"Slandering" the Baathists?

Is it "slander" to describe the main web site of Iraqi exiled pro-Saddam Ba'athists as a web site of pro-Saddam Iraqi exiled Ba'athists?

Well, Uruknet, the web site of exiled pro-Saddam Iraqi Ba'athists, sure thinks so. It has its current spokesman, Kurt Nimmo, claiming that David Horowitz and Frontpage Magazine "slandered" the Baathists by pointing out that they support Saddam and are Ba'athists. Really.

Now it does not take a high school diploma, which evidently Nimmo does not have, to figure out from one look at "Uruknet" that it is a web site of Iraqi pro-Saddam Ba'athists. While nominally based in Italy and even having a front man with an Italian name, the Uruknet site is filled with sycophantic essays about "our dear leader President Saddam Hussein". It defines itself as the "web site from inside occupied Iraq", in other words, the web site run by the same sorts of people who lop off heads of Westerners and who snipe at US soldiers in Fallujah. Don't take our word for it - have a look for yourself!

Nimmo, besides being the spokesman for the Uruknet site and one of its regular writers, is also a columnist for Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch. We have also learned that Nimmo has ties with the people who run web sites on behalf of Frederick Toeben, the convicted German born Australian convicted Nazi, and Nimmo posts his "creations" with one of these. Toeben, a notorious Holocaust Denier, has been sentenced to five years in Germany as a nazi. (Here is a typical example of the "research" his followers turn out.)

So here we have the spectacle of Alexander Cockburn, the Iraqi B'athists, and followers of an Australian convicted nazi all tied to the same "columnist". (Cockburn included Nimmo as one of his "expert writers" in Cockburn's anthology proving that people who hate Jews just are not anti-Semites.)

This is the same "columnist" who complains this week that David Horowitz "libeled" the poor Iraqi Ba'athists at Uruknet. Nimmo's evidence? He writes: "I can vouch for the fact Uruknet is not 'hosted by pro-Saddam Iraqi Ba’athists' and is indeed edited and posted by Italians." (Nimmo also regularly complains in his web pages that he has long been unemployed because of the Jewish "neocons".)

We are sure that Frederick Toeben will find all that convincing.