mediajunk

Yesterday evening, having already posted another entry on Salam Pax's Bagdhad Blog, I read the Guardian's and came to its G2 section -- to discover a front cover and five pages devoted to Salam and his diary!

Contributor Leo Hickman questioned the blogger's identity, pointing out some teasers that I hadn't noticed:

To start with, there is the mystery of his cryptic name. It doesn't take long to realise that "Salam Pax" is a simple play on words meaning "peace" and "peace" in Arabic and Latin respectively. This mirroring motif is reflected in the website's address, www.dear_raed.blogspot.com, with its palindromic "dear" and "Raed". There has also been a lot of chatter about the true identity of the eponymous "Raed" from the website's title, Where is Raed? Is "Raed" a euphemism for a family member in trouble with the Iraqi authorities? Or is he Salam's gay lover?

Hickman insists that what lends Salam's blog authenticity is "the detail of his day-to-day life." (Note, if you're intending to fake a blog: detail = authenticity!) The Guardian sleuth nevertheless makes the mistake I pointed out yesterday (*blush*) of assuming that alleged "old entries" were indeed created in the past:

Why would he [Salam] make it all up, especially for the long period before it even became the internet phenomenon it is today?

Hickman's piece serves to justify the Guardian's subsequent four pages of extracts from Salam's diary. But the previous day, the Independent on Sunday printed an extract from Salam's site and attributed it, without any of the Guardian's agonizing, to a man blogging from Baghdad!

*****

Meanwhile, another war blog has been bubbling into the web limelight. Its author is Bettejo Passalaqua, an Iraqi peace activist. For this reason, Bettejo's identity immediately seems authentic. But let's not get into that again...