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Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother.
Obama’s stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school,
as well as two years of public school. As Obama described it, “Without the money to go to the international school
that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the
children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.” [The Audacity of Hope, p. 274]
To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa. |
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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 reported in the same month that its own investigation found those
claims to be false:
[R]eporting 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.' "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." CNN Video: |

| "He refused to not only put his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance, but refused to say the pledge...how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief? " |
| The photograph was taken on September 16, 2007, at Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry festivities in Iowa,
an important ritual for Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Contrary to the e-mails attacking Obama for disrespecting the flag, the candidates were not reciting the
pledge of allegiance. They were standing for the national anthem.
Obama responded: |
| “My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was 2. During the Pledge of Allegiance you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem you sing.” |
| General Merrill “Tony” McPeak, USAF (Ret.), Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, USAF (Ret.), and Richard Danzig, Former Secretary of the Navy saw fit to denounce the chain email and weigh in on the topic of Obama's patriotism with a letter of their own. |
| Just for the record, Robert Gibb, Communications Director of the Obama campaign, released the following two photos of Obama with his hand over his heart during recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. |


| This statement is a mistaken reference to Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison. |
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Barack Obama's father (also named Barack Obama) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya.
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.
Barack Obama himself has repeatedly acknowledged that his parents split up when he was two years old and
that he scarcely knew his father:
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