Obama: ‘False Comfort’ to Turn to People Who Share Your Culture, Values, Nationality

“Yes, these are unsettling times,” President Obama told Germans on Monday, as he lectured them on the need to “welcome and integrate people of all backgrounds and faiths and make them feel as one. And that includes Muslims,” he said.

Obama was speaking in a nation that has absorbed more than a million refugees fleeing Syria and other Middle Eastern and African nations, many of them Muslims.

“And when the future is uncertain, there seems to be an instinct in our human nature to withdraw to the perceived comfort and security of our own tribe, our own sect, our own nationality–people who look like us, sound like us, but in today’s world, more than any time in human history, that is a false comfort.

“It pits people against one another because of what they look like or how they pray or who they love.”

Obama told the Germans that such “twisted thinking” can lead to oppression, segregation, internment camps and the “Shoah” (Holocaust).

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“And now as Europe confronts questions of immigration and of religion and of assimilation, I want you to remember that our countries are stronger, they are more secure and more successful when we welcome and integrate people of all backgrounds and faiths and make them feel as one. And that includes our fellow citizens who are Muslim.”

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