I’d barely followed “A Gay Girl in Damascus” until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: “This is really important — this woman is a hero,” with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian-American woman and the author of the blog, “A Gay Girl in Damascus.” According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing.
Quickly, Amina’s arrest became a new Internet cause. Even the U.S. State Department joined the effort.
Advertisement
And soon thereafter, the whole thing fell apart. Amina never existed. The author of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was in fact a 40-year-old straight dude from Georgia living in Scotland. Rather than the sexy young lesbian in the photos (stolen from the Facebook page of a Croatian expat living in London), the photo of him in the Washington Post shows a man who looks like the bearded comic-actor Zach Galifianakis — in a Che Guevara T-shirt, naturally.
Tom MacMaster was raised to be a peace activist. When he was a kid, the family trekked to the Pentagon to hand out origami doves to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki. He’s the co-director of Atlanta Palestine Solidarity and claims to have visited Baghdad on a “student peace mission” to deter the Iraq war.
In an “Apology to Readers” posted on June 12 from his vacation in Istanbul, MacMaster writes, “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground.” And that’s true, except for all the ways in which it’s a lie.
He explains that as a white guy with an Anglo name, people wouldn’t take him seriously in online discussion groups. So he made up Amina and her countless fictional experiences in Syria and America.
At first it sounds a bit like the old jokes swirling around the publishing industry: Lincoln sells. Medicine sells. Dogs sell. So let’s put out a book about Lincoln’s doctor’s dog! It’ll be a best-seller!
Except McMaster’s ploy really worked. People desperately wanted to believe in this “hero”: a saucy, sage, left-wing member of the LGBT community who likes to wear the hijab, can’t stand Israel or George W. Bush, and who parrots every cliché about the romantic authenticity of the Arab people and their poetic yearning for democracy, peace, and love. Whereas no one cared about McMaster’s “Anglo” arguments, Amina’s assertions succeeded with little effort. For instance, “she” writes of the Palestinians’ need to return to their homes in Israel: “It’s simple but, maybe, you have to be a Levantine Arab to get this. It makes perfect sense to me.” Of course it does!
CNN interviewed “her” — by e-mail — for a story about gay rights and the Arab Spring. “She” said things were going great for gays. She said the feedback, even from Muslims, for her blog was “almost entirely positive.”
But the CNN story troubled her. The outlet encouraged the sin of “pink washing” — a term used by some anti-Israel critics to decry any attempt to compare Israel’s treatment of gays with that of Arab states. Israel is tolerant, even celebratory, of gay rights. (Israel recently launched a gay tourism campaign with the slogan “Tel Aviv Gay Vibe — Free; Fun; Fabulous.”) Syria punishes homosexual activity with three years in prison. (In Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran, the punishment is death).
Who cares, Amina angrily responds. In fact, how dare “advocates of war, occupation, dispossession and apartheid” use Arab and Muslim hostility to gays as “‘evidence’ that the primitive sand-people don’t deserve anything other than killing by the enlightened children of the West.”
Besides, “she” has never been harassed by Arabs for being gay. But in America, “she” has been “struck by strangers for being an Arab” and “had dung thrown at me” for wearing the hijab.
Except that is a lie.
Worse, it’s propaganda. McMaster’s fake-but-accurate lesbian was perfectly pitched to Western liberals desperate to alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance. No longer must you think too hard or make tough choices if you’re, say, anti-Israel and pro-democracy, or pro–gay rights and in favor of the self-determination of Muslim fanatics. Heck, you can even stop worrying and love a lesbian feminist who sees no big deal in wearing a religiously required sack over her head. With Amina, all contradictions are resolved — in favor of the incoherent biases of the anti-America and anti-Israel Left.
Of course she was a hero. Of course she didn’t exist.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. (C) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
I wonder how much of the propaganda supporting gay marriage is being put out by people who are not actually gay. If we knew that the argument for gay marriage was not so much to support gays, but rather to tear down traditional morality and religious freedom, people might have a different opinion about the issue.
In my experience, most supporters of SSM are straight. I have come to believe that the entire movement is based more or less on leftist activists' need to constantly reassure themselves that they are not bigots and that their ideological opponents are.
There previously had been little to no demand for inclusion in traditional marriage among LGBT activists; references to marriage in LGBT literature from the 1960's through to the 1980's are almost uniformly hostile. But a small number of activists (Andrew Sullivan may have played a key role here) marketed SSM among LGBT-sympathizers in the broader community of the left (e.g., most of whom would be straight) as a way for them to demonstrate their LGBT-friendly credentials (and a way to demonize their opponents), and it quickly became a cause celebre.
It is also striking that the few dissents on the issue of SSM on the left have actually come from LGBT activists, some of whom have seen the push for SSM as an attempt to "mainstream" LGBTs and coerce them into greater conformity with the middle-class lifestyle (on which point they are probably correct).
