"Amina" was really a middle-aged American male

[major.tom]

What a strange story. He's described as a "Middle East activist," but one must wonder what good he thought might possibly come from this. Syrians already have enough real cause to protest without any motivation from outside, especially in the form of a hoax.

The worst thing about this is that from this point forward, any reports of repression made by LGBT in Syria will very likely be received with much more skepticism than before "Amina."

*shakes head*

[faceless]

Here's the arsehole talking on Scottish radio this morning...

CLICK

[SpursFan1902]

I heard about this on NPR this morning....

[Brown Sauce]

Hoaxer says sorry for ‘gay girl’ blog

By Michael Peel in Abu Dhabi

Published: June 13 2011 19:50 | Last updated: June 13 2011 19:50

A US history student apologised on Monday for the “big mess” he left after his popular blog in the guise of a gay Syrian woman reacting to the uprising shaking her country was revealed as a hoax.

Tom MacMaster, a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said the rave reviews his “Gay Girl in Damascus” site won internationally had fed his vanity and stopped him from coming clean sooner.

The imbroglio – which included desperate appeals for the release of the site’s “author”, Amina Abdallah Arraf al-Omari, after she was supposedly kidnapped last week – said a good deal about the audience as well as about Mr MacMaster, observers said.

Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow in the Middle East programme of Chatham House, the London-based think-tank, said Mr MacMaster’s conceit had worked so well because he had found a near-perfect figure to appeal to western observers trying to understand this year’s wave of Arab revolutions.

Mr Shehadi said: “The guy deserves a prize. It’s important because of the audience it captured – and because it hit the internal political debate in the west.”

Mr MacMaster, whom photos suggest is a bearded Virginian with little in common with his fictional heroine, said in a telephone interview from Istanbul that he had been shocked by how the blog had taken off. He had set it up to try to draw attention to the desperate situation in Syria, he said, but it had got out of hand as it attracted fans in large numbers. He said: “I have created a big mess and now I have got to clear it up. I know that I have embarrassed a lot of people and hurt a few people a lot. I really regret that and I regret that I have potentially hurt the causes I was supporting.”

He said he had first created the character of Ms Arraf years ago “during the Bush administration”, but had abandoned an earlier blog using her identity because of a lack of reader interest.

He revived the idea in February, with the site really taking off at the end of April after “Amina” wrote a vivid account of how her father had seen off secret police officers who came at night to arrest her.

Mr MacMaster, who claimed to be an unpublished novelist, said the number of hits on the site went from about 290 to 10,000 within a week. “All of a sudden, after having years of rejection letters, I was getting a whole lot of positive feedback for some fiction I had written. That certainly fed my vanity.”

Edinburgh University said it had suspended Mr MacMaster’s computing privileges pending an investigation into whether he had breached computing rules. The University of St Andrews, where his wife Britta Froelicher is an associate fellow at the Syrian studies centre, said it did not plan to take any action over the case. Mr MacMaster and Ms Froelicher insisted the blog was entirely his work.

The case has raised the question of whether some readers were predisposed to find the blog credible because “Amina” – who had lived in the US as well as Syria – was such a western-friendly voice in an uprising that otherwise seemed remote and mysterious.

The affair has also highlighted the difficulties of finding reliable sources in places where information is tightly controlled by governments and often not verifiable because foreign journalists are barred.

On yet another level, the blog’s success as anti-government propaganda may have been partly because the widely condemned alleged killings of 1,300 of protesters by President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime made just about any criticism of it believable[/quote]

from the FT.

Silly boy. In the end did no favours to anyone, what's interesting to me though, is that an arguably well intentioned 40 year old married guy had to become a lesbian to get any recognition.

[faceless]

Messing with that woman's emotions for a year wasn't well-intentioned... that was malicious.

[major.tom]

[major.tom]

Here's an excellent comment from the MediaLens message board on the subject:


Daniel Boorstin said news of pseudo-events drives out news of real issues and real events. This was the conclusion he drew in his book - The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, published in the 60s.

The pseudo/synthetic event is a propaganda tool, much utilised by advertising and marketing companies. The Jessica Lynch story (attractive American soldier kidnapped and raped by Iraqis, rescued by American heroes - none of it true) is an example of a Pentagon-promoted pseudo event.

