Gay Girl in Damascus

hoaxer - video

Edinburgh-based American student Tom MacMaster, 40, talks to the Guardian's Esther Addley via Skype, and explains why he pretended to be a lesbian Syrian blogger with the A Gay Girl in Damascus blog and claimed to have been kidnapped

<object width="460" height="370">

<param name="movie" value="http://www.guardian.co.uk/video/embed"></param>

<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>

<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>

<param name="flashvars" value="endpoint=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-hoaxer-video/json"></param>

</object>

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-hoax...

__________________________

 

 

06/13/2011 (9:21 am)

Understanding #amina

Filed under: Blogs and bloggers,Global Voices,Human Rights,Media ::

On Monday, June 6th, a post appeared on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” announcing that Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, the “girl” in question, had been kidnapped, possibly by Syrian authorities. Bloggers, including my friend and colleague Jillian York, reported on Amina’s disappearance, and some of her readers and supporters began advocating for her release on Twitter, using the hashtag #FreeAmina. A Facebook group supporting her release gathered more than 14,000 followers.

“A Gay Girl in Damascus” was a fairly new blog, launched with a series of long autobiographical posts in February. The blog gained popularity in late April, with a dramatic post, “My Father, the hero” that detailed a visit from Syrian security forces who wanted to arrest the blogger for Salafist sympathies, and her father’s defiant response. Two weeks later, a writer in The Guardian described her as “an unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country”. The article raised her profile and brought her to the attention of CNN and other news networks. It also offered an explanation for how Amina had avoided arrest thus far, suggesting she had relatives in the Syrian government and in the Muslim brotherhood.

A Facebook poster was one of many online campaigns triggered by reports that a Syrian lesbian blogger had been kidnapped. Online she was known as Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari - but the real blogger has been revealed as Tom MacMaster, an Edinburgh University student.

Not everyone reacted to news of Amina’s detention by lobbying for her release. Some began questioning whether Amina actually existed. Liz Henry, a journalist and blogger who’s spent a great deal of time thinking about fictional blogging (she led an excellent session at SXSWi in 2007 on the topic), posted about her doubts on June 7th, the day after Amina’s detention was announced. Her uncertainty was crystalized by the discovery that Sandra Bagaria, who had been giving media interviews as a close friend and possible girlfriend of Amina’s, had never met Amina in person. Liz wrote:

I would hate to have my existence doubted and am finding it painful to continue doubting Amina’s. If she is real, I am very sorry and will apologize and continue to work for her release and support.

But it now turns out that Bagaria has never met Amina in person. They had an online relationship. As I see it, this could indicate various possibilities:

- Amina is as she appears to be, a talented writer living in Syria; perhaps with a different name and with the names of her family members obscured.

- Amina is someone else entirely in Syria.

- Amina is someone else; anything goes. Amina could be Odin Soli [a blog fiction writer who'd previously created a character "Plain Layne"] for all I know. In fact, wouldn’t it fit all too neatly?

- Amina is Sandra Bagaria.

Andy Carvin of NPR, who’s been tirelessly curating tweets about the Arab Spring since January, cast a wide net online searching for anyone who’d met Amina and person and came up empty. On June 8th, a woman in Croatia announced that the photos appearing on the web of Amina were actually pictures of her, taken from her Facebook account. While these doubts began to pile up, the depth and complexity of Amina’s online presence made it hard to doubt her existence entirely. On June 9th, Carvin tweeted, “I just don’t see anyone creating a sleeper-cell online persona years ago, waiting for unrest to start just to blog it. Some truth somewhere.”

Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty from Electronic Intifada and Liz Henry began sharing data and unraveling Amina’s identity, with help from Carvin and Jillian York. Henry’s post “Chasing Amina” and a long post on Electronic Intifiada connect the Amina persona to Thomas J. MacMaster, a 40-year old American student, and his wife Britta Froelicher. On June 12th, MacMaster posted an “apology” to Amina’s blog, acknowledging his authorship and making it clear that Amina was a fiction he created.

