Barack Obama gave his first formal television interview as president Tuesday, but he didn’t give it to Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer. He gave it to a less recognizable name here in America: Hisham Melhem.

Melhem works for Al-Arabiya, an Arabic satellite TV network, owned by Saudi Arabia but based in Dubai. Hoping to send a signal that he means to help repair the nation’s relations with the Muslim world, Obama chose Al-Arabiya to deliver his message: "Americans are not your enemy."

The president also admitted that the U.S. had made mistakes in the past but "that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that." 

Although Obama tried to distance himself from the policies and stances of the Bush administration many times during the interview, he did repeat the United States’s strong alliance with Israel, and he had some words for Al-Qaeda terrorists: "We will hunt them down." 

"Their ideas are bankrupt," he added. "There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them."

Click here to read the entire transcript on HuffingtonPost.com. Watch Obama’s interview below: