A Perspective From Over There

[promethius9594]

why havent more bloggers brought about the call that riverbend is a fraud? googlesearch and im sure you will be glad to find riverbends' postings as making the list of lies.com, a sight dedicated to exposing lies on the web.

HOWEVER, i dont know how to use IP's to find locations. why doesnt anybody go to riverbend's website, look up her IP, and see where its located. divulge the IP and i can even have it looked up and tell you what city Ms. "riverbend" lives in.

Now, why does all that even matter? so what if she's not FROM iraq, its the thought that counts right? WRONG!!! nearly all of her 'evidence' for the position of being against american occupation is based on a false testimony!!!

[Chewbacca]

Lies.com is not a site that dedicated to exposeing lies on the web, but a site dedicated to exposing the lies of people in power. They actually give credibility to Riverbend's blog.

from lies.com: Riverbend on Media Coverage of Fallujah Riverbend offers her Iraqi's-eye-view of the controversy over recent media coverage of our glorious military campaign: Media and Falloojeh.

Keep on trying! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[promethius9594]

really? lies.com's listing pointed out that "riverbend gets some of her information from the most anti iraq campain sources."

HOWEVER: try this as well, since i dont think i mentioned it yet... googlesearch 'falloojeh - "bagdad burning"' and see what pops up... three articles by riverbend herself.

what does that mean? it means that no one who has posted their website online who hasnt been reposting riverbends (mis)information or otherwise commenting on riverbend, has EVER spelled fallujah the way that "riverbend" does. not even iraqi websites spell it like that. for such a media centered location, i would think that an iraqi could spell it, especially when nobody out there mispells it quite so poorly as she does.

still no one has gone to her blog site to check her IP, if someone can do that we can imperically settle this debate immediately by finding out what city she is in.

[Melusine]

Dude. Like I already said your assertion that this person is "misspelling" Fallujah is just completely wrong and if I may say so, pretty bloody arrogant for a non-native speaker of Arabic. I am not at all mixing myself in this debate, I had no opinion on it when I first posted here, I just noticed you making a wrong assumption and I thought I'd let you know how Arabic spelling works. Your comparisons with spellings of "sackramentoe" or "nue yorck" are just waaaayy off the mark and irrelevant.
Your point about "Iraqi websites" is silly too. What you mean is Iraqi websites written IN ENGLISH! Not the same thing at all. It's logical that when the media have to report often on a topic (a city or personal name) there will slowly be reached a consensus on how to spell its name. If I remember correctly, most English-speaking sources decided to spell Al Qaeda thus, whereas I've seen Dutch sources use Al Qa'ida and Al Kaida as well. This does not reflect any superior or inferior spellings, but simple WESTERN convention - for speakers of Arabic, one western spelling isn't more right than the other. It's the same in MagiK's example that was pointed out by Timber.

Tell me, do you speak Arabic? Do you know how Fallujah would be pronounced by a native speaker? Do you know how, in their language system, a bilingual (English/Arabic) person would attempt to put the Arabic spelling and pronunciation into western script? If not, then you have no basis at all for the accusation that she misspelled Fallujah/Fallujeh/Falloojah/Falloojeh.
Take it from a language & literature student who would get laughed at if she asserted the author of The Freiris of Berwik was illiterate "because he misspells Berwick"! Pronunciations of foreign words being reflected in different spellings is an age-old phenomenon.
As I said, I'm keeping out of this debate and not saying anything about the apparently questionable veracity of this blog. All I'm saying is that this particular piece of "evidence" of yours has no grounds in reality at all.

[ 04-22-2004, 04:13 AM: Message edited by: Melusine ]

[promethius9594]

it just so happens i know a few words of aramaic here and there, though by far not many.

however, im not sure you even know what aramaic is... if she is writing in aramaic then it should look something like this: أجنبية في العراق بحجة

now, tell me, from those words, which one is fallujah? thats right, none of them. that does not change the fact that the word fallujah in aramaic is ILLEGIBLE to us. so what you mean to tell me is that riverbend is the ONLY iraqi in to translate fallujah as falloojeh, when she is "oh so involved in keeping up with american news" and that somehow im supposed to accept the fact that she spells it differently than more or less ALL of her fellos citizens?

i dont buy that. well, guess what. i've provided proof. why dont you all give a little evidence to back her claim that she really is an iraqi citizen... since i have called it into doubt you all have defended it like your life depended on it, so you MUST have proof SOMEWHERE that she really is who she claims to be.

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by promethius9594: it just so happens i know a few words of aramaic here and there, though by far not many. however, im not sure you even know what aramaic is... if she is writing in aramaic then it should look something like this: أجنبية في العراق بحجة now, tell me, from those words, which one is fallujah? thats right, none of them. that does not change the fact that the word fallujah in aramaic is ILLEGIBLE to us. so what you mean to tell me is that riverbend is the ONLY iraqi in to translate fallujah as falloojeh, when she is "oh so involved in keeping up with american news" and that somehow im supposed to accept the fact that she spells it differently than more or less ALL of her fellos citizens? i dont buy that. well, guess what. i've provided proof. why dont you all give a little evidence to back her claim that she really is an iraqi citizen... since i have called it into doubt you all have defended it like your life depended on it, so you MUST have proof SOMEWHERE that she really is who she claims to be.

Honestly, dude, you don't wanna make her mad. She has eerie powers. Eerie, Dutch-chick powers. Fair warning...

[promethius9594]

well, i will watch out for those dutch powers. in the meantime, some MORE things i saw in the blog that are incorrect just from the first few days of posts:

"if I want to hear what Fox News has to say, I’ll watch it"

no, she won't. she might read it on the internet, but it may surprise you to learn that there are ONLY three media corporations which air news on television in iraq. all three have a name that starts with AL and no, AL FOX NEWS is not one of them.