I hadn’t paid very close attention to the story this week – I’ve been away from my office all week, in meetings and at a conference. I’d been aware there was uncertainty about the abduction story, and was keeping an eye on Global Voices’s coverage of the story, wondering whether we would need to modify or retract our earlier story. (Jillian updated her original story and ran a story on doubts about Amina’s identity on June 9th.) But MacMaster’s “apology” caught my attention:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in this year of revolutions. The events there are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

That’s not an apology. That’s a pathetic, self-serving attempt by MacMaster to justify his actions.

MacMaster is on vacation in Istanbul and thus far, appears to have given only one interview on this matter. It’s likely we’ll get more information about his motives in future conversations. But his statement here is quite informative. He believes that writing as Amina allowed him to call attention to the dangers faced by activists and by GLBT people in Syria in a way that would reach western audiences. He’s critical of what he perceives to be shallow coverage of the Middle East and believed that creating a compelling heroine would provide a key “hook” for a story.

What’s peculiar about this is that there’s been an enormous amount of western media attention paid to the Arab Spring. While most news outlets were late to the Tunisia story, the Egyptian revolution was covered in depth, and key figures like Wael Ghonim have received widespread media attention in the US. While there’s been significantly greater coverage of events in Libya (an armed conflict where NATO forces are involved, something that invariably correlates to media attention) than to other revolutions, there’s been solid, steady coverage of events in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. We could all use more coverage of the Arab Spring and less of Anthony Weiner, but this seems like an odd moment to complain about undercoverage.

To the extent that there is undercoverage of Syria, it’s worth remembering that the country has closed its borders to foreign journalists. As I observed in analyzing media coverage of the 2009 Iran green movement protests, when countries close themselves to international media, there’s a tendency to report stories relying heavily on social media. Syria was the right place for a hoax in no small part because journalists were hungry for any information coming out, particularly information that could help readers and viewers connect to the story. Earlier today, Syrian/American anchor of CNN International Hala Gorani tweeted: “The most infuriating aspect of Tom MacMaster’s ‘hoax’ is claim media’s interest in #Amina reveals superficial coverage of Mideast. Please. Media were interested bc MacMaster’s lie put a human face on a story we cannot cover in person. That is why there was interest.”

Gorani was searching for a human face because it’s far more compelling to tell the story of a revolution in terms of individual struggles than in the language of mass movements. As humans, we’re wired to connect with personal stories. The story that helped spark the Tunisian revolution was the story of an individual fruit-seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose frustrations with his personal situation and his country’s shortcomings led to his self-immolation and death. We understand the Egyptian revolution through Wael Ghonim, and the tragedies of the Green Revolution through Neda Agha Soltan. These stories can obfuscate as well as illuminate – in the retelling, Bouazizi gained a college education and a computer science degree because those inaccurate details helped the story better represent the tensions and frustrations within Tunisia. Understanding a revolution through individual stories is always imperfect – the details of an individual life can’t completely represent the whole – but they allow us to connect to stories in a deep, elemental way.

Participatory media offers the possibility that an individual can tell her story to a global audience. There’s a gap between potential and reality. Speak in a language that’s not widely understood and your potential audience shrinks dramatically. And while we celebrate the possibility of social media enabling many to many communication, it’s probably better understood as enabling one to some, as most of us command fairly small audiences of friends and family.

To reach a broader audience, participatory media needs a helping hand. That’s what Nawaat, an activist media site run by Tunisian dissidents, did for the protesters in Sidi Bouzid. They translated and subtitled Facebook videos from Tunisian Arabic (a dialect that borrows heavily from other Mediterranean languages and isn’t understood outside the country) into French and Arabic, organized them into easy to follow timelines, and made it possible for Al Jazeera to use their footage… which made the revolution visible not just to people throughout the Arab world, but to fellow Tunisians, who otherwise wouldn’t have known what was going on given the country’s effective censorship of domestic media.

