Aaron Klein, WND.com

President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, told the U.S. government she would homeschool her son using U.S.-approved textbooks during the period she moved the family to Indonesia, according to testimony unearthed by WND.

Dunham, however, broke her pledge. She enrolled the future president in Indonesian schools, where he was registered as a Muslim going by the name “Barry Soetoro.”

Dunham’s pledge to homeschool Obama was part of an ongoing attempt to secure an immigration department waiver so her second husband, Indonesian citizen Lolo Soetoro, could return to the U.S. after his visa had expired.

Dunham separated from her first husband, Barack Obama Sr., in 1963 when the future president was 2 years old. Dunham and Obama Sr. are reported to have divorced in 1964.

In 1965 in Hawaii, Dunham married Soetoro, an Indonesian, and moved to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, in October 1967.

WND reported earlier this week evidence continues to mount that Obama was adopted by his Indonesian stepfather, raising concerns over his presidential eligibility.

Soetoro had been studying at the University of Hawaii as part of a State Department-initiated student exchange program.

Soetoro’s U.S. student visa had been sponsored by the University of Hawaii’s Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange between East and West. The program enforced strict visa limitations, requiring foreign students to return to their home countries after two years.

Soetoro outstayed his visa. He eventually was obliged to return to Indonesia after his university program received a special cable from the Indonesian government that Soetoro, a civilian employee of the Indonesian army, should “immediately terminate his studies and return to Djakarta, Indonesia.”

Soetoro apparently was expected to devote four years of service to the Indonesian government in return for its subsidizing geography studies at the country’s Gadjah Mada University, as well as for his participation in the student exchange program.

With Soetoro back in Indonesia, both he and Dunham filed petitions with U.S. Immigration, in hopes of persuading the American government to grant a waiver allowing Soetoro to return.

Those documents were reviewed by WND. All their requests were denied.

As part of the saga, Robert R. Schmitz, a U.S. Immigration Inspector, noted Dunham’s pledge to homeschool young Obama if she took him to Indonesia.

Schmitz wrote in the immigration file dated May 24, 1967:

“[Mrs. Soetoro] also indicated that her son is now in Kindergarten and will commence the first grade next September and if it is necessary for her and the child to go to Indonesia she will educate the child at home with the help of school texts from the U.S. as approved by the Board of Education in Honolulu. …”

A subsequent document dated Oct. 6, 1967 and addressed to the State Department’s Facilitative Services Staff of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, explained Dunham decided to go to Indonesia if her requests for her husband’s visa were denied.

“She has made application for a visa for herself and her son to travel to Indonesia as she is determined to join her husband as soon as possible, if he is not permitted to return here, because she can no longer endure the separation,” stated the memo.

Once in Indonesia, Dunham clearly violated her pledge to the U.S. government by enrolling her son in Indonesian schools.

Widely distributed reports as well as a photograph of Obama’s school registration papers have documented that in January 1968 Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta’s Roman Catholic Fransiskus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro.

He was listed as an Indonesian citizen whose stepfather, identified on school documents as “L Soetoro Ma,” worked for the topography department of the Indonesian army.

Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students but exempt them from studying religion.

After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled “also as a Muslim, according to documents” in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta.

Obama once ‘quite religious in Islam’

The Laotze blog, run by an American expatriate in Southeast Asia who visited the Besuki school, noted, “All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school, and a young ‘Barry Soetoro,’ being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam.”

Indeed, in Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he acknowledged studying the Quran and describes the public school as “a Muslim school.”

“In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies,” wrote Obama.

A number of Obama’s childhood friends from Indonesia claimed to the media that Obama was once a mosque-attending Muslim.

The Indonesian media have been flooded with accounts of Obama’s childhood Islamic studies, some describing him as a religious Muslim.