"A ‘burqa’[sic] on the other hand, like the ones worn in Afghanistan, covers the whole head- hair, face and all. "

for those of you who dont know, [sic] is used to designate that a person has mispelled something, which is why i used it here. not only has she mispelled this piece of arabic culture, she has no understanding of it either. a burka does not cover just the head, hair and face (as opposed to the hair covering she names). it covers the entire body except for the eyes. living in an arab nation, she should know this...

"I am female and Muslim"

Funny thing is, she repeatedly makes reference to God... again, and again, and again. No where in the whole first archive of her blogs does the word ALLAH appear. yeah, when i refer to my God to others, i like to call him Allah, i feel it lends credibility to my claim of christianity (that is sarcasm, if you missed it).

"Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50% of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore. We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying."

actually, according to al jazeera iraq was a fundamentalist regime PRIOR to the war. Funny, even one of the most biased against western influence news syndicates points out that saddam was an islamic fundamentalist.

"There’s been an overwhelming return to fundamentalism. People are turning to religion for several reasons" and "Most of my friends are of different ethnicities, religions and nationalities"

Um, prior to the war 97.7 percent of the population was either sunni or shi'ite muslim (figure taken from al jazeera's website). The other 2.3 percent is distributed among all the other religions and the atheists. There is no SURGE towards the muslim religion, and there is no great "diversity" of religion in iraq. in fact, iraq is one of the least religiously diverse nations in the entire world.

"(that was because he was clueless when it came to any type of programming and anyone who could do it was worthy of respect… a girl, no less- you get the picture)."

as a student of computer science im playing the BS card on this one. we're talking a major programming corporation, according to the size she indicates in her blog. a MAJOR corporation which, i might add, doesnt even have its own webpage. Her boss is a project manager (he oversees several programmers who work together). major corporations dont use people who cant program to be project managers... it doesnt work. I'm willing to bet that riverbend is a political science major, but nothing more. her blog doesnt report anything that hasnt been announced in the news already OR doesnt mention anything that can be traced back to any particular source.

"(one of the smartest females in the country) named Henna Aziz was assassinated in front of her family- two daughters and her husband"

REALLY? thats funny, because a google search of "Henna Aziz" + engineering + bagdad produced ABSOLUTELY no results that weren't direct quotes of riverbend's blog. yeah, i know how in america when a premier scientific mind dies a tragic death, the media doesnt report it at all, not once.

[Dreamer128]

Well, I do believe many Muslims refer to Allah as 'God'. And after the fall of Saddam, haven't satelite dishes become big business in Iraq? Those might permit one to watch Fox News (or not - to be honest, I don't have a clue ). As for this company of hers. Is it possible that it may have only been a national business? Since I doubt many Iraqis had internet acces before the war, companies may not have had a reason to promote their work on the internet.

[ 04-22-2004, 08:20 AM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[Melusine]

Originally posted by promethius9594: however, im not sure you even know what aramaic is... [...] so what you mean to tell me is that riverbend is the ONLY iraqi in to translate fallujah as falloojeh

OK mate, I'm not even going to go into your insinuations about me not knowing what Aramaic is (after I've just stated that I'm a student of language ) but I have to correct you on the latter part of the quote I give above. She's the only Iraqi that you can find online that does so. Again, big, big, difference. It's just not conclusive evidence man. If anything, if she was a foreigner pretending to be Iraqi, wouldn't she have written Fallujah "correctly" (in your definition of the word) in order to appear genuine? If she were a foreigner pretending to be Iraqi, wouldn't the 'Fallujah' spelling be the one she used instinctively because that's the version she saw in her English-language news sources? If anything the spelling proves the opposite of what you're trying to say.

Funny thing is, she repeatedly makes reference to God... again, and again, and again. No where in the whole first archive of her blogs does the word ALLAH appear. yeah, when i refer to my God to others, i like to call him Allah, i feel it lends credibility to my claim of christianity (that is sarcasm, if you missed it).

Again, I have to say you're wrong. Sorry mate.
The fact that some westerners still refuse to translate the word Allah when they write in their own language is sad, and it leads to misconceptions such as these. But Allah is simply the Arabic word for God!! So if you want to do things linguistically correct, when writing in English you call Allah God!! Arabic-speaking Christians refer to their God as Allah. English-speaking Muslims should refer to their God as God. Simple as that. That's also why contaminated structures such as "Allah is great" are wrong. It's either "God is great" or "Allahu Akbar", anything else is an incomplete translation.
It is, in short, completely normal for a Muslim writing in English to refer to the deity they worship as "God". Just as it is normal for a Christian writing in an Arabic language to refer to God as Allah.

Seriously, this linguistic nitpicking you're doing is not making your case any more believable (a burqa DOES cover the head and hair, and indeed as you say it covers a whole lot more than that, namely the whole body, but her statement that it covers the head and hair is irrefutably correct nonetheless). Neither is the fact that even though I haven't argued with you for one second about the blog itself and whether it is genuine or not, you lump me in with a generic "you" that you seem to demand evidence from. I've repeatedly said I'm not discussing that, I'm just pointing out some things that might have a bearing on the discussion.


Edit: don't pay any attention to The Hierophant. [img]smile.gif[/img]
The only reason he thinks I have uncanny powers is because he's a hormone-infested adolescent and I'm a cool Dutch chick.

[ 04-22-2004, 08:37 AM: Message edited by: Melusine ]

[pritchke]

I personally think arguing if the author of the blog is genuine or not is quite pointless and tiresome. Wouldn't it be better to attack/discuss her views and facts of the blog and not her personally. Even if she was a fake would that make all she said wrong?

[ 04-22-2004, 11:54 AM: Message edited by: pritchke ]