Leave it to the right to even screw up a smear. Insight Magazine's fairy tale that Barack Obama attended a Muslim "madrassa" school when he was but 6 years old has traversed the planes of right wing hackery, sling-shotting from Glen Beck's wacky world of low-rated cable TV (and high-rated radio), to the ultimate dumping ground for factually-sketchy slander against Democrats: Fox "News" Channel.
Well. That would be all well and good if the story was actually true. Here's the scoop from ThinkProgress:
Last week, Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch outlets amplified a right-wing report alleging that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) attended an Islamic “madrassa” school as a 6-year-old child. One Fox News caller questioned whether Obama’s schooling means that “maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy.” Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, “Well, we’ll see about that.” So what is a news organization to do when they want to "see about that?" It's called simple reportage. And CNN went one better:
Commenting on this report today, Wolf Blitzer said that CNN had done “what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation”: actually investigate and learn the facts. CNN’s Senior International Correspondent John Vause filed a report from Indonesia. ThinkP has the video, here's the rest of the story:
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." The Insight article even went to lowbrow as to accuse, not their own hackery, but Hillary Clinton's camp of cooking up the Obamarassa story, something Clinton's camp has called total junk (consider the source.) I mean, why take the credit for such a scummy story when you can pass the blame onto someone else?
Oh, and one other thing: if Barack Obama HAD attended a madrassa school at 6 years old, he'd be one hell of a terrorist prodigy, since madrassas are kind of like college -- they're for adults. Funny thing, that.
Labels: Barack, Barack Obama, Faux News, Islam, madrassas, religion, right wingers |
