Obama Goes On Campaign to Debunk Madrassa Education Allegation

Jan. 24, 2007 — -- Sensing a need to respond to an untrue allegation that he had been educated during his childhood in an Indonesia madrassa, Sen. Barack Obama and his staff have aggressively launched a campaign to debunk the story, perhaps indicating a fear that some may believe it.

"When I was six, I attended an Indonesian public school where a bunch of the kids were Muslim, because the country is 90 percent Muslim," the Democratic presidential hopeful told ABC's Chicago affiliate WLS-TV. "The notion that somehow, at the age of 6 or 7, I was being trained for something other than math, science and reading, is ludicrous."

Obama described the allegation as indicative of the "climate of smear" associated with presidential campaigns and called on the press to make sure "stories are substantiated."

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Obama defended his education at "Sekolah Dasar Negeri 04," which roughly translates as government elementary school No. 4 in Indonesia, where he moved at the age of 6 after his mother married an Indonesian man. After two years at the government elementary school, Obama transferred to a Catholic school.

The false coloring of Obama's early education gained considerable steam during a "Fox and Friends" round table on Jan. 19, 2006. Host Steve Doocy said that Obama spent "the first decade of his life raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa." It is almost impossible to tabulate how many false claims are in that sentence.

Doocy went on to colorfully "define" madrassas as "financed by Saudis, they teach the religion that pretty much hates us. The big question: Was that on the curriculum back then?"

The round table was discussing a since-discredited story that ran in Insight Magazine entitled "Hillary's team has questions about Obama's Muslim background." The story cited unnamed sources that claimed that the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, a New York Democrat who has announced her candidacy for president, was looking into whether Obama's Indonesian elementary school was a "madrassa" that "espous[ed] Wahhabism, a form of radical Islam."