Democratic Senator Barack Obama Launches Aggressive Counter-Attack

The Democratic senator, Barack Obama, has launched an aggressive counter-attack against rumours that he is a Muslim and was educated at a madrasa in Indonesia.

In an interview with a Chicago television station, Mr Obama denounced what he called a "climate of smear", intended to scupper his run for the White House in 2008. "When I was six, I attended an Indonesian public school where a bunch of the kids were Muslim, because the country is 90% Muslim," he said.

"The notion that somehow, at the age of six or seven, I was being trained for something other than math, science and reading, is ludicrous."

Mr Obama's spokesman said the senator had never been a Muslim and was a church-going Christian. "We won't take allegations that are patently untrue lying down," Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

The furore over Mr Obama's ethnicity - he is the son of a Kenyan father, whom he describes as a secular Muslim, and a white American mother - erupted just as he announced he was running for the White House. It has had a renewed life in a media war, with CNN attacking Fox for repeating unattributed allegations made in a rightwing online magazine.

Mr Obama has been a favourite subject of rightwing commentators for months, with speculation about his middle name, Hussein, and comments about the similarity of his surname to Osama bin Laden.

But rumours that would ordinarily have remained in the blogosphere gained some credibility this month when an online magazine said Hillary Clinton's campaign was investigating Mr Obama's Muslim heritage. Ms Clinton's campaign has condemned the story as an attack on both Democratic leaders.