The call from the news desk in Atlanta came at 4 a.m. Sunday. It was about a report that presidential hopeful Barack Obama may have attended a madrassa, an Islamic religious school, as a boy. That seemed an odd claim; at 4 a.m., downright bizarre.
A day's travel later, cameraman Brad Olson, producer Andy Saputra and I were in Jakarta, Indonesia, outside the school in question. A hotbed of radical Islamic extremism it was not. Moms and dads dropped their kids off for school, kids played soccer, expensive houses lined the street, including the U.S. ambassador's residence.
We went in and spoke with the deputy headmaster, other officials, even some of Obama's old schoolmates. There were boys and girls singing and dancing, Christian kids next to Muslim kids.
This was nothing like the madrassas I had been to in Pakistan, where young boys learn the Koran by rote, memorizing every word, where no other religion is tolerated, where the teachers are men with long beards dressed in traditional garb.
To be honest, I felt embarrassed to ask the school about the controversy in the United States. The deputy headmaster was surprised, and I think a little taken aback that some had made the assumption his school was a hotbed of radicalism.
An old classmate of Obama's was more blunt. He said it was a racist assumption that every school in a Muslim country is a hard-line extremist madrassa.
I spoke with the bosses back in New York and Atlanta and outlined the facts, not entirely sure what they would want me to do next. The response was pretty simple: Do the story, report what you find, nothing more, nothing less. So that's what I
did.
