United States and countries in the Muslim world.

Now, I think it's very important to understand that one speech is not going to solve all the problems in the Middle East.  And so I think expectations should be somewhat modest.

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.