I had written a critique a few days ago of this hysterically libelous column [deleted from website] from the Ottawa Citizen making wicked and unfounded accusations against our blog buddy Salam from Baghdad.

"Salam is the scion of a senior figure from Iraq's Baathist nomenclature. He was brought up at least partly in Vienna, which is the OPEC headquarters; his father was therefore an oilman, and possibly a former head of Iraq's OPEC mission. Another clue is a hint that his grandfather was an Iraqi tribal chief, from which I infer that his father was one of the Iraqi tribal chiefs that Saddam Hussein rewarded for loyalty, outside the Tikrit clan."

It wasn't until I was reading Salam's response that I understood the depths of just how nasty the columnist Warren really was. He had not only questioned Salam, but thourghly disrespected his entire family.

"You are being disrespectful to the people who have put the first copy of George Orwell's 1984 in my hands, a heavy read for a 14 year old with bad English. But that banned book started a process and gave me the impulse to look at the world I live in a different way."

I'm one of the first to lose sympathy with people acting overly sensitive to criticism. I am particularly impatient with Arabian shame-based culture stuff.

But crikey, this Warren guy couldn't have possibly said more scandalous things about Salam's family than he did- and all of it just made up out of the frickin' air. Now that I think about it, if some jackass made up crap like that about my people to print in the paper, they'd be doing good if I didn't have a couple of crackheads with tire irons waiting for him one night in the parking lot.

Columnist David Warren and the Ottawa Citizen owe Salam and his family a very public retraction and apology.