Global Voices has been trying to amplify participatory media since our inception in 2004. By aggregating, contextualizing and translating citizen media, we try to make Hala Gorani’s job easier, offering accounts from people who are telling their own stories in their own words. Even in a country like Syria, where blogging can be a dangerous activity, real, non-fictional people write about their perspectives and experiences – we’ve published two dozen substantial stories drawing from accounts of people in Syria and Syrians in exile since the Arab Spring began, and linked to hundreds of individual accounts.

MacMaster’s “apology” refers to “the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism”. Perhaps we’ll learn more about the target of his critique when he discusses his motives at more length. Part of the post-colonial critique Edward Said offered in “Orientalism” was a recognition of the danger of understanding the Middle East through the frames, accounts and preconceptions of Westerners, who consciously or unconsciously tend to define the Orient as “other”. As a response, we might choose to read western accounts of the Middle East with a critical eye, or to seek out more accounts from people of the Middle East to understand the region. But it’s hard to imagine a more orientalist project than a married, male American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian to tell a story about oppression and democratic protest.

By speaking in this assumed voice, MacMaster tells us, “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone.” Some gay Syrians disagree. Writing on GayMiddleEast.com, Daniel Nasser explains, “You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know.” Further, by calling attention to gays and lesbians in Syria, he complicated the lives of people on the ground, worried that this could become an excuse for their arrest and disappearance. “This attention you brought forced me back to the closet on all the social media websites I use; cause my family to go into a frenzy trying to force me back into the closet and my friends to ask me for phone numbers of loved ones and family members so they can call them in case I disappeared myself.”

On the same site, Sami Hamwi rejects MacMaster’s apology saying, “What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us.”

I don’t think there’s much uncertainty about this last point. MacMaster’s project is going to complicate the work of anyone who tries to bring marginal voices into the dialog through citizen media. The question I’ve been most often asked since founding Global Voices is a question about authenticity: “How can we know that any of these people blogging and tweeting are real people?”

It’s a tough question to answer. At Global Voices, we’re reporting on the conversations taking place, not the facts on the ground – this distances us from the challenge of verifying individual facts, but doesn’t free us. As it’s become more common for pro-regime supporters in Syria or Bahrain to write in pro-regime fora, part of offering context is helping readers navigate a web of identities – people who we believe to be speaking in their own voices and people we worry are misrepresenting themselves. One of the best tools we have is iterated reputation: it’s cheap and easy for someone to appear on a message board, claim to be someone they’re not, offer a couple of posts and leave. It’s harder to construct an identity for months or years and establish credibility with that voice. Yet that’s what MacMaster did, and we, like everyone else, will be taking a close look at how we’re representing the identity of the people we’re featuring on the site.

The challenge is even harder for someone like Andy Carvin, who’s working with breaking news reports. In this case, verifying facts is the key issue, not just understanding the dynamics of the conversation. Much of Carvin’s work involves chasing down the identity of sources and getting confirmation from multiple voices. This is complicated by the fact that, when a revolution or a natural disaster comes to a place, people who’ve never spoken before enter the conversation. Iterated reputation may be impossible to establish when someone offers details on a plane crash or an earthquake as that person never previously spoke to an audience beyond a small circle of friends. This became a huge problem in the Ossetian war, where new blogs sprang up like mushrooms after rain, offering detailed “eyewitness” accounts that strongly favored either a Russian or Georgian interpretation. Crisis Media platform Ushahidi has been working on the problem of algorithmically verifying these sorts of reports, looking for cross-confirmation and trying to identify more and less believable reports, as part of a project called Swift River.

Needless to say, none of this is easy, whether individuals or algorithms are doing the work. Part of the success of MacMaster’s deceptions is that he had so many details right. Jillian York, whose partner is Syrian and who knows the country well, wrote, “[Amina's/MacMaster's] knowledge of Syria stood up to my tests. Her personality in private conversation was consistent with her personality on the public blog. Friends claimed to know her (one even suggested she knew her ‘in real life’ – looking back, the suggestion was rather vague, the boastfulness of someone who wants to get close to a story).” And, as York points out, the nature of MacMaster’s deception made it impossible to verify. Journalists can’t get into Syria, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that an out lesbian might be visible, but disguising her name.

