WASHINGTON DC (Web Desk) – President Barack Obama opened the White House to American Muslims for a traditional iftar dinner to reach out to the community, reported Huffington Post.
Obama said that Americans stand united in rejecting the targeting of any religious or ethnic group as he marked holy month of Ramzan.
“We affirm that whatever our faith, we’re all one family,” Obama said at the East Room dinner attended by about 40 members of the diplomatic community and a few members of Congress.
Present at the iftar dinner were several young Muslims who had made a mark in different ways.
Samantha Elauf went to the Supreme Court to defend her right to wear hijab. She was 17 in 2008 when she was rejected for a sales job at an Abercrombie Kids store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after wearing a hijab to the interview.
Ziad Ahmed, 16, a Bangladeshi-American founded Redefy, a Web site to combat harmful stereotypes by encouraging teens like him to share their stories.
Munira Khalif, the daughter of Somali immigrants, started an organization to support girls’ education in East Africa and lobbied Congress to pass the Girls Count Act so that girls in the developing world are documented at birth. Obama signed the bill into law last week. She was accepted to all eight Ivy League colleges and will attend Harvard.
Talking about the victims of Charleston church shooting and murder of three Muslim Americans in Chapel Hill earlier this year, Obama said Americans “insist that nobody should be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, who they love, how they worship.”
