TOKYO — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that the Obama administration will make “a concerted effort” to restore the image of the United States in the Islamic world and will seek to “enlist the help of Muslims around the world against the extremists.”
Clinton, who today will travel to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, told students at Tokyo University that “this is one of the central security challenges we face — as to how to better communicate in a way that gets through the rhetoric and through the demagogy and is heard by people who can make judgments about what we stand for and who we truly are.”
Clinton’s remarks came in response to a question about terrorism causing people in the United States to have anti-Muslim “prejudice,” a term she rejected forcefully.
“I am a Christian,” she said. “Through the centuries we have had many people who have done terrible things in the name of Christianity. They have perverted the religion.”
Clinton’s visit to Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, appears to be part of the administration’s effort to reach out to Muslims during this week-long trip to Asia. President Barack Obama spent part of his childhood in Jakarta, and expectations are high in Indonesia that he will visit later this year.
Tuesday’s town-hall gathering came at the end of a busy first day of diplomacy for Clinton, who crisscrossed Tokyo in a mix of diplomacy and personal outreach to the Japanese people.
Clinton visited a shrine early in the morning, then signed an agreement moving 8,000 troops from Japan to Guam; she had tea with Empress Michiko in the Imperial residence and took questions from students for an hour before having dinner with Prime Minister Taro Aso. She then followed that with a meeting with Aso’s political nemesis, Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.
She extended an invitation to Aso to meet next week with Obama, a coup for an embattled politician whose approval ratings sank this week to the single digits. But during the news conference announcing the invitation, Aso’s finance minister resigned over reports that he appeared drunk at a major economic meeting last weekend.
Clinton also held a private 20-minute meeting with two families of Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean agents decades ago, an emotional subject in Japan.
