US President Barack Obama made his first visit to a mosque in the United States on Wednesday, in an effort to allay public fears fueled by pop-culture portrayals of Muslims as terrorists, and to reassure Muslim American youth about their place in the nation.

Obama, declaring that attacks on Islam were an attack on all religions, decried the "inexcusable political rhetoric" against Muslims from Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.

"We have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths," he said at the mosque outside of Baltimore, which he said had received threats twice in the past year. "When any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up."