[Seattle-editorial] content

[Jonathan Lawson]

To Wang Chang,

Thank you for your comments. I will try to respond to several of the points you make.

At 01:59 PM 8/27/2002 -0700, wang chang wrote:

Several articles on your site promote the website
stopamerica.org. This site is filled with half-truths
and blatant lies. 

Several articles submitted by Indymedia readers, and a feature based upon them, link to the website stopamerica.org. Since we are a news organization, that is hardly "promoting" the site, any more than we are "promoting" any other linked sites that bear on the subject of a given story. You obviously disagree with some of the views expressed on stopamerica.org, but our news coverage of Ujaama's case was unrelated to the specific content of his site, except to note that Ujaama "has made common cause with the victims of American military adventures in the Arab world, particularly in Iraq." Your arguments with stopamerica.org, therefore, have nothing to do with our coverage.

Our feature calls Ujaama a "community activist," not a "community leader" as you claim. It also refers to approving remarks about Ujaama made by the Seattle Times and by King County Executive Ron Sims. Perhaps you should attack Sims and the Times for making those remarks, instead of us for reporting them.

Ujaama's involvement with the website supportersofshariah.com (the extent of which is not clear) is also irrelevant to our story, as is the entire question of his guilt or innocence of (unspecified) crimes. The focus of our feature on Ujaama was to point out that he has been detained for weeks, under a shroud of official secrecy, without being charged with any crime, while being tarred in the press with innuendo and unsubstantiated accusations of links to "suspected terrorists" abroad. If you think that US fascism is preferable to "islamic fascism," that is your right, but I would suggest that such is a more hypocritical position than the one you accuse Indymedia of adopting in this case.

Jonathan
Seattle IMC Editorial Collective