Students at Queens College in New York gather for a vigil, Feb. 18 in honor of three Muslim students killed recently near the University of North Carolina. Experts and advocates say Muslims are more organized and vocal in the wake of the shootings. President Barack Obama said helping Muslims and immigrants in the U.S. feel they're full members of American society is the best defense against radicalization.

WASHINGTON — In the fight against violent extremism, President Barack Obama has argued the U.S. has one thing going for it that Europe doesn’t: a long tradition of warmly embracing its immigrants, including Muslims.

With the Islamic State 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. U.S. 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 Wednesday. He planned to speak again today when delegates from about 65 countries gather for the summit’s closing session at the State Department.

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

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. has largely been spared the terrorist assaults that have hit cities in Denmark, Belgium and France, growing out of radical interpretations of Islam. In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo newspaper shootings in Paris, Obama and other U.S. figures have portrayed the U.S. as being at a lower risk. After all, America is known as the “Great Melting Pot,” where minorities of all stripes are made to feel at home.

“In the U.S., you can be 100 percent American and 100 percent anything else. In Europe, you have to reduce the percentage of anything else to be more European,” said Ahmed Younis, a prominent Muslim-American leader participating in the summit. “People burn and destroy what they perceive to not be their own.”

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 U.S. 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.

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 U.S. in 2008, the last date for which Census data is available. France, by comparison, has an estimated 5 million Muslims — about 8 percent of the total population. In the U.K., 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 embraced.

Jamila Nasser, a high school junior, said she rarely sees good news about Muslims in the media. She doesn’t expect a positive reception outside of Dearborn, which has one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in North America.

“For being a Muslim American growing up in America, I really don’t feel a part of it,” she said.