If one believes — as the New York Sun does — that the American voters do things for a reason, then surely one, if only one, of the things they intended when, seven years after 9/11, they elevated to the White House a man named Barack Hussein Obama, was that he make the kind of speech the President made at Baltimore. He went to the mosque of the Islamic Society there and sought to allay its members’ fears of ostracism in the midst of the current war.

We don’t mind saying that we had some reservations. We are not big fans, to say the least, of the speech the President delivered in 2009 at Cairo. That is where he made his promised outreach to the Muslim world. In it he failed to rally the Muslim nations to our cause, mis-represented Zionism, failed to follow with a visit to Israel, and put himself off-side in his biggest foreign policy challenges. At Baltimore, in contrast, he rooted his remarks on the American Founders, who were ahead of us all.

What he was addressing is the fact that for many Muslims in America, ours is “a time of some fear.” Fear not only of the threat of terrorism itself but, he said, but on top of that, “another concern” —that “your entire community so often is targeted or blamed for the violent acts of the very few.” He spoke both calmly and with emotion, no doubt animated by his own life experience as an African American who, though he is a Christian, is the son of a Muslim father. It was important to address that fear.

We couldn’t help thinking, as we listened to the president’s remarks in full, of George Washington’s letter to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue at Rhode Island. That’s the letter in which he prayed that the “children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Mr. Obama didn’t mention Washington’s letter, and the predicament of Muslim-Americans isn’t quite the same as that faced by American Jews, whose religion does not have an armed minority bent on jihad. The President did mention Jefferson’s Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786, six years before the First Amendment. Mr. Obama adduced the language of Jefferson himself to suggest that the statute was designed to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.”

No doubt there is much more that Mr. Obama could have said at Baltimore. We like the way it was put in Commentary by Jonathan Tobin, who reckons that “in February 2016, there is more at stake in the intersection between Islam and America” than the President’s “noble sentiments.” He writes that Mr. Obama understands that “Muslim terrorists threaten the world” but that “in his commendable desire to protect American Muslims from potential bias, he downplayed the nature of that threat and the extent of the support it gets from Muslims around the world.”

Fair enough, for the occasion, we suppose. It was, after all, Mr. Obama’s first visit to a mosque. President George W. Bush raced to a mosque in Washington but six days after 9/11 and offered eloquent reassurance to law-abiding Muslims in America. Both were important. At the end of the day, though, this war is not going to be won merely by reassuring loyal Americans that they will be safe here. It will be won by taking this battle to our enemies and defeating them in a struggle for which no apology need to be asked or given.