Posted by Nadezda on November 12, 2008, at 17:42:31
In reply to Re: The forgotten corners of the world » Nadezda, posted by Sigismund on November 12, 2008, at 15:51:42
Okay. I think I get it.
This part of a report from CNN may address your issue (or non-issue), the bottom line of it being that the school Obama attended in Indonesia was a school with Christian, Buddhis and Muslim children, and had no religious bent. It was certainly 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."...
"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."...
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. "
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Furthermore, he went to a highly regarded high school in Hawaii and then attended Occidental College and Columbia U. and Harvard Law School and is a committed Christian.
What's the problem?
As for his going to Pakistan for three weeks in his early twenties, with college friends, it is reportedly not at all clear that travel to Pakistan was banned with a US passport. I actually don't see what difference it makes. I assume he went to visit some people; I have no reason to think he went in any way illegally, or without appropriate permission.
If you have some authetic evidence of it, fine. If it's all rumors and innuendo, not fine. And frankly, I don't see what difference it makes anyway. He is a US citizen. Period. This happened 26 or 27 years ago, for three weeks, when he was in college. I did all sorts of rebellious stuff when I was in college that has no bearing my patriotism, Americanness, or US citizenship, or in fact criminal record, or likelihood of colluding with terrorists. What does this trip matter to anything?
I'm utterly perplexed about what this is all about.
Nadezda
poster:Nadezda
thread:860966
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20081002/msgs/862608.html