Obama Responds to Jihad: It Has a Lot of Different 'Meanings' and 'Interpretations

During a question-and-answer session in India Sunday, students continued with their hard-hitting queries of President Obama. This one about his thoughts on Jihad:

Transcript via The American Spectator:

Well, the phrase jihad has a lot of meanings within Islam and is subject to a lot of different interpretations. But I will say that, first, Islam is one of the world's great religions. And more than a billion people who practice Islam, the overwhelming majority view their obligations to their religion as ones that reaffirm peace and justice and fairness and tolerance. I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence towards innocent people that is never justified.

And so I think one of the challenges that we face is how do we isolate those who have these distorted notions of religious war and reaffirm those who see faiths of all sorts -- whether you are a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or any other religion, or your don't practice a religion -- that we can all treat each other with respect and mutual dignity, and that some of the universal principles that Gandhi referred to -- that those are what we're living up to, as we live in a nation or nations that have very diverse religious beliefs.

Technically, he answered the question: these are his thoughts.

Fox News commentator Juan Williams weighed in with his thoughts on "America's Newsroom" this morning: