No one has come forward to state who actually started this smear campaign but the evidence is overwhelming that it originated in the Clinton campaign in 2007, and the counter-evidence is non-existent.
I first heard of this from a politically well connected co-worker who was a strong advocate for Hillary Clinton. It started well before the Iowa caucuses when no one thought Barack Obama would win the necessary delegates in the primaries or the convention to become the Democratic Party presidential candidate. This under-handed approach that attempted to tarnish Obama and all Muslim Americans only benefitted Hillary Clinton. The mantra was already clear before the primaries began, Barack Obama was a nice and ‘articulate black man’ who could not possibly win the general election because he was ‘black’ and the voters would not vote for him in the primaries knowing he couldn’t possibly become president. In the mean time in the Clinton campaign he was considered an interloper who was taking campaign funding away from Hillary. No one but Clinton benefitted from this nonsense, and the Republican party wanted only for Obama to succeed as a slap to Clinton, weakening her in the general election which they were sure she would still win. The idea of Barack Obama becoming the Democratic candidate was a wet dream for the GOP because like everyone else the assumption was that a ‘black’ candidate could not win in the general.
Whoever started this evil rumor doesn’t matter, it was not directly denied by Clinton herself. One might consider that a clever tactic for a candidate to use, but I consider it the kind of tactic Trump would use, not clever, but bigoted and racist. The rumor did start from Clinton supporters because it benefited no one but Clinton and her lack of a forceful denial of the claim, the best I recall her saying was a left-handed comment “As far as I know Obama is a Christian” with no denouncement of the anti-Muslim sentiment behind it. Whether or not Hillary herself made it up to start with, no matter if it was an official member of her campaign, she knew it was false and yet a benefit to her campaign and her failure to counter it means she is responsible for it, responsibility she would assume if she actually had any leadership characteristics or any character at all.
In another thread I was presented with utter nonsense posing as counter-evidence, yet it was nothing but a debunking of statements made by Trump many years after the fact that had nothing to do with the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ concept, but instead the claim that Clinton started Birtherism, something patently untrue, and that I did not say. The closest thing to a denial of Hillary’s responsibility is the false claim by some guy on the internet that there was no evidence that it did start in the Clinton campaign, despite the obvious circumstantial evidence that it benefited only Hillary and started at a time when she needed it most with the Iowa caucuses suddenly up for grabs and Obama obtaining new campaign funding and increasing his popularity among the Democratic votes. And in addition he states the actual evidence that the Chair of the Clinton Campaign in Jones County Iowa as passing this rumor around to other Democrats as early as November 2007. And if that is not enough there is also an unverified claim from Joe Scarborough that ‘Obama is a Muslim’ started wi`thin the Clinton campaign. Thay one may not be proof but there is no way to disprove it and it is further evidence, contrary to the claim that no such evidence existed.
Further, this attack on a fellow Democratic candidate did become the pre-cursor to the rise of Birtherism Bullshit. Not the origin of it, but priming the pump for attacks on Obama’s status as an American, not to mention encompassing the anti-Muslim bigotry that Hillary is responsible for. The anti-Obama forces were given a template for how to accomplish through lies what they could not do at the polls. The fact that Donald Trump lied about Hillary starting Birtherism is irrelevant though, his nonsense started after Obama was president and debunking of his claims is just a way to distract from Hillary’s own culpability.
So as long as no one can counter the evidence that Hillary is responsible for the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ smear a rational person would conclude that all the existing evidence points at Hillary’s campaign, and there is not shred of evidence in opposition.