"We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live.
"While we have given others great powers to deceive us, to create pseudo-events, celebrities and images, they could not have done so without our collaboration. If there is a crime of deception being committed in America today, each of us is the principal, and all others are only accessories.
"We must discover our illusions before we can even realise that we have been sleepwalking.' - Boorstin

According to Boorstin, are reasons the pseudo-event is attractive:
- It is scripted and dramatic.
- It includes interesting, larger-than-life characters.
- It produces iconic images: impassioned groups, hugging families, bravery in the face of danger, victims we can embrace, etc.
- It is designed to be re-assuring: “Even if we don't understand the bigger, confusing picture, how comforting to have one individual, human-interest matter to latch on to.” In terms of propaganda, the re-assuring symbol may persuade us to be sympathetic towards a certain group;
- It creates the illusion that we who watch it are “informed.”
- It leads to an endless number of other pseudo-events.
- Depending on its angle, it's pure propaganda for one group or another. In this case a 'gay' 'woman' (a figure easily identified with by the West) is being threatened by evil, repressive Syrians. 'Women', 'rape victims', 'our babies', 'Caucasian victims' - emotive hooks on which to hang pseudo events.
http://www.transparencynow.com/boor.htm

[faceless]

Second lesbian blogger exposed as a man
Paula Brooks, who claimed to be editor of LezGetReal.com, admitted to the Washington Post that 'she', too, was a man
Esther Addley and Ben Quinn
The Guardian,
14 June 2011

A second supposedly leading lesbian blogger was exposed as a man masquerading as a gay woman, a day after the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was revealed to be the fictional creation of a married male student from Edinburgh. Paula Brooks, who claimed to be the executive editor of a US-based lesbian site LezGetReal.com, told the Washington Post that "she", too, was a man – in this case, a 58-year-old retired construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber.

The LezGetReal blogger's identity began to come into question last week as doubts over the Gay Girl in Damascus blog intensified, voiced, among others, by the feminist blogger Liz Henry, who writes at BlogHer.com. Before starting the Gay Girl in Damascus blog in February, Tom MacMaster, the Edinburgh student masquerading as Amina Abdullah Araf al Omari, had written posts on LezGetReal.com. Graber, masquerading as Brooks, had supplied information to a number of news outlets, including the Guardian, which pointed towards an Edinburgh IP address for the Amina blog.

But the LezGetReal editor's own conduct increasingly led to questions over her own identity. Material released online on Sunday, which resulted in an admission by MacMaster that he was Amina, also raised questions about Brooks, including speculation over whether the two were creations of the same person. MacMaster, in a contrite blog post on Monday, even apologised to "Paula Brooks" as a handful of named victims of his deception.

Challenged on Monday by the Washington Post, Graber said he had started the blog after witnessing the mistreatment of close lesbian friends. "I didn't start this with my name because … I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man," he said. He said his interaction with Amina was purely coincidental, "a major sock-puppet hoax crash[ing] into a major sock-puppet hoax." "Sock puppet" is the term used by bloggers to describe a fake persona adopted by a blogger who may also be posting under another name. Amina often "flirted" with Brooks, the paper said – with neither man apparently realising that the other was also a man pretending to be a lesbian.

Brooks told reporters that "she" was deaf, and so telephone interviews had to be conducted through her "father". The Guardian spoke a number of times to a man masquerading as Brooks's father, after which suspicions were raised that Brooks was a man and was also potentially posing as Amina. Further investigations established that, rather like the supposed young woman in Syria, even close associates had never met Brooks, and that her claims to have a PhD in archaeology from Bryn Mawr college, a masters from Gallaudet University and a BA from Duke University, were false.

In an email to the Guardian on Thursday, during our investigations, Brooks said: "Now I have a real day job … and a real off blog life … and I will be real annoyed if you intrude in that … you get my message?" The blogger, who claimed to have three children, said her "father" was "totally up [her] ass" following the paper's inquiries. In another email Graber/Brooks wrote: "Let me be clear here … we are both the victim of this 'woman's' scam."

Challenged directly by email on Sunday, before MacMaster's admission, about the allegations that she was Amina, Brooks confirmed that "she" was an avatar, or false identity, and directed this reporter to a blog dated 2007 that described a woman's experience of coming out. It was headed with the following Shakespeare quotation: "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Melanie Nathan, an LGBT and human rights advocate who was a partner in LezGetReal.com and had also been taken in by Graber, told the Guardian of her feelings of betrayal. "I left the site because I believed that Amina 'the Gay Girl from Damascus' was not authentic," said Nathan. "I told Paula – Bill – that Amina was suspect and she went ballistic on me and called me a bigot. I was completely taken in. She [Paula] is a person to me, a real person with this persona, with children."

"The whole gay community of bloggers is freaking out right now because everyone in some shape or form has encountered Paula Brooks. It has had a severe impact on the trust among the web of bloggers who are interconnected and work with each other. In my opinion, what Graber has done, to be a straight man calling himself a lesbian, is tantamount to impersonating an entire community."

Linda LaVictoire, a contributor at LezGetReal.com who writes as Linda Carbonelli, told the Washington Post: "I was completely taken in. I have been completely taken in for three years."

-------------------

The fact that these two were flirting with each other is pretty funny, the sad bastards.

[faceless]

Gay Girl in Damascus hoaxer accused of defending himself with new persona
Tom MacMaster says complimentary anonymous commenter in online forum using same IP address was friend who was visiting
Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk,
26 June 2011

Tom MacMaster, the US graduate student behind the Gay Girl in Damascus blog hoax, has been accused of creating another fake Arab female online identity to defend his own reputation online. A comment on the website Mondoweiss under the name "Miriam Umm Ibni", mounting a spirited defence of MacMaster's conduct in posing as "Amina", a lesbian Syrian woman, was traced by fellow users to the same IP address in Edinburgh that he used for the Amina hoax. The Guardian has seen screengrabs of the IP data, emailed by one of the site's hosts Adam Horowitz, that show the post originated from the address 188.74.64.53.

Journalists, bloggers and web users unmasked MacMaster earlier this month as the unlikely hoaxer behind the Amina blog, in part after its posts were traced to the address. In an email, later posted on the site, MacMaster acknowledged that "Miriam Umm Ibni" was a fake identity, but denied being behind it, saying a "friend of mine who would really like to remain nameless" had posted the comment in his defence. It came from the same IP address because she had been staying with his wife and him, he wrote. "Like many of my friends, many of whom are committed pro-Palestinian, anti-war and anti-colonialist activists, she was outraged by some of the slanders made against me online. And, like many of my friends, she's been urged by me to defend me. She did so. She's that kind of person."

MacMaster said he had received death threats after being exposed as the Amina blogger, who shot to international attention after he wrote a post, posing as the blogger's cousin, saying "she" had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces. "Some people, I suppose, are angry at the uniqueness of their experience being called into question when someone can successfully impersonate that voice. Others question the 'right' of a simple non-Arab goy [a Jewish name for a non-Jewish person] to speak on these issues in any form. Still others have trouble understanding the concept of fiction." He added that he had "signed an agreement forswearing all use of sockpuppets".

Contacted directly by the Guardian, MacMaster declined by email to explain the circumstances further, saying only that he was "committed to maintaining all confidences that were given to me in either personae and will continue to do so". He also declined to elaborate on the details of the "agreement" or why he considered it binding.

Mondoweiss describes itself as "a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective". The post on which the comment appeared argued "that western audiences will only embrace Arab gay movements if those movements attempt to mimic western gay movements", and described MacMaster as "vile". The author of the post, "Seham", told the Guardian by email that he used a pseudonym to retain his anonymity "given my work on Palestinian issues".

In response, "Miriam Umm Ibni" wrote: "MacMaster, misguided though he may have been in his actions, _did_ [sic] highlight real issues ... He misguidedly placed himself in the guise of an Arab woman but he did so from real compassion. He is (or was) a real ally (though considering how so-called progressives are calling for his blood I wouldn't be shocked if he's turning into a rightwinger)."

After MacMaster's exposure, a second supposedly lesbian blogger, "Paula Brooks", founder of the US site LezGetReal.com, was revealed also to be a man. Last week, MacMaster updated the Gay Girl blog with a post entitled: "That kinda sucks: Not that anyone cares."

------------------

What an arrogant fool.

[major.tom]