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Jennifer03801
Starlite Member
Username: Jennifer03801
| | Posted on Monday, January 22, 2007 - 04:12 pm: | 
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POSTED: 5:43 p.m. EST, January 22, 2007
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 step-father and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa.
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.
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.
“Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one” - Elbert Hubbard
Let us today take a stand to end all kinds of fear and hatred of "the other." - Abdul Malik Mujahid
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Bubby
Starlite Member
Username: Bubby
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 - 05:28 pm: |
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INSIDE THE BELTWAY .............By John McCaslin
January 31, 2007
Faux first
Contrary to pronouncements by pundits and publications
alike, freshman Rep. Keith Ellison, Minnesota
Democrat, is not the first Muslim elected to Congress.
Writing for the Christian Worldview Network, historian
David Barton says that as is often the case with the
mainstream media, they were wrong about the
43-year-old Democrat, who created a storm of
controversy by taking his oath of office on the Koran
rather than the Bible.
Rather, the first Muslim to serve in Congress was John
Randolph of Virginia , elected off and on from 1799 to
1834. During the time there "were numerous Muslims
living in America," says Mr. Barton, so many that the
first Koran was published and sold here by 1806.
"Significantly, Francis Scott Key, author of the 'Star
Spangled Banner,' befriended Randolph and faithfully
shared Christ with him. Randolph eventually converted
from Islam to Christianity," Mr. Barton writes.
"Interestingly, during the founding era, like today,
there was great concern over the possibility of a
Muslim being elected to Congress. That concern was
heightened by the fact that at that time, like now,
America was involved in a war on terror against
Islamic terrorists," the historian notes.
"That war, called the Barbary Powers War, lasted 32
years, involved six years of active overseas warfare
against Muslim terrorists, and spanned four U.S.
presidencies: those of George Washington, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison."
President Jefferson sent U.S. troops and General William Eaton to Tripoli to battle Muslim terrorists, who were engaging in piracy and extortion, demanding tribute and even holding captured American ships' crews for ransom. Eaton's military success was the inspiration for the words from the Marine Corps hymn, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...." |
Jennifer03801
Starlite Member
Username: Jennifer03801
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 - 06:03 pm: |
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Are you saying Dennis Prager was wrong, Bubby?
"Jones asked Galloway if he thought an invasion of Iran was on the horizon. Galloway was confident that massively opposed public opinion would stop an attack from taking place, unless a staged terror attack carried out by the military industrial complex and blamed on Iran was carried out."
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Jennifer03801
Starlite Member
Username: Jennifer03801
| | Posted on Sunday, February 04, 2007 - 07:25 am: |
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Now this is an example of what I mean.
Goose and gander, stones and glass houses, but you don't see me whining about Bubby going off topic in my thread with one of those cut and pastes he condemns others for posting.
"...I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 (600,000)(650,00)people paid with their lives; 1600 (2952) (2954) (2964) (2969) (2972) (2980) (2983) (2987) (2989) (2990) (2993) (2996) (2998) (3000) (3002) (3003) (3024)3054) (3060) (3062) (3095) (3097) of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 (22,032) (22,401) (22,834) (47,657 non-mortal casualties)of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies." George Galloway
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