Believe everything that you read on the Internet

[OneFootInTheGrave]

http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/

there are fake gay women bloging out of Damascus out there.

Damascus – The conflicts of the past few weeks here keeps fooling us. Protests against the government happen and the government responds and more protests follow. In some cities, things have gotten far more violent than here; the body count now is between 170 and 200 people killed in political clashes across the country.

Yesterday, it came even closer for me. For the first time since the protests began, a demonstration was held at the University of Damascus. Though it was overwhelmingly organized by and made up of students, a number of those of us who are a bit ‘older’ had come to lend support. A friend of mine on the faculty had alerted me and I had rushed over.

Students assembled and began chanting “The people of Syria are one!” a slogan that emphasizes the non-sectarian and non-regionalist nature of our movement; we are not Islamists or Communists or Baathists or Nationalists; we are not men or women, not Arab or Kurd, Christian or Muslim or Druze or Alawi; we are Syrians and as Syrians we are struggling for freedom, dignity, and democracy for all of us.

coming out of a real American located in Scotland... classy

[Cort Haus]

[OneFootInTheGrave]

yes, exactly... what about extraordinary rendition... Syria was one of our service providers... perhaps this guy should be sent to Assad for re-education.

[C0ckney]

i heard about this and had the same reaction as cort.

[BeBMan]

I think it is clear now that Syria doesn't exist

[Cort Haus]

There's been another one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/14/second-lesbian-blogger-exposed-paula-brooks

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."

[DaShi]

Aren't all internet lesbians really balding accountants from Reading?

[Barnabas]

This reminds me of when I was a teenager and pretended to be a lesbian in mIRC lesbian channels.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

impersonating a lesbian woman for 3 years... some people really have nothing to do with their life

anyhow, the second one is just a teaser who should be given to his "ex" feminist lesbian friends with a double 6 year community service sentence, but the first one is fuelling a civil war and really deserves to be sent to Assad to explain himself.

[C0ckney]

in a lot of ways he's been helping assad, because now the syrian leader has something to point to when he's says the protests are all the results of some foreign plot.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

well I'd still send him, and if this will be a good enough explanation, he might find himself living a good life in Syria

[Cort Haus]

In some ways this is a logical progression from the advocacy journalism or journalism-of-attachment of the past, where an a priori position is taken and all facts either distorted, exaggerated or made-up to fit the bill.

While MacMaster has been making contrite noises about how things got carried away and how he let down specific individuals, I don't recall reading much in his confession about the wider deception here of intervening in a civil war, particularly when many non-state combatants these days have a strategy of seeking international intervention - with all that that implies.

[Cort Haus]

This:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p...article/10608/

Wednesday 15 June 2011
Why so many hacks fell for the ‘gay girl in Syria’
Fake blogger Tom MacMaster is not the only person who has magicked up an identity by morally leeching off other people’s conflicts.
Brendan O’Neill

The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media. ‘How could he have done this?’, journalists are demanding of Tom MacMaster, the American self-confessed nerd based in Scotland who for six months pretended to be a dissident **** in Syria. ‘Doesn’t he know the damage he has done to gay people in the Middle East and to the reputation of political blogging?’

These are the wrong questions. Because the most striking thing about this blogging hoax is not its potential impact over there, but what it reveals about culture, politics and journalism over here. The thing that ought to cause jaws to drop and eyebrows to rise is not Mr MacMaster’s deceitfulness - he isn’t the first mundane man to masquerade as something sexier on the world wide web - but rather the ease with which he planted himself in the cultural consciousness. It is the manipulability of the modern media, their wide-eyed openness to unchecked foreign stories that seem to confirm their prejudices, which should really be in the spotlight.

In many ways, MacMaster has only done in a more extreme, unrestrained fashion what is now commonplace in the media: discovered himself, forged an identity for himself, through other people’s political struggles and their seemingly more exotic existences. In projecting himself into Syria, imagining that he was a lesbian called Amina Arraf clashing with the Assad regime, MacMaster has taken to its perversely logical conclusion the modern trend where journalists and activists try to give a bit of meaning to their lives by morally leeching off foreign upheaval. His creation of a ventriloquist’s dummy through which he could spout his supposedly ‘authentic’ political feelings mirrors the modern-day fashion for turning put-upon foreign peoples, especially Middle Eastern ones, into vehicles for the working-out of middle-class Westerners’ existential angst.

One of the most remarkable things about his blog was the speed with which it became a go-to place for liberal hacks, bloggers and tweeters who wanted to know ‘the truth’ about life in Syria. MacMaster started his hoax in February, yet by the time he had invented Amina’s arrest by Assad’s forces on 6 June – an invention that would lead to his hoax being exposed – everyone from the pouting princess of the human rights lobby, Bianca Jagger, to mainstream newspapers such as the Guardian was reporting Amina’s words and thoughts as fact. On 7 June, Esther Addley, the Guardian’s senior news reporter no less, reported without the benefit of any allegedly’s or quote marks that ‘[Amina was] teargassed, arrested and detained with other protesters’ and had now been ‘snatched from a Damascus street by three armed men and bundled into a vehicle’. Thus did an American man’s ramblings, written in Scotland, make it into a serious newspaper’s coverage of repression in Syria.

The Guardian even republished a supposed photo of Amina, though it was actually a picture that MacMaster had nicked from Facebook, showing a London-based Croatian woman called Jelena Lemlic who popped up on BBC2’s Newsnight to deny being Syrian, a lesbian or a blogger. Meanwhile, the online human rights lobby rallied to Amina’s cause. It set up Facebook pages called ‘Free Amina Arraf’, and designed posters calling for her release. Made to look like cool, 1970s, radical Arab propaganda, the posters quoted from one of the ‘poems’ that ‘Amina’ ‘wrote’ on ‘her’ website: ‘Borders mean nothing / When you have wings.’ Thus did an American man’s crap poetry, written in Scotland, become the rallying cry of an international campaign to free a lesbian in Syria.

The media’s current focus on the clever nature of the gay-girl hoax (‘it is an elaborate hoax’, says a track-covering Guardian), overlooks what is easily the most important dynamic in this story: not MacMaster’s alleged powers of persuasion, but the media’s susceptibility to delusion. However well-written or seemingly authentic MacMaster’s blog was – and as it happens, some Syrians have said it was unconvincing – the fact is that it was just a blog; just a self-started website with various bits of personal writing and nothing to suggest that any of it was accurate or authoritative. Those complaining about being duped, Scooby Doo-style, by the apparent master of disguise that is Tom MacMaster need to have a word with themselves: it was their openness to being duped, their embrace of the seemingly made-in-heaven ‘gay girl in Damascus’ narrative with its achingly right-on contrast between a morally sensitive LGBT gal and a male-dominated regime, which really blew this blog out of all proportion.

The reason they were drawn to it, the reason this made-up blog could become a source for serious journalists, is not hard to fathom. It is because it pressed their political buttons, it massaged their moralistic worldview. Indeed it seems to have been designed to conform to the modern liberal tendency to reduce all foreign conflicts to simplistic morality tales, in which profound political complexities are airbrushed away in favour of flagging up the victimisation of (ideally gay) individuals by faceless rulers. Unable, or unwilling, to get a handle on what is really happening in Syria, to analyse or account for the inspiring uprising and serious violence there, journalists and activists glimpsed in this blog the opportunity to promote a fairytale version of events instead, complete with a pretty Cinderella-style figure (only gay) and the ugliest Ugly Sisters you could ever imagine (only male). That serious journalists fell for MacMaster’s fiction speaks to a profound crisis of objectivity in the modern media, and a preference for simplistic moralism over the tough task of reporting.

Indeed, many contemporary journalists and activists share something important in common with MacMaster. No, not a penchant for telling outright lies, but certainly a desire to discover themselves, to give their run-of-the-mill lives a shot of political adrenalin, by creaming off the experiences of ‘exotic’ Arabs or Africans or Asians. ‘I was very involved in issues surrounding the Palestine and Iraq struggles’, said MacMaster in his apology. ‘Ever since my childhood I had felt connected to the cultures and peoples of the Middle East…. So I invented her. Amina came alive. I could hear her “voice”.’ MacMaster says he mashed his own personality, and his views on Palestine, with Amina’s: ‘Some of her details were mine.’

