Posted on 03/27/2003 12:29:37 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Where was Salam Pax?
While bombs rained on his beloved Baghdad and fierce battles roiled the sands of Iraq, people around the world spent last weekend seeking a man called Peace.
In Brazil and Sweden, in China and Australia, from California to Maine, the question flew across the borderless Internet: Where is Salam Pax?
For months, the mysterious Blogger of Baghdad, whose pseudonym translates as "peace" in Arabic and Latin - and who is suspected by some of being a secret agent or a hacker - had chronicled the minutiae of life in a city on the edge of war. Salam Pax's blog - a log of thoughts, or a journal, on the Web - had become a symbol of the power and pitfalls of a fast-growing new form of interactive reporting that has emerged with this war.
In opinionated, quirky English prose, Pax tracked the rising price of tomatoes and the influx of tie-dyed "war tourists."
He described members of the Ba'ath party, "fully armed and freshly shaven," taking up positions in trenches around the city. "They looked too clean and well-groomed to defend anything. And the most shocking thing was the number of kids. They couldn't be older than 20, sitting in trenches sipping Miranda fizzy drinks and eating chocolate."
On Friday, Pax - a gay man in a repressive society, an atheist in a Muslim land, a lover of democracy but a hater of war - filed a worried dispatch as he awaited the first shock-and-awe assault on the city he cherishes.
He is, like many in his part of the world, conflicted about the war. At times it seems he hates Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush in equal measure. When soldiers arrive in Baghdad to liberate him, Pax warned, "Don't expect me to wear a 'I heart Bush' T-shirt."
His Friday message showed him to be nervous, but not too scared to abandon his trademark sarcasm: "The most disturbing news today has come from Al-Jazeera. They said that nine B52 bombers have left the airfield in Britain and are flying 'presumably' towards Iraq. As if they would be doing a spin around the block."
A short time later his Web log, "Where is Raed?" (www.dearraed.blogspot.com), went dark, and fans around the world began to worry.
Had an errant bomb fallen on his house? Had the Iraqi government shut down his Internet service? Or was the blog a fraud, an intelligence front that had hastily shut down? Who could say?
Blogs give everybody with Internet access a chance to converse with the masses. Whether diaries or journals, thoughtful essays or nuggets of commentary, blogs invite feedback that, uploaded almost instantly, invariably provokes argument. Most blogs provide links to like-minded blogs, which link to other blogs and so on, in a buzzing spiderweb of give and take.
"This is a very powerful technology. Maybe it is the beginning of something that will change the world as much as the Iraq campaign itself. Or more," wrote a tech-savvy businessman in Bangor on his blog, Gary Robinson's Rants.
Robinson noted that by reading Pax's blog he was able to predict within the hour when, in Maine time, bombs would fall on Baghdad. "As far as I know, none of the major news networks made such predictions."
Pax's compelling, ground-eye account of Baghdad under attack is history as it happens. But like all blogs, "Where is Raed?" lacks the fact-checking mechanisms of traditional journalism. So its truth is almost impossible to verify.
"Other than what he tells us, we have no way of knowing if he's actually posting live from Baghdad or is running some elaborate hoax from the middle of Kansas," Web designer Jason Kottke blogged at kottke.org.
But Susie Madrak of Bensalem, who calls her blog Suburban Guerrilla, believes in Pax.
"For many people, Salam is the face of this war. He articulates the anguish of being caught in the cogs of the wheel when it's out of control. If he's a hoax, he's a damned good one."
Pax posted this at 6:05 p.m. Friday in Baghdad (10:05 a.m. in Philadelphia): "2 more hours until the B52's get to Iraq."
Then, for three days, nothing. His site was inaccessible.
Was he dead? As it turns out, no. Traffic to his jury-rigged blog had blown out servers on two continents.
Visits to his site have intensified with the war. In December 2001, the blog's first month, Pax got 140 hits. A year later, there were 2,563. So far this month, there are 98,757.
When he came back online Monday, after servers in London and in Santa Clara, Calif., were back in business, Pax thanked Blogger and Google for improving his access, and began to share:
He'd gone for a walk Sunday and picked up two American propaganda leaflets that had dropped from the sky. Water, electricity and phones worked. The price of vegetables was back to normal. Bomb hits were precise, but shock waves shattered glass and caved in roofs on nearby buildings.
"As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears," the 28-year-old architect wrote.
He appears to be well-off and well-educated, with eclectic musical tastes that embrace the Deftones, Amr Diab, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. His blog is named for a wealthy Jordanian friend he calls Raed. (Blog chat notes this is "dear" backward, perhaps a pseudonym to protect a lover.)
Pax says he speaks English, German and Arabic because his father's work required the family to settle abroad for 14 years. He resides in an unnamed neighborhood, in "Hotel Pax," as he nicknamed the house when his mother invited 30 people in to wait out the war.
He's such a colorful character, so observant and bitterly humorous, that he seems to some too good to be true.
What if he's a CIA plant? An agent for Israel's Mossad? A treacherous Saddam Hussein relative? A regime loyalist setting an intelligence trap? The debate has raged for months.
Perhaps the name of his blog, with its pop culture homage to "Where's Waldo?," is a clue.
"Gevalt, if either our side or theirs is faking a gay antiwar anti-Saddam Weblog, either they are much smarter than I thought or the CIA is no longer screening for current drug use," Washington writer Eve Tushnet observed on her blog, eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/.
"I believe he's real - nothing he says sounds a false note, you know?" e-mailed local blogger Madrak, a former reporter. "I interviewed politicians for a living. I know a con job when I hear it."
"Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real," Salam Pax blogged Friday. "Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy. Well, except my own."
Paul Boutin (paulboutin.weblogger.com), a technology writer for Slate and Wired, investigated Pax's blog and concluded the man is "probably" real.
Boutin proved that Pax connects to the Net via Uruklink, the state-run Iraqi service provider. For his e-mail, Pax uses an e-mail service run by the British music magazine New Musical Express.
The blog is hosted in Santa Clara by blogspot.com, a domain that Iraqi network administrators have blocked from access to Iraqis. Pax circumvents the authorities by using his techno-savvy.
The evidence that Salam Pax is all he claims to be is persuasive, but as Boutin concluded: "In the end, it's still a matter of faith."
Contact staff writer Beth Gillin at bgillin@phillynews.com or 215-854-2917.
Whew! That scared me for a second, but I checked and my blog is okay!
It appears that one could speculate on a lot more than just on "his" sexual preferences. Pretty amusing to see all the angst over a "ghost".
http://www.monkeytime.org/
Sounds like it could be a good joke -- if I knew what an "Adra'a" was.
LOL......gave me a chuckle at least.
When the heavy media coverage started about the "Raed" blog site last Sunday the Iraqi security forces could not possibly have missed it. What is on the blog is certainly enough to have him arrested along with family and guests. It is therefore most likely he is dead. The people who got him noticed are responsible.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.