OBAMA NOT LOSING SLEEP OVER REPORTS THAT HE IS MUSLIM

WASHINGTON - A public opinion poll showing Americans are increasingly convinced, wrongly, that he is Muslim does not trouble him, President Barack Hussein Obama said on Sunday.

• "It's not something that I can, I think, spend all my time worrying about it," Obama said in an interview with NBC News, dismissing the results of a recent Pew Research Centre poll.
• "I'm not going to be worrying too much about whatever rumours are floating out there. If I spend all my time chasing after that, then I wouldn't get much done."
• The Pew poll showed nearly one in five Americans — 18 per cent — believes Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 per cent in March 2009.
• In addition, only about one third of Americans surveyed correctly describe Obama as a Christian, a sharp decrease from the 48 per cent who said he was a Christian in 2009.
• "There is, a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly," Obama said, on why he thinks Americans appear to be uncertain about his religion.
• He said that he dealt with it during his presidential race, and earlier when he campaigned for the US Senate.
• Obama said he won in Illinois because he trusted the American people's capacity to get beyond the "nonsense".
• The Pew survey was completed in early August, before Obama waded into a controversy over a proposed Muslim cultural centre and Mosque near the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York.
• Proponents of the project met fierce opposition from conservative politicians and those who say it is offensive to families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11 attacks by Al Qaida militants.

Obama turned what had been mostly a local issue into a national debate when he said he believed Muslim Americans had the same right to practise their religion as other US citizens and supported their right to build the centre in lower Manhattan.
Obama repeated that religious freedom is a core value of the US Constitution and that it was his job to uphold the Constitution.

Source: Reuters