Obama, Osama, Madrassa: Setting the record straight

We got an anonymous comment yesterday from someone responding to Chris's recent post about the South Carolina church sign asking if "Obama" and "Osama" were brothers. As comment moderator, I aim to avoid spreading misinformation in our forum. But I wanted to share this particular comment with readers, because it repeats a lie that unfortunately is believed by too many Americans and that needs to be confronted. Here's the relevant excerpt:

This is just another case of "just don't get it!" The sign has NOTHING TO DO WITH RACE or POLITICS. It has everything to do with RELIGION. The church is trying to get people in America to get their heads out of the sand and recognize a religious problem. I thought that was what churches were supposed to deal with.

Radical Islamists have declared war on America and the rest of the "Infidels" in the western part of this world. They have very plainly stated their intention is to kill us. They teach it in their schools where Obama attended.

It's true, unfortunately, that radical Islamists have declared war on America and want to kill us. And it's true that there are schools where this ideology is taught.

However, Obama did not attend them.

During his family's stay in Indonesia, the young Obama attended both Catholic and Muslim schools. But the Muslim schools he attended were no more "radical" than the Catholic ones. These were mainstream institutions, where children learned about religion, yes, but also basic subjects like reading and math. These schools were nothing like the madrassas that "educated" Afghanistan's Taliban, where students were taught a narrow interpretation of the Qur'an through rote repetition.

But in fact, the very idea of madrassas as terrorist factories may be mistaken -- at least according to a 2006 Washington Quarterly article titled "The Madrassa Scapegoat" by Johns Hopkins Professor Peter Bergen and Los Angeles Times writer Swati Pandey:

...[C]areful examination of the 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks in recent memory-the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Africa embassy bombings in 1998, the September 11 attacks, the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, and the London bombings on July 7, 2005-reveals that only in rare cases were madrassa graduates involved. All of those credited with masterminding the five terrorist attacks had university degrees, and none of them had attended a madrassa. Within our entire sample, only 11 percent of the terrorists had attended madrassas. (For about one-fifth of the terrorists, educational background could not be determined by examining the public record.) Yet, more than half of the group we assessed attended a university, making them as well educated as the average American: whereas 54 percent of the terrorists were found to have had some college education or to have graduated from university, only 52 percent of Americans can claim similar academic credentials.

For a thorough debunking of the Obama madrassa myth, see Jonathan Alter's Newsweek story from last January titled "Behind the 'Madrassa Hoax,'" which explains how this untruth was spread by right-wing media and used to slime not only Obama but also the Clinton campaign, which was wrongly named as the source of the misinformation. Also, Media Matters for America has assembled a timeline showing how the smear was spread.