Claim: 'Absolute proof' Obama was Indonesian citizen

A college classmate of Barack Obama who wrote a column asserting “The Obama Scandal is at Columbia” says he received a call from a reporter who claims to have “absolute proof” Obama became an Indonesian citizen.

WND has reported since 2008 that an Indonesian school record shows Obama attended school in the Asian nation registered as an Indonesian citizen and as a Muslim.

Wayne Allyn Root, in an interview with fill-in host Joe Pagliarulo on the “Glenn Beck Program,” said he received a phone call at 4 a.m. this morning from an investigative reporter with Breitbart.com probing Obama’s past in Indonesia.

The reporter, according to Root, a former Libertarian Party vice-presidential nominee, said he has “absolute proof” Obama was adopted by his mother’s new husband and became an Indonesian citizen.

“It’s a fact, it’s not a question,” the reporter told Root. “I’m looking at [the proof] right now.”

Watch the live stream of Sheriff Arpaio’s most recent press conference on Obama’s eligibility. When you sign up for access, you’ll receive a copy of the official press release distributed at the conference.

Information about Obama’s Indonesian schooling first surfaced in January 2007 in a blog called An American Expat in Southeast Asia. The blog documented Obama was registered Jan. 1, 1968, under the name Barry Soetoro, with serial number 203, in Class 1B at the Catholic Franciscan Assisi Primary School in Jakarta.

School records listed Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961.

His religion was listed as Islam.

According to the blog, school documents recorded Barry’s father as L. Soetoro Ma, a worker in the director general’s office in the TNI Topography division of the Indonesian army.

The records indicated Barry attended the Franciscan school for three years, until Class 3.

WND reported Aug. 17, 2008, that conformation for Obama’s attendance in the Indonesian school came with the surfacing of a 2007 Associated Press photograph by Tatan Syuflana, an Indonesian AP reporter and photographer. The photo showed Obama’s registration card at the Assisi school.

An AP spokesman confirmed to WND that the photograph of the registration card was authentic.

The listing of Obama in an official record in a foreign country as a foreign citizen should have prompted a major media investigation.

Obama in Islam: A Muslim

After attending the Catholic school in Jakarta, Obama was enrolled at a public school.

WND has been unable to find an Indonesian law in force when Obama was in Jakarta that required a child to be an Indonesian citizen to attend public schools in Indonesia.

Indonesian law at the time required instruction in Islam, a contention confirmed by two academic studies done by Lambert Kelabora, a lecturer in Indonesian Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Writing in Asian Survey in 1976, Kelabora wrote that Sukarno’s defeat of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Communist Party of Indonesia, in an unsuccessful coup led to changes in religious instruction in the Indonesian public school curriculum.

“With the victory over the PKI in their hands,” Kelabora wrote, “Moslem groups had no difficulty in arguing that it was religion that had saved the country from Communism, and that it was time to make religion compulsory for everyone in order to strengthen the moral fibre of the nation.”

As a result, Islamic studies throughout Indonesian institutions were intensified “in the communist prison camps, in factories, in offices, and in all educational institutions.”

The study of Islam was then made mandatory in all Indonesian educational institutions in the country, including pre-primary schools. All students were required to increase their study of Islam to four lessons a week, some 10 percent of the curriculum, elevating the study of Islam “to the most important subject in the school curriculum.”

In a 1979 paper Kelabora published in Comparative Education, titled “Assumptions Underlying Religious Instruction in Indonesia,” he stressed “the changing political and security situation in the country since 1949 has made religion a compulsory subject for all, from pre-primary to tertiary level, from the communist prison camps to factories and government establishments.”

Even Kim Barker, a Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent, in an article focused on “debunking the myth Obama had attended a Madrassa,” admitted Barry Soetoro attended the mosque with his father to pray.

Barker interviewed Israella Darmawan, Barry’s first grade teacher at the Assisi school, the teacher previously interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Barker reported her as saying, “Sometimes Lolo went to the mosque to pray, but he rarely socialized with people. Rarely, Barry went to the mosque with Lolo.”