Here, in this seemingly weird, po-mo, borderline crazy playing about with identity, we can actually glimpse a very mainstream modern phenomenon: the construction of identity and discovery of the self through the theatre of foreign affairs. From those Western pro-Palestinian activists who don the keffiyeh in a PC version of blacking-up, to the journalists and celebs who carved out new, super-moral public personas through their campaigning against the evils in Darfur, to the multitude of hacks and human rights activists who turned the war in Bosnia into their war, describing it with undiluted narcissism as a political ‘acid test for our generation’, time and again influential people in the West have reduced conflicts and clashes ‘over there’ to personality playpens, in which they might discover a new edge and spark to their own lives and existences.

Eschewing that oh-so-outdated approach of analysing the dynamics behind war or political upheaval, journalists and activists have preferred instead to make it all about them. Pro-Palestinian types advertise their moral indefatigability by standing alongside their favourite brown-skinned victims and shouting slogans at Evil Israel, while many journalists imagine that their brave reporting in Bosnia (I say brave. I say reporting) made them modern-day Schindlers facing down modern-day Nazis. The cultivation of identity through the moral hijacking of other people’s wars and misfortunes is an activity that has been around for years now, and it is one which has seen the line between fact and fiction in foreign reporting become increasingly blurred. MacMaster has taken it all one step further by completely inventing an imaginary exotic person through which he might express his desire for political momentum. That is because in the blind world of the blogosphere, it is possible for the wall between fact and fiction to be smashed down completely.

The trend for transforming other people’s struggles into self-serving morality plays has led to an alarmingly casual attitude towards the distinction between truth and lies. MacMaster justifies his fake blog by saying that he was ‘trying to enlighten people’. The Guardian says his blog might have been a hoax but it nonetheless ‘[drew] attention to a nation’s woes’. This sounds a lot like the ‘Good Lie’ defence, the idea that, yes, some of the facts might be a bit dodgy (all of them, in MacMaster’s case) but at least we have touched upon some broader if impressionistic ‘truth’. Such moral mendaciousness also echoes the arguments made by those reporters who, in the name of boosting their claim to historic fame, have in recent years warped or exaggerated events on the ground in various warzones: ‘Okay, we might have toyed with the facts, but we got at some deeper truth.’ This is another important thing exposed by the gay-girl blog hoax: the fact that modern political culture has a very dysfunctional relationship with Truth.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Read his personal website here.

reprinted from:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10608/

[OneFootInTheGrave]

This sounds a lot like the ‘Good Lie’ defence, the idea that, yes, some of the facts might be a bit dodgy (all of them, in MacMaster’s case) but at least we have touched upon some broader if impressionistic ‘truth’. Such moral mendaciousness also echoes the arguments made by those reporters who, in the name of boosting their claim to historic fame, have in recent years warped or exaggerated events on the ground in various warzones: ‘Okay, we might have toyed with the facts, but we got at some deeper truth.’ This is another important thing exposed by the gay-girl blog hoax: the fact that modern political culture has a very dysfunctional relationship with Truth.

and we are used to it, the point fascinating here is that this was 100% fiction... even more fiction than Fox News - impressive feat.

[BeBMan]

Here, in this seemingly weird, po-mo, borderline crazy playing about with identity, we can actually glimpse a very mainstream modern phenomenon: the construction of identity and discovery of the self through the theatre of foreign affairs. From those Western pro-Palestinian activists who don the keffiyeh in a PC version of blacking-up, to the journalists and celebs who carved out new, super-moral public personas through their campaigning against the evils in Darfur, to the multitude of hacks and human rights activists who turned the war in Bosnia into their war, describing it with undiluted narcissism as a political ‘acid test for our generation’, time and again influential people in the West have reduced conflicts and clashes ‘over there’ to personality playpens, in which they might discover a new edge and spark to their own lives and existences.

He forgot to mention those "the acitivists are bad guys" activists.