How the radical Islam tag on Obama fell flat on its face

By Athman Amran

Playing with the fear of Islam, opponents have tried to discredit Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama using his Islamic name, Hussein.

The opponents believed this would scare US voters, especially with the memory of the September 11, 2001; Al-Qaeda attacks on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

But by Obama merely having an Islamic background, the opponents went further, knowing that would not have much effect.

They introduced the terms "Islamic fundamentalist" "radical" "terrorist" "Wahhabi" after his name.

His father, Barack Hussein Obama Senior was referred to in e-mails beginning from early last year, as "a black Muslim from Nyangoma Kogelo" in Kenya.

The e-mails claimed Obama’s father was married to a "White atheist" from Wichita, Kansas, Ann Dunham.

They continued to say when his parents divorced, Obama was only two years old, and his mother married a "radical Muslim" from Indonesia, Mr Lolo Soetoro.

Obama’s family relocated to Indonesia where the presidential nominee attended a "Muslim" school in Jakarta.

To portray Obama not worthy of being US president, the e-mails further claimed he was enrolled in a Wahhabi school in Jakarta.

In the US and the West, the Wahhabi school, whose origin is Saudi Arabia, is regarded as teaching "radical" Islam.

multiplication tables

"Radical" Islam is associated with terrorism in the US and is allegedly followed by terrorists waging a holy war (Jihad) against them.

Rumours began circulating in e-mails early last year that Obama was a "radical Muslim" and would not recite the Pledge of Alliance.

But when the Insight Magazine took up the matter, it had become a national and an international issue.

The magazine cited unnamed sources claiming Obama was enrolled for at least four years in an Indonesian "madrassa".

The madrassa, according to the article, was "espousing Wahhabism", which is regarded as a form of radical Islam.

The Fox News also took up the issue. Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy asked, according to About.com: "Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised – spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father – as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?"

But in his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama speaks of his early years in Jakarta.

"During my five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighbourhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables".

somaLi elder

And investigation by CNN aired on January 22, disputed the claims by Insight Magazine and Fox News that Obama was enrolled in a Wahhabi Islamic school in Jakarta.

CNN said the Basuki School, which Obama attended between 1969 and 1971, was a public institution.

CNN reporter John Vause even interviewed one of Obama’s classmates at the school, Mr Bandug Winadijato.

Winadijato told CNN: "It’s not (an) Islamic school. It’s general. There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian…So that’s a mixed school".

Vause said: "The deputy headmaster (Hardi Privono) tells me he’s unaware that his school has been labelled an Islamic madrassa by some in the United States…"

Obama was later transferred to SDN Menteng I.

AP interviewed Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, which dismissed claims that Obama studied at an Islamic school as "groundless".

Handlers of then candidate for Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, used the phobia of Islam in some US quarters to hit at him.

In February, Clinton’s campaigners circulated a photo of Obama dressed as a Somali elder during a trip to Kenya.

This was expected to whip US sentiment against Obama as association with Somalia evoked the massacre of American troops by Somalis in the 1980s.

The US military had gone to intervene in a civil war immediately after the ouster of Somali dictator Siad Barre and suffered casualties now depicted in the film Black Hawk Down.

mccain steps in

AFP recently quoted a joint petition by some 100 Islamic scholars on the issue.The scholars said: "Not since the election of John Kennedy (a Catholic) in 1960 has the religious faith of a US presidential candidate generated so much distortion as the false claims generated by extremist critics that Senator Barack Obama, the candidate of the Democratic Party, is a stealth Muslim."

They further said: "This is part of an Islamophobic hate campaign that fuels prejudice against Americans who practice Islamic faith and Muslims worldwide."

Even Republican nominee John McCain had to step in at a rally when a member of the audience suggested that Obama was an Arab.

Colin Powel, a Republican who is now supporting Obama, was recently quoted by AFP as asking: "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated (with) terrorists’. This is not the way we should be doing it in America."