Every once in a while we see such spasms of deceit coming from the left. When exposed, the perpetrator is never contrite. Instead, he or she is always defiant and insists that there is no objective truth, the invented character is a "composit" who embodies a greater truth, the only way to convey the reality of the situation is tnrough fiction...blah, blah, blah. This post-modern palaver is the direct result of the relativism that pervades our intellectual climate.
Occasionally, some weak minded academic drone emerges from the confines of academia where such intellectual and moral bankruptcy is encouraged and celebrated. He is shocked and disappointed that the real world does not align itself with the elaborate construct he has formed in his head. When evidence of his lies is discovered, he denounces his critics for their lack of understanding and retreats to the security of the obscurity from which he should never have emerged in the first place. As Mark Steyn has already discerned, he is a depressingly boring cliche produced in such abundance by our institutions of higher learning.
No doubt MacMasters will be celebrated as a bold activist within the dysfunctional environment of academia that created him. Elsewhere in the world, people will scratch their heads at the ridiculousness of a corpulent 40 year-old college student revealing the post-modern irony of a T-shirt featuring Che Guavara wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt.
This is another example of how dysfunctional the Democratic Partisan devotee (those considered 'progressive') has become.
They have been posting lies online for so long, acting - pretending to be the opposite of who they really are. One of the biggest Democratic Partisan Swindles is to pretend the poster is actually a Conservative or Libertarian: the game is to offer endless anti-GOP sophistry to debase the opposition to the Democratic Party. I remember how many bragged about this on a rather popular Conservative political message board after the 2006 Midterms. It was ugly indeed.
Sadly, it has worked, and helped enable the worst after 2004. We still see some very curious efforts even in the comment area on the mighty NRO. The efforts to sway Our own, to manipulate all to destroy support for the Republican Party is a constant.
Just the other day, some poster bizarrely was using Bill Clinton as a shining example of what politicians should resemble!
It amazes, the level of fraud Democrats will engage to promote their political fantasies. And we all pay for it in the end.
Actually, Jonah's using this incident to draw attention to the general cognitive dissonance of the left, which has an impact on quite a bit of foreign and domestic policy.
It's only "small ball" if you don't scratch beyond the surface of the article.
A sequence of events involving left wing activists which captures each and every (well ALMOST every) pathology of the left in one little package?
That's what you call, "small ball"?
Leftists have been lying about the Arab Spring ever since Tunisia exploded. A bunch of organized socialists ensuing mayhem, not a "democracy" movement.
The international socialist movement has about as much use for "democracy" as the NFL does with Louisville Sluggers.
"Small ball" -- the brain that misses the relevance completely.
Conservatives always know the difference between real and make believe -- that's why Ronald Reagan quoted the movie dialogue of fake WWII soldiers on the late show whenever he wanted to look patriotic.
It should actually be Lincoln's doctor's SON's dog (books about kids were popular, too.)
Actually, that was come up with in the 1940s and 1950s, in the 1970s and 1980s someone suggested that Nazis, conspiracy theories, diet and sex were all popular topics, so "The Secret Nazi Diet Sex Plan" would have been the ideal title then.
The publisher joke reached its apex with this 1976 collection of humor pieces by the late British writer Alan Coren. At the time, he figured the top three audience grabbers were cats, golf, and anything with a swastika on the cover. So here's the original (later suppressed) cover of his collection: External Link
The fundamental issue is that the left is not the product of a coherent rational philosophy; it is a collection of essentially emotional issues embraced as "causes" by the activists who are the thought leaders of the movement. As issues based on emotion, they are rarely thought through in great depth, at least to the point of reconciling them with other issues that have been included in the same ideology.
Hence the deep disconnect between such causes as support for LGBT rights vs. opposition to Israel, concern for the poor vs. protection of the environment, "living wages" vs. reduction of unemployment, livable cities vs. compassion for criminals, free speech vs. "political correctness", etc., etc. That the left does not even see, let alone address, those fundamental conflicts is evidence of just how saturated with emotion their entire movement is.
It has long been my belief that the left has no principles, only goals.
Here is further proof that I've got it right. This man will wrap himself in the cloak of "the ends justify the means" and few on the left will complain.
For a perfect example of how the left simply has no standards, read the comment from Dan Sickles. It amounts to "Yeah but (insert name of conservative here)..."
That is the difference, it seems to me. We face an opponent that simply ignores rules of conduct because those rules stand in the way of achieving leftist nirvannah, whatever that might be.
The despicable lies that this infantile, obese, lazy liar told (having dung thrown on her in America) are not trivial.
One wonders, is there any history of a valid equivalent of this fraud being perpectuated by a right-wing zealot? Certainly the parade of fake bloggers, of fake racial hate crimes (as documented by the inimitable Ann Coulter, see 7/21/10 and others columns in her archives), of fake anti-gay hate crimes (External Link) tells us something about the left's mind set.
The fact that this guy felt justified in pretending to be someone he wasn't in order to get people to take his arguments seriously tells you all you need to know about the mindset of your average liberal.
Follow