In an interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Obama was questioned about his Islamic education.

After acknowledging that he once got in trouble for making faces during Quran study classes in his elementary school in Indonesia, Obama recited for Kristoff the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer. It reads as follows:

“Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no God but Allah
I witness that there is no God but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet …”

Kristof noted Obama recited the prayer “with a first-rate accent.”

“In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks),” Kristoff wrote, “Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’”

The lines of the Adhan are very similar to the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of the oneness of Allah and the acceptance of Muhammad as his final prophet. Recitation of the Shahada is one of the most important of the Five Pillars of Islam and is performed daily by Muslims worldwide.

Maya Soetoro: Obama’s ‘adopted’

WND reported April 28, 2011, one day after the White House posted a PDF file it claims is Obama’s authentic long-form birth certificate, Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s Indonesian half-sister, suggested on a blog that Obama was adopted by her stepfather.

On a Facebook page, Soetoro-Ng wrote to a woman who had met her in Hawaii after Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Stanley Ann Dunham and grandmother to both Maya and Barack, passed away in 2008.

Soetoro-Ng was objecting to having a conversation with a critic of her half-brother and said she had been misquoted as saying her whole family was Muslim.

She wrote: “I did not say my brother was a Muslim. I did say that I was more philosophically Buddhist. I told you that you were upsetting me. You said that you were not trying to upset me but wanted to know the truth about (Raila) Odinga (a Muslim for whom Barack Obama campaigned in the 2007 presidential race in Kenya.) I told you I didn’t know who that was and had never met him. You mentioned the adoption laws of Indonesia that you saw as related to my brother’s legitimacy (you were suggesting that because my father, his stepfather, had adopted him, that my brother was no longer American) and I said that I had no idea about Indonesian adoption law.”

WND noted that while not a definitive statement, Maya’s post on Facebook supports the registration of Obama at the Catholic school in Jakarta as an Indonesian citizen.

Indonesian citizenship law

The Indonesian citizenship law in effect when Obama was there was titled “Laws of the Republic of Indonesia, Number 62 Year 1958, Regarding Citizenship of the Republic of Indonesia (LNRI 1958/113).”

Article 2(1) deals with the citizenship of foreign children and reads as follows:

A foreign child not yet 5 years of age who is adopted by a Republic of Indonesia state citizen, acquires Republic of Indonesian citizenship, when the adoption is declared lawful by the District Court of the place of residence of the person who adopts the child.

If Obama were adopted by Lolo Soetoro after the age of 5, he would have had to undergo the Indonesian naturalization process to become an Indonesian citizen.

If Obama had been naturalized, he would have been required to renounce U.S. citizenship, prove Indonesian language proficiency and knowledge of the history of Indonesia.

To this point, no official Indonesian adoption papers proving Lolo Soetoro legally adopted Obama have been presented; nor is there any proof Obama was naturalized as an Indonesian citizen when he was there with his stepfather and mother.

Obama ‘Soebarkah’

State Department documents released in two separate FOIA requests indicate that Ann Dunham apparently identified her son with an Indonesian surname and asked the State Department to drop him from her U.S. passport.

In a passport amendment she submitted in person to the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, on Aug. 13, 1968, less than a year after joining her second husband in Indonesia, she petitioned to renew her expiring passport.

In the amendment form, she also requested “Barack Obama II (Soebarkah)” be removed from her U.S. Passport No. 777788.

Her listing of her son’s name as “Barack Hussein Obama (Soebarkah)” suggests she intended to indicate he was an Indonesian citizen.

Until the State Department released the document in July 2010, the surname Soebarkah had never surfaced in reference to Barack Hussein Obama Jr. Indonesians do not typically use surnames, as is the custom in Western nations.

Surnames may be used to convey ethnic information and even within families surnames may vary. Soebarkah may be a variation of the Soetoro surname.