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The Facts
As with his 1988 ad attacking Michael Dukakis for being soft on crime, Brown has grounded his assault on Barack Obama on a seemingly solid fact. It is true that the Associated Press reported, in passing back in January, that Obama was "enrolled as a Muslim" in a Catholic school in Indonesia in 1967. He was six years' old at the time. The bulk of the AP article was devoted to rebutting rumors that the Illinois senator had attended an Islamic madrassa while growing up in Indonesia.
Documents viewed by the AP showed that students attending the Fransiskus Assisis Catholic school were registered under one of five different religions: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant. Obama, then known as Barry, attended the school from 1st through 3rd grade as student 203. He later enrolled in Public Elementary School Menteng No. 1, a school incorrectly described by the Washington Times Insight magazine and Fox News as an Islamic madrassa.
The Brown ad misses out key facts that cast a very different light on Obama's Muslim connections. At the Catholic school, he was required to participate in Catholic rituals and pray four times a day. Teachers quoted by the Chicago Tribune said that he was probably registered as a Muslim because this was the religion of his then-Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetero. Like many Indonesians, Soetero was a rather lax Muslim who drank and did not abide by the strict tenets of the faith.
More importantly, the Brown ad attaches far too much importance to an entry in a ledger written under unknown circumstances more than 40 years ago. The Tribune report notes that the ledger entry was "rife with errors." It listed Obama as an Indonesian, gave an inaccurate name for his previous school, and made no mention of his mother. It is unclear who wrote the ledger entry, which can be viewed at the school but is unavailable on-line.
While historians generally prefer written evidence to oral evidence, documents can also be misleading, or simply inaccurate, on occasion. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is no record of John McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone in the records of the Canal Zone Health Department, now available at the National Archives. After reviewing all the available evidence, I nevertheless concluded that McCain was born in the Canal Zone, as he has stated.
It seems clear that Obama, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, was exposed to many cultural and religious influences as a child. But he appears to have shown little interest in organized religion until he "found Christ," in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in the mid-80s. The dominant influence in his life was neither his father (whom he barely knew) or his stepfather, but his mother, Ann Dunham, a free-spirited type he once described as a "secular humanist."
The Obama campaign says they believe that the Muslim notation was made in the ledger because that was the nominal religion of Barack's stepfather, now deceased. Campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor said that Obama "is not, and was never, a Muslim." The campaign yesterday established a new website, Fight the Smears, to counter such rumors.
The Pinocchio Test
The Floyd Brown ad is evidently a preview of a line of attack that will be sharpened and reprised between now and November. For a more sophisticated, or at least more detailed, variant of the "Obama was a Moslem" argument, see the posts of conservative Middle East expert Daniel Pipes (son of Harvard professor Richard Pipes.) Both Brown and Pipes base their arguments and conclusions on factoids that have appeared in the mainstream media. But they make no attempt to weigh the evidence fairly.
Barring fresh revelations, the Obama campaign's explanation for the "Muslim" annotation beside Barack's name in the Catholic school ledger seems reasonable. Three Pinocchios for Floyd Brown.
This is a partial transcript of "The Big Story With John Gibson," January 19, 2007, that has been edited for clarity.
JOHN GIBSON, HOST: The gloves are off: Hillary Clinton is reported to be already digging up the dirt on Barack Obama.
The New York senator has reportedly outed Obama's madrassa past. That's right, the Clinton team is reported to have pulled out all the stops to reveal something Obama would rather you didn't know: that he was educated in a Muslim madrassa.
I was criticized on this show for outing Obama as a smoker, but look at what some anti-Obama Democrats are doing to her political rival now. They are playing the Muslim phobia card.
Is this just the beginning? Is the Obama honeymoon officially over? What other dirty little secrets will come out as they battle it out in the race for the White House? With me now is Republican strategist Terry Holt.
Terry, this is appearing on a Web site today, Insight magazine, which is a subsidiary of The Washington Times. Here's the question. I'll put it up on the screen: Barack's madrassa past. He says that "during the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school." That's from his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
Now in the meantime, this is what Democrats are saying, according to Insight magazine. They're looking into his background. They're saying: He was a Muslim. He concealed it. His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.
Now, we have heard about dirty politics before. Republicans aren't involved in this one. What do you think about what's going on over there?
TERRY HOLT, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: John, the last time I checked, there was still a freedom of religion in this country. And this is either a despicable act by an absolutely ruthless Clinton political machine. We know that they are capable of doing this. But it wasn't directly linked to Hillary Clinton. If it wasn't her, then certainly she should disavow it because I think we have spent an awful lot of time in this country trying to tamp down anti-religious sentiments.
But you know, it's also, if you took a page out of the Clinton book and you are really shrewd and you were Barack Obama, you might want to put this out yourself so that you could deal with it early in the political campaign and get it over with. I don't know.
GIBSON: Let me show you what the press secretary to U.S. Senator Barack Obama said today in a statement about this story. They said: "The idea that Senator Barack Obama attended some radical Islamic school is completely ludicrous. Senator Obama is a committed Christian and attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago."
Nonetheless Terry, what damage does it do to Obama to have the word madrassa attached to his name?
HOLT: Well, I think that Barack Obama is such a white-hot political property right now that I'm not sure that it does any long-term damage. He may have to explain this, but, you know, Obama's story is unique to the political field at this point having been educated overseas.
I would also point out that a madrassa before it was politicized and really taken over by the fundamentalists primarily from Saudi Arabia, it was nothing more than a parochial school, and Barack Obama was in school 40 years ago. So I'm not sure that this is a campaign killer, but it does, I think, maybe put on him the burden of explanation, a little bit more about his bio.
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