Both citizen and broadcast media got Amina’s story wrong. The Guardian, in particular, has much to answer for: the May 6th story by “Katherine Marsh” lionizing Amina doesn’t mention the reporter never met Amina in person. Given the use of a pseudonym to protect the reporter and a Damascus byline, it’s hard to read the story as anything but a verification of Amina’s identity, implying the reporter met with her subject. As of this morning, the Guardian has run a long story on MacMaster’s identity, but hasn’t amended, corrected or retracted the May 6th story. Today’s story includes an explanation of the initial interview, which I think should have accompanied the original piece: “Katherine Marsh, the pseudonym of a journalist who until recently was reporting for the Guardian from Syria, interviewed Amina by email in May after being put in touch with her by a trusted Syrian contact who also believed the blogger to be real. Marsh said that many steps had been taken to try to verify Amina’s identity, including repeated requests to meet, at some personal risk to the journalist, and talk on Skype.”

Credit for discovering MacMaster’s deception goes both to citizen and broadcast media. The Washington Post had been pursuing MacMaster at the same time Electronic Intifiada and Liz Henry did, and their attempts to interview him generated some of the pressure that may have led him to end his hoax. Carvin works for NPR, focused on social media, and the hard work he and colleagues did in reporting the story speaks to the sort of old/new media cooperation that’s going to be critical to reporting in a participatory media environment. But the sheer effort necessary to debunk the story is going to serve as a caution to all news outlets that seek to use citizen voices to tell stories in the future.

That’s a serious problem. If you’re a whistleblower exposing corporate or government wrongdoing, or an activist in a developing nation, you may need to use a persistent pseudonym to protect your identity. More than one of Global Voices’s authors, over the years, has written using pseudonyms. In general, we’ve been able to meet these people in person and verify their identities and reasons to remain pseudonymous. In a few cases, we’ve featured the writing of people we were not initially able verify, like Sleepless in Sudan, who wrote as an aid worker in Darfur. (I helped her set up mechanisms to post to her blog without revealing her identity or aid organization affiliation to the Sudanese government, and Nick Kristof eventually verified her identity when he visited her in Sudan.)

MacMaster has just made it harder for people who need to write under assumed identities to do so and have their perspectives taken seriously. Zeynep Tufekci, writing about Amina, suggests that the story gives support to Facebook’s (inconsistent) insistence on a real-name identity. She suggests we consider the situation as “a reverse tragedy of the commons” – what’s good for the group (real identity) is bad for a small set of individuals (activists who need to protect their identity.)

In his interview with BBC Scotland today, MacMaster explains that “I really felt a number of years ago, in discussions on Middle East issues in the US, often when I presented real facts and opinions, the immediate reaction to someone with my name was: ‘Why are you anti-American? Why are you anti-Jewish?’ So I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual issue.” He explains that he wanted people to listen to the perspectives Amina was offering “without paying attention to ‘the man behind the curtain’.” Thanks to his actions – whether they were stupid, naïve or malicious – people are going to be looking closely for the man behind the curtain in citizen media for a long time to come.

---

More links as they come in:

More from The Guardian on the difficulty of verifying blog sources, and their response to being alerted to the Amina deception.

The correction on this Guardian piece gives a sense for just how shaken that paper is by the situation – they’d run a picture of MacMaster on an earlier edition of the story, and have now replaced it with a graphic from Amina’s blog because they couldn’t verify that the photo actually was of MacMaster…

Elizabeth Flock and Melissa Bell interview MacMaster for the Washington Post’s blogpost. He’s more contrite in this interview than in his BBC Scotland interview. The Post interviewed his wife as well, who was evidently unaware of the deception until this weekend – they’re posting that piece shortly.

MacMaster’s first interview appears to have been with Turkish paper Al Hurriyet (in Turkish)

Skype video interview with MacMaster on Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-hoax...

Response to MacMaster on KABOBfest by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui, who are “New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.”

