HOW I FOUND SALAM PAX. So there’s been a lot of talk about Dear_Raed–is it for real, is it a propaganda tool (gevalt, if either our side or theirs is faking a gay anti-war anti-Saddam weblog, either they are much smarter than I thought or the CIA is no longer screening for current drug use), etc. I can’t provide the kind of details you’d get from Letter from Gotham, but since I brought the site to Insta-levels of attention while researching my Weekly Standard piece on blogs and the Muslim world, I do have a small slice of evidence against the “Salam as Plant” theory.

I found the blog on this site, which lists blogs from around the world. I was trying to find blogs in every majority-Muslim nation (and nations with large or restive Muslim minorities, too), and so I just went down the list clicking on everything that seemed relevant. Salam’s earlier blog, Where_Is_Raed, was listed under “Iraq,” and was the only one of the Iraqi listings (I think there were two) that was still in operation. One thing this boring story means is that Salam’s site did not come up when I Googled “iraq blog” or “iraq blogger,” which is one of the first things I tried. (And I clicked through lots and lots and lots and lots of pages on those Google searches, not just the first few.) It also means that Salam’s site didn’t turn up in any of the Muslim or Arab webrings I found; it wasn’t referred to by anybody else; it was, in other words, tucked away in a fairly obscure nook of the blogosphere. If somebody was trying to milk the site for propaganda purposes, he was doing a piss-poor job.

I can’t remember how much Salam had written when I first read his site. I had to trust my instincts; I read enough to satisfy me that this guy was for real, but, obviously, there was no way of knowing for sure. But before Salam started getting lots of US visitors via InstaPundit etc., I really don’t recall any posts that had any especially “useful” political slant. It was just this guy’s life. (Which it still is…) And again, nobody brought this site to my attention, and as far as I know I was the first political US blogger to find the thing (maybe?? I don’t want to take credit where it’s undue), so there was no publicity campaign going. The whole how-I-found-it story is in my view vastly more suggestive that Salam is what he says he is than otherwise.

And finally, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Salam has ever claimed to be an “ordinary Iraqi.” (Would an ordinary Iraqi guy have a blog?) I seem to recall a post a while back in which an American blogger questioned his real-Iraqi street cred, and he basically said, Um, right, I’m just some guy who’s here and has a blog, I’m not claiming to be a Representative Of My People or anything. Sorry for no link to that post.

Anyway, go read now, if for some bizarre reason you haven’t already.