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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