 126 576share2share737

Discuss [13]

-->

13 Responses to “Understanding #amina”

1. gregorylent Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 9:59 am

   too many literalists in this story. what if it were an art project? and what IS truth? and why so much effort and twitter hype around this, when far more serious issues are worthy of time and attention?

   people’s expectations were not met. so?

2. Stiv Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 10:19 am

   You need an editor. The word “musings” should have alerted me.

3. Tim Friese Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 10:21 am

   Ethan, I’m a longtime reader of your blog. On the subject of amplifying real people’s voices, I thought you and your readers might be interested to hear about the project Tahrir Documents (tahrirdocuments.org) that I have done some translation for. The site quite simply is a repository for documents coming out of the Egyptian revolution and subsequent protest movements. The documents include pamphlets, position statements, newsletters and many other genres coming from groups large and small. A global team of volunteer translators translates from Arabic, and both the Arabic original and the English translation are hosted on Tahrir Documents permanently.

4. Understanding #amina » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 10:25 am

   [...] This article was originally published on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog. [...]

5. “this is the face” « zunguzungu Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 10:26 am

   [...] Hamwi and Daniel Nassar (two actual Syrian LGBT activists), Zeynep Tufekci, Mircea, Liz Henry, Ethan Zuckerman, Sappho, Maya Mikdashi, Jillian York, and Helen de [...]

6. Elliott Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 10:45 am

   ‘MacMaster’s project is going to complicate the work of anyone who tries to bring marginal voices into the dialog through citizen media.’

   Doesn’t it rather point to the level of scrutiny that has always been required of professional journalism?

7. jm Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 11:47 am

   MacMaster also gave an interview to The Lede, the NYT media blog. You can find it on their site today.

8. Syria: Lesbian Blogger Amina is a Married American Man · Global Voices Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 1:14 pm

   [...] Reading: Understanding #Amina by Ethan [...]

9. Popular on Twitter: The Amina hoax, the hamsterization of journalism and high-stakes Twitter » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism Says:
   June 13th, 2011 at 2:03 pm

   [...] try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){} ABOUT      ARCHIVES      CONTACT      SUBSCRIBE      TWITTER http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/popular-on-twitter-the-amina-hoax-the-hamsterization-of-journalism-and-high-stakes-twitter/ THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT LINKS ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW: Ethan Zuckerman on the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax [...]

10. Kobe Says:
    June 13th, 2011 at 3:40 pm

    No one likes to be fooled and you, sir, bought it hook, line, and sinker. I understand your anger, but your flimsy attempts to demonize MacMaster resound like someone who can’t admit they were duped. It is my sincere hope that individuals like MacMaster continue to make journalists work to become better journalists by pointing out vulnerabilities in reporting. Chalk it up to a lesson and move on. Try exercising caution and critical thinking as opposed to naive credulity.

11. Syria: Lesbian Blogger Amina is a Married American Man :: Elites TV Says:
    June 13th, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    [...] Reading: Understanding #Amina by Ethan [...]

12. marc Says:
    June 13th, 2011 at 5:08 pm

    He is simply stupid. Full Stop. Do not buy his “novel”.

13. George D Says:
    June 13th, 2011 at 5:28 pm

    Kobe, GregoryLent, Elliot, trying to defend the erasure of real voices, as if truth is just a game, or a security exercise.

    It has been my experience that news sources everywhere depend on trust. I’ve handled a major human rights story that was impossible to independently verify, and found that the ability of news agencies to deal with us depended on the credible sources we could attach to the story. A degree of this is inevitable, it is the nature of things. Truth usually comes out.

__________________________

 June 13, 2011, 5:12 AM

‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact

FacebookAn image of Tom MacMaster posted on Facebook.

Six days after a post on the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus triggered panic among its readers by suggesting that the blog’s author, who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian caught up in the protest movement, had been detained in the Syrian capital, a new entry appeared on Sunday that described the entire online diary as a work of fiction by an American man.

The new post, headlined “Apology to Readers,” was signed by Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old graduate student, who identified himself as