Nothing Extreme About Indonesian School Attended by Obama
ABC News Visits School in Jakarta, Indonesia, That Has Caused Furor Around Presidential Hopeful
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?"
Clinton Camp Denies Role
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."
Clinton's campaign said there was absolutely no truth to the magazine's claim.
"We have no connection to this story and think it's deplorable," said Phil Singer, a Clinton campaign spokesman. "It's an attack on both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama."
The story seems to have started with Insight magazine, then bounced to Fox News Channel, then to myriad other conservative media outlets including the popular Rush Limbaugh radio program. Often hosts repeating the false charges did so while bemoaning the notion that the Clinton campaign was investigating Obama's past, a charge that remains unproven and unsubstantiated.
Some political observers wondered if there was a political element to the Obama pushback; that, in addition to shutting down the false story, Obama strategists sought to rally the liberal base by painting their candidate as a victim of conservative news outlets, much in the same way the Bush White House has sought to rally his base by slamming the New York Times.
