As President Obama touches down in Saudi Arabia today, anticipation continues to build about his speech to Muslims scheduled for Thursday in Cairo. Obama has given a number of interviews recently on the topic to NPR, BBC and a French news outlet.

Since he’s taken office, Obama has repeatedly tried to tamp down “Clash of Civilizations”-type language by arguing that the U.S. is not, in fact, a Christian nation and, by extension, is not mired in a religious war with Muslims. In the recent interviews, Obama’s taking that idea a step further by saying that America actually has more Muslims than many Muslim-majority nations.

Obama told Canal Plus, the French tv station, “I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.”

He told the BBC:”The U.S. Muslim population is more numerous than the populations of many majority-Muslim countries. So, you know, we have a huge and thriving Muslim American community. We have Muslim Americans represented or who are serving in Congress. We’ve got a President who’s got family members who are Muslim.

So this notion that somehow America is detached, is removed, sees some clash of civilizations as inevitable — I think a lot of the propaganda and dogma that’s churned out there is inaccurate.”

But with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan huffing on, Obama will have to address America’s foreign policy vis a vis Muslims, as he told NPR. Reports like this, in which the U.S. military found that American personnel made significant errors in carrying out airstrikes in Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of civilians, will not help his cause.

“Well, there’s no doubt that anytime you have civilian casualties, that always complicates things, whether it was a Muslim or a non-Muslim country. I think part of what I’ll be addressing in my speech is a reminder that the reason we’re in Afghanistan is very simple and that is: 3,000 Americans were killed. And you had a devastating attack on the American homeland; the organization that planned those attacks intends to carry out further attacks. And we cannot stand by and allow that to happen.

But I am somebody who is very anxious to have the Afghan government and the Pakistani government have the capacity to ensure that those safe havens don’t exist. And so it, I think, will be an important reminder that we have no territorial ambitions in Afghanistan; we don’t have an interest in exploiting the resources of Afghanistan. What we want is simply that people aren’t hanging out in Afghanistan who are plotting to bomb the United States.

And I think that’s a fairly modest goal that other Muslim countries should be able to understand.”