Who started the 'Obama is a Muslim' smear?

Who started the "Obama is a Muslim" smear?

One of the prominent features of this Presidential election camapign will be the privatised War Room.

In 1992 the Clinton campaign determined that Michael Dukakis had let too many unreasonable attacks go unanswered. So they established a rapid response unit in their War Room designed to rebut allegation within a single news cycle.

During the last election bloggers joined in the fun. Using the collective wisdom available to them through collaboration on the internet, they brought down Dan Rather by shredding his report on George Bush's army service.

During this election I expect an explosion of this sort of activity.

An early example is the work bring done to trace the source of the so-called smear about Obama's religion.

I call it a so-called smear not because I am suggesting for one second that Obama is a Muslim but because, if you think about it, it is odd to call suggesting someone is a Muslim a "smear", isn't it?

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.

The same conclusion has been reached by Chris Hayes in The Nation.  Ben Smith says Hayes got there first.

Whatever.

But it looks like they've got their man.