Obama '08?

Barack Obama was given a rude awakening to the cut-throat world of presidential politics yesterday after being accused of hiding four years in which he was educated at a madrassa when a teenager.
The claim, made in the conservative Insight magazine, also revealed the Machiavellian scheming of political activists in a presidential race still nearly two years away.

It was aimed at tarnishing Mr Obama's image in the week he announced himself as a White House contender. But the article also claimed that the madrassa allegations came from aides to Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama's main opponent for the Democratic nomination.

This may be wishful thinking on behalf of Republicans. The Clinton camp is determined not to be accused of digging dirt on Mr Obama because they fear such tactics could backfire, given his popularity.

But the Insight allegations represent an exquisite double shot at the Democrats' two leading White House contenders: it implies that Mr Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, is a closet Islamic extremist, and that Mrs Clinton is so rattled by his candidacy she is using underhand tactics to weaken him.

Summary: Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers, Rush Limbaugh, and John Gibson all forwarded the accusation made by a website controlled by Rev. Sun Myung Moon that Sen. Hillary Clinton was responsible for spreading information linking Sen. Barack Obama to a madrassa, or Muslim school. None of the four cited any evidence, other than the article, that Clinton was responsible for promoting the madrassa story, and the article cited no one by name.

The distorted, deceitful Obama hate mail is making the rounds already. Snopes has one of them here:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp

What do you think about Obama, Frank?

As silly as any concern about a once muslim Obama is, if it is true that he spent four years attending an Indonesian madrassas, I'm afraid he will not be able to easily dismiss the fact (if it is a fact - I really don't know) that he did not previously reveal this part of his past.

Researchers doing a background check? You mean someone hanging out in Kramerbooks on Dupont Circle in DC while waiting for a friend on a cold evening who stumbled across Obama's first book on a big stack outside the bar/cafe area of the store? You mean someone who read the two chapters in the book devoted to/dealing with his mother's marraige to an Indonesian man and his life in the world largest Muslim country?

Wow, quite the background check. Because that would be me last Friday night when I was in town - I stumbled across Dreams of Our Father, and flipped through it for 15 minutes. I guess I've got what it takes to be a highly paid oppo researcher/smear doctor.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa" are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa. (Watch video of Obama's school )

Insight attributed the information in its article to an unnamed source, who said it was discovered by "researchers connected to Senator Clinton." A spokesman for Clinton, who is also weighing a White House bid, denied that the campaign was the source of the Obama claim.

He called the story "an obvious right-wing hit job."

Insight stood by its story in a response posted on its Web site Monday afternoon.

The Insight article was cited several times Friday on Fox News and was also referenced by the New York Post, The Glenn Beck program on CNN Headline News and a number of political blogs. (Watch how the Obama "gossip" spread )

School not a madrassa
But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

"I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan," Vause said on the "Situation Room" Monday. "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."

Vause also interviewed one of Obama's Basuki classmates, Bandug Winadijanto, who claims that not a lot has changed at the school since the two men were pupils. Insight reported that Obama's political opponents believed the school promoted Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam, "and are seeking to prove it."

"It's not (an) Islamic school. It's general," Winadijanto said. "There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian. ... So that's a mixed school."

The Obama aide described Fox News' broadcasting of the Insight story "appallingly irresponsible."

Fox News executive Bill Shine told CNN "Reliable Sources" anchor Howard Kurtz that some of the network's hosts were simply expressing their opinions and repeatedly cited Insight as the source of the allegations.

Obama has noted in his two books, "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," that he spent two years in a Muslim school and another two years in a Catholic school while living in Indonesia from age 6 to 10.