Barack Obama’s Background

Claim: Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunh am, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii.

Barack Hussein Obama (Senator Obama’s father) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya. He met and married an American woman, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. Their son, also named Barack Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he was ever a “radical Muslim,” and Senator Obama’s family histories note that his father was an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the younger Obama’s mother. Of his mother’s religious views, Senator Obama wrote:

Claim:   Obama’s introduction to Islam came via his father, and this
      influence was strong an lasting, for years. In reality, the senior Obama returned to
      Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence
      over his son’s education.

      As noted above, Barack Obama’s parents divorced when he was only two years
      old, and his father then moved thousands of miles away, from Hawaii to
      Connecticut, so he couldn’t have received much of an “introduction to
      Islam” from his (biological) father:
      My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been
      divorced from my mother when I was two years old.

      At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and
      less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two
      years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my
      mother and grandparents told.
      (Barack’s only other childhood contact with his father occurred when he
      was eleven years old, and his father came to visit Hawaii for a month at
      Christmastime. The elder Obama died when Barack Jr. was twenty-one years
      old.)

Claim: Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.

The claim that Obama attended a radical Wahabbist school in Indonesia in the mid-1960s is exceedingly far-fetched, given that:

Insight magazine claimed in a January 2007 article that Barack Obama spent at least four years attending what is variously described as a “madrassa,” a “radical Muslim religious school,” or a “Muslim seminary” in Indonesia, but CNN has more recently reported that its own investigation found those claims to be false:

The Associated Press reported similarly:

Moreover, a statement released by the Obama campaign affirmed that:

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.

Obama, known as “Barry” throughout his early years, was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced.After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro’s home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta from ages 6 to 10. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade until his graduation in 1979. Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.

Obama received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia in 1983, then worked at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group before moving to Chicago in 1985 to take a job as a community organizer. He entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In 1990, The New York Times reported his election as the Harvard Law Review’s “first black president in its 104-year history.” Obama completed his law degree magna cum laude in 1991, then returned to Chicago where he headed a voter registration drive and began writing his first book, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995.

As an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill and Galland from 1993 to 2002, he represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases. Following his election to the Illinois Senate in 1996, Obama agreed to work at the firm during the summer, when the Illinois Senate was not in session. While Obama never took part in a trial, he worked on teams drawing up briefs, contracts, and other legal documents. This included being part of teams that represented Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in a successful lawsuit that forced the state of Illinois to implement a federal law that was designed to make it easier for people to register to vote, an appeals brief on behalf of a whistleblower that was suing Cook County Hospital and the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research for wrongful termination, and on another team forced the city of Chicago to redraw ward boundaries that the city council drew up following the 1990 census. Obama also did some work on taxpayer-supported building rehabilitation loans for Rezmar Corp., owned by Tony Rezko and Daniel Mahru. Rezko has raised over $250,000 for Obama’s various political campaigns.

Obama also taught constitutional law part-time at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Is Barack Obama a muslim? YOU Decide.