Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet — coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men.
On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:
Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.
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Who knows what romance might have blossomed had not “Amina” been arrested by a squad of Baath Party goons dispatched by Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Tom MacMaster then created “Rania,” a fake cousin for his fake lesbian, to try to rouse the world to take up the plight of the nonexistent Amina’s nonexistent detention.
A “Free Amina!” Facebook page sprang up.
“The Obama Administration must speak about this,” declared Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. “This woman is a hero.”
On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into the “kidnapping.”
Now consider it from Assad’s point of view. Unlike “Amina,” “Rania,” and the “three armed men in their early 20s” who “hustled Amina into a red Dacia Logan,” you have the disadvantage of actually existing. You’re the dictator of Syria. You’ve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep. Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a “reformer” only 20 minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger. Any moment now Sarkozy or Cameron or some other Europoseur will demand anti-homophobic NATO bombing missions over your presidential palace. On CNN Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing each other back and forth all day long about the Gay Spring sweeping the Arab world. You’ll be the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism. You’ll be a laughing stock at Arab League Where-Are-They-Now? nights.
Who needs it? “Release the lesbian bloggers!” commands Assad.
“Er, what lesbian bloggers?” says his vizier. “This is Damascus, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” And he spends another sleepless night wondering if this is the most devilish CIA dirty trick of all, or if one of their satellite drones merely misinterpreted the grainy footage from the Colonel Qaddafi Lookalike round of Syrian Idol.
The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of “Paula Brooks,” shortly before “Paula” was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio. “He would have got away with it if I hadn’t been such a stand-up guy,” the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, “Paula” told the Associated Press that “he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.”
“He got that one right,” sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.
Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial. Greg Mortensen’s now discredited Three Cups Of Tea took it to the next level, not just near mandatory in the usual circles (grade schools and sentimental punditry) but also compulsory in the Pentagon for commanders en route to Afghanistan. After centuries of disdain for the preferred beverage of imperialists, American officers in the Hindu Kush now drink more tea than the Brits, and they don’t even like it. But a charlatan told them to do it, so the tea allowance now consumes 23 percent of the Pentagon budget.
"“Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:
Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."
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This fake memoir stuff has gone beyond Marx' categories of Tragedy and even Farce. Now history is repeating itself as Bad Sitcom Premise.
Looking back to at least 9/11 or further to Jimmy's saving the world through home insulation, the martyrdom of Israel, and a new moral regime in Iran, the point about fiction may have a bit of traction. Not only is it policy, it's the necessary MO with fake anti-military soldiers, racist Tea Parties, hidden Islamism, Recovery Summers and starving but gallant public service employees. We could on, but the point is taken.
The important things is that we are all lesbians now. Or anything else they tell us to be.
Isn’t this what fiction writers do all the time? They become the characters in their books, while writing the stories, that interact with each other (themselves) throughout the story.
By the way, who is Mark Steyn?
Click on "Archive" under his name and start reading. You'll get an education...if you're open to it. Or are you one of those mythical "open minded" liberals?
Well whenever the Liberals need a hero they make one up as the mix of ideologies, finances and abilities are the stuff of fiction. These men just created the figure for them.
Lefty's only mad because this was a creation of the Right, which not only shows we know them inside and out, but they are not in control of the lie.
Didn't we go through this exercise in the 70's?
Men getting in touch with their feminine side.
I always knew the woman trapped inside a Man's body was a lesbian.
What makes it even funnier is in our neighbor to the Great White North (oops! better make that Great Multicultural North) there is a courageous Pakistani Muslim lesbian activist name of Irshad Manji.
It's just that her views tend so distressingly right-wing...
The Left wants to pretend that if only they can reshape America everyone else will follow. There has never been any evidence of the world eager to pick up the bad behaviors of the Left in any form, but the world does use the ignorance of the Left to continue in its own preferred bad behaviors.
Those two bloggers made a mockery of the true Syrians who are dying in the streets for something other than Assad's bloody rule. The Left is more upset that they posed as lesbians than they did as revolutionaries fighting against a tyrannical regime. That should tell you all you need to know about the moral compass of the Left.
And btw, this is why the stats range so far from activists "10-20% are gay, so we need to have gay marriage, AIDS is like the holocaust, Alexander/Lincoln/Washington/Everyone was really gay" and the actual stats of 2-3% maybe. Imposture is not only the province of the lonely and attention-seeking--it is the basis for a lot of identity politics activism, too.
The Liberals' ridiculous fantasies and inability to reason is definitely the problem. The very idea that a lesbian activists could exist for long in Pakistan, defies reason. And for liberals to believe that all of the Muslims that we are importing into this country will ever assimilate and become peaceloving Westerners is just as ludicrous. The Liberal government that rules over us here in America, that uses safety as the excuse for ever increasing restrictions on my liberty, is adding daily to the number of potential terrorists right here in our midst. Good job, Mark.
You mean Christopher Buckley can't be stopped, as he coined that term way before Steyn in his novel Florence of Arabia, which is ironically about two lesbians trying to change the middle east through media.
Steyn is at his acerbic best, but he overlooks one little thing: the Left really has won the Orwellian battle to control thought by controlling language and how we are allowed to use it. The evidence lies in the fact that two men have managed to so thoroughly co-opt the lingo that they can successfuly pose as lesbians, and fool a lot of supposedly sensible people.
Isn't Assad bad enough that people wouldn't need to be taken in by this garbage in order to see the fault lines?
I think that in a rush to be anti-American, the left reveres any regime that "stands up" to the US. But they are so obsessed with being anti-American they cannot recognize the foul creatures they crown as anti-imperialist "strong men". What a farce.
To paraphrase a sentiment of Hitchens, everything I find beautiful in the world is despised by fascists. Be they Islamo-fascists like A-Jad or your run of the mill cult of personality fascist like Assad.
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