Calm down, conservatives—Obama apparently did not attend a madrassa

Conservative columnist Jack Wheeler has an article that’s been circulating in the conservative Internet about how conservatives can make hay out of Barak Obama’s four years in a Muslim madrassa when he was a boy in Indonesia. Trouble is, Obama himself says it’s not true. According to an article sent out by the National Council of Churches:

The facts below are no mystery. Senator Obama wrote openly about his life in his autobiography, Dreams from my Father. We take Senator Obama’s long-cited and uncontested description of his educational and faith journey at face value.

* Senator Obama never attended a radical Madrasa nor was he ever educated in a wahabi school. In the years he lived in Indonesia as a child, from ages 6 to 10, he attended a neighboring Catholic school for two years and then a public school.
* Senator Obama was not raised in a religious household.
* Senator Obama became a Christian long before he entered politics.
While working as a young community organizer in the mid-1980s, working with a consortium of churches in a depressed neighborhood of Chicago, he became a Christian and became active in Trinity United Church of Christ.
He, his wife and family are still active members of Trinity today.

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Carl Simpson writes:

A curious statement from the Marxist faux-Christian National Council of Churches. I note there is no explicit denial of attending a madrassa per se, only a “radical” or “Wahabi” madrassa. The statement goes on to report attendance at a Catholic, then a “public” school in Indonesia.

Maybe I’m being overly suspicious here, but I am curious as to what difference there is between an Indonesian public school and a madrassa.

Indonesia is after all a majority Muslim country. If it follows the pattern of several other Muslim countries, the “public” school is in fact merely a government-funded madrassa. (Something the NCC would no doubt fully support in the USA.) What would be the difference between what is taught in Indonesian public schools (assuming there are actual independent public schools) and what is taught in “Palestinian” public schools, for example?

Now even if the NCC report turns out to be essentially true (a broken watch tells the correct time twice a day, after all), there are certainly multiple reasons to oppose an evil character like Barack Obama from any rational conservative’s point of view. It’s telling that some of the conservative commentariat feels the need to resort to this level of speculation. Another thing that I’ve read is that the madrassa story was initially circulated by operatives of Hillary Clinton.

LA replies:

Someone will have to check out Obama’s book and find out what he said.

Why do you call him evil? He seems like a rather pleasant likable person to me, without the usual leftist/minority resentment of America.

Mr. Simpson replies:

In contrast to many of the numerous leftists in the Illinois legislature, State Sen. Obama openly opposed the legislation which outlawed what is sometimes called “live-birth abortion”—itself a euphemism for cold-blooded murder. Prior to the passage of this legislation, abortionists in Illinois were perfectly free to “terminate” any infant that happened to survive a late-term abortion by a) allowing the child to die of exposure and dehydration over a couple of hours; b) jabbing a scalpel into the infant’s skull or heart right there on the table.

Even most of the regular “pro-choicers” headed for the tall grass on that issue once the facts of what was actually taking place where made known. Not Obama. He and a few die-hard feminist ideologues voted against the law, which fortunately ended up being passed. I cannot think of another word to describe a person who would knowingly oppose such a law (which required a minimum of medical care to such an unfortunate) apart from evil. Even the Muslims oppose abortion.

LA writes:

Here’s an example of the non-journalism that is a curse of our society. Editor and Publisher, in a story quoted elsewhere in the blogosphere as the authoritative source for the fact that the madrassa story is not true (title: “Obama ‘Muslim’ Charge Found to Be—Unfounded”), gives not a single fact showing that the story is not true; it simply says it’s not true and that the reports about the madrassa are slurs spread by conservatives. And this fact-free story is taken as disproof that Obama went to a madrassa.

At least the story by the National Council of Churches that I quoted referenced Obama’s biography.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 25, 2007 01:32 AM | Send