Well, Matthew Mosk in the Washington Post makes clear why the smear label is well merited. From the beginning the allegation was less that Obama was some sort of Islamist than that he was a liar. The idea, the smear, was that he was attempting to conceal his religious background.
It is rather similar to the reason why Holocaust denial is anti-semitic. The numbers who died are a matter for historical research, the suggestion that the Jews are engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the truth is a smear.
Mosk attributes the uncovering of the truth about the Obama smear to political theorist Damielle Allen and a Google search she conducted using phrases from an attack email on Obama's religion:
That search showed that the first mention of the e-mail on the Internet had come more than a year earlier. A participant on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com posted a copy of the e-mail on Jan. 8, 2007, and added this line at the end: "Don't know who the original author is, but this email should be sent out to family and friends."
Allen discovered that theories about Obama's religious background had circulated for many years on the Internet. And that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert that the Illinois senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.
Martin, a former political opponent of Obama's, is the publisher of an Internet newspaper who sends e-mails to his mailing list almost daily.
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