Salam Pax, interviewed
Jeff Jarvis has a translation of an interview with Salam Pax, the anonymous Baghdad blogger. The funniest moment: his surprise when told by the Austrian interviewer that his western admirers have printed Salam Pax t-shirts. The Baghdad blogger, an Iraqi who studied in the West, has been accused of Baathist tendencies. So, he was privileged, speaks English, naturally gravitates toward the western journalists now in Baghdad. Well, of course he was privileged, of course he's not representative. If you want representative, try one of the paranoid, beaten-down, bloody-headed Shiites who so scare the US. In almost every country, the class of English-speakers is small. In Hungary or Russia, it was disproportionately Jewish, which stressed out the local fascists no end. But the east European and Arab internationalistas, as Glenn Reynolds might call them, are precisely the people most eager for integration with the West. If they're disillusioned with the US occupation, as is Salam Pax, that's a problem, and not one to be dismissed glibly as Baathist propaganda.
#
