In Mid-January 2007, Fox News reported, on “Fox & Friends,” that Obama had attended an Islamic “madrassa” as a 6-year-old student in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia—the kind of madrassa that teaches anti-Western belligerence. Fox also claimed that Hillary Clinton was making the charge against Obama. The claim, based on a report in Insight magazine, was also picked up by the London Times, which is owned, like Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch.
The Times wrote that the charge “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.”
The claims were false on three counts: Obama attended a Catholic school and a public school open to all faiths in his four years in Indonesia; the Clinton campaign never leveled the charge (although the Clinton campaign had reportedly unearthed information on Obama in November); and madrassas, Islamic or otherwise, are overwhelmingly and exclusively peaceful, educational establishments. CNN debunked the original claim with reporting from Indonesia.
The Washington Post on Nov. 29, 2007, again revived the rumor of Obama’s supposed ties to Islam: “Despite his denials,” the Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. wrote, “rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a ‘Muslim plant’ in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.”
On Dec. 2, 2007, New York Times Columnist Frank Rich wrote, “The repeated attempts to fan “rumors” that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously[/link] on the front page on [Nov. 29] — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.
