CAIR-LA Rep Backs Obama's Outreach to Muslims

Flashpoint: Middle East

LOS ANGELES (CBS) ― Like every American president since World War II, Barack Obama will try to figure out a way to bring peace to the Middle East. It's the one problem all his predecessors have failed to solve. Over three nights, KCAL9 political reporter Dave Bryan will examine where things stand in the Middle East, and why it's been such a stubborn problem that has resisted solution.

It's no coincidence that President Barack Obama's first foreign policy challenge is in the Middle East.

His Middle East envoy, George Mitchell was immediately dispatched to the region, just six days after Mr.Obama took office, on the same day the new President did his first sit down TV interview -- with Al Arabiya, a network based in Dubai that serves the Middle East, and competes with Al Jazzera.

In the interview, Obama hinted there would be a new more aggressive approach to separate moderate Muslims from fundamentalist radicals and terrorists.

"I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down. But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship," President Barack Obama said during the interview.

Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greater Los Angeles chapter, known as CAIR California, says it's an approach that moderate Muslims welcome.

"It is clearly obvious President Obama is trying to isolate the terrorists, and put them in the right place. They don't represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims," Ayloush said. "And I think that has gained him trust and gained him the ability to tell them that this, the terrorists are our enemies, for both of us. America and the Americans are not your enemy as he said clearly, and the Muslim world in not our enemy."

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