WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama reiterated his call for the world to stand up to violent extremism Thursday, saying terrorists peddle a the lie that there is a clash of civilizations.

“The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie,” he told a three-day conference on combatting extremism. “And all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it.”

Ministers from over 60 nations gathered Thursday to draw up an action plan to fight violent extremism, as top US diplomat John Kerry urged the world to “wage a new war against a new enemy.”

Obama said on Wednesday that the US is not at war with Islam, but with “terrorists who pervert it.”

Obama has argued that in the fight against violent extremism, the US has one thing going for it that Europe doesn’t: a long tradition of warmly embracing its immigrants, including Muslims.

With the Islamic State (IS) group spreading and terrorists gaining strength in the Mideast and Africa, Obama has sought to use this week’s White House summit on violent extremism to urge the world to broaden its response far beyond military interventions. US airstrikes have managed to blunt some of the militants’ gains in Iraq and Syria, but they don’t address the extreme ideologies that underpin deadly groups such as IS, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

“If we’re going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism, then the international community has to offer something better — and the United States intends to do its part,” Obama told the summit.

But not all Muslim-Americans feel like full members of American society, and security experts warned against assuming the US is impervious to those who seek to recruit and radicalize.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the US has largely been spared the terrorist assaults that have hit cities in Denmark, Belgium and France. In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo newspaper shootings in Paris, Obama and other US figures have portrayed the US as being at a lower risk.

Ample evidence suggests that Muslims in America do feel more integrated into society than those living in Europe. Often marginalized and relegated to poorer neighborhoods in European cities, many Muslim immigrants to the US have flourished as doctors and scientists and in other white-collar professions. Middle-class, predominantly Muslim or Arab-American enclaves have cropped up in places such as Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, allowing immigrants to carve out their own stories.

“That’s the story extremists and terrorists don’t want the world to know: Muslims succeeding and thriving in America,” Obama said.

There’s also reason to believe that sense of successful assimilation has offered a degree of protection against the allure of extremism. In 2011, a Pew Research Center survey of American Muslims found that just two in 10 Muslims in the US thought there was a great deal or a fair amount of support for extremism among Muslim Americans. Roughly 80 percent said suicide bombings and other violence against civilians was never justified to defend Islam from its enemies, compared to just eight percent who said it was sometimes or often justified.

Europe, where many Muslims or their ancestors emigrated from former colonies, is host to a much larger Muslim population. There were about 1,350,000 self-identified Muslims in the US in 2008, the last date for which Census data is available. France, by comparison, has an estimated five million Muslims — about eight percent of the total population. In the UK, 2011 census data counted about 2.7 million Muslims out of a population of 63.1 million.

But within America’s smaller Muslim population, not everyone feels they’ve been fully embraced by society.

Jamila Nasser, a high school student, said she rarely sees good news about Muslims in the American media.