WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Thursday condemned those who seek to use religion as a rationale for carrying out violence around the world. “No god condones terror,” he said.
“We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends,” Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast.
He singled out the Islamic State, calling the terrorists in Iraq and Syria a “death cult,” as well as those responsible for last month’s attacks in Paris and massacre on a school in Pakistan.
Obama offered a special welcome to a “good friend,” the Dalai Lama, seated at a table in front of the dais among the audience of 3,600. Earlier, Obama, from the head table, pressed his hands together in a prayerlike position and bowed his head toward the Dalai Lama, then gave him a wave and a broad smile. It was the first time the president and the Tibetan Buddhist leader had attended the same public event.
China objects to foreign leaders meeting with the Dalai Lama because of his quest for greater Tibetan autonomy from Beijing. Obama’s three previous meetings with the Dalai Lama have been private.
But in a show of White House support for the Dalai Lama, he sat at a table with Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Actor Richard Gere, a friend and follower of the Dalai Lama, was nearby. Outside, hundreds of demonstrators banged drums and waved Tibetan flags under heavy police presence.
The Dalai Lama fled to exile in India after a failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Obama called him “a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion and who inspires us to speak up for the freedom and dignity of all human beings.”
Obama joked it’s a rare event that can feature the Dalai Lama and NASCAR, after retired driver Darrell Waltrip gave the keynote.
Obama had a nondenominational message for the audience that also included prominent leaders of non-Christian faiths. The president said that although religion is a source for good around the world, people of all faiths have been willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.”
“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
“So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
