Fox News host Sean Hannity said in a Playboy interview published Wednesday that he never helped propagate the conservative conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.
“I never fueled the myth,” he said. “How do you come up with this stuff? He did go to a Muslim school. He writes about it in his own book.”
“He did not grow up in Kenya,” the interviewer responded.
“He went to a Muslim school in Indonesia, or wherever it was, Kenya. I forget,” Hannity said. “Now you’ve got me. I think it was Indonesia. I’m trying to remember his biography. It’s going back so long. He admits he went to a Muslim school. It’s on his audiobook, if you want a tape of it—you can hear him say it himself.”
He added: “I’m a Christian. All people are the children of God. I’m just telling you what Obama said in his own words. He didn’t go to a madrassa, which has negative connotations, but he did study the Koran and Islam and learn prayers that he could recite with a perfect accent, according to Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. As for the issue of his birth certificate, I thought that was one of the oddest things, a noncontroversy that the White House easily could have ended but didn’t. If you’ve got the birth certificate, just release it and move on. That’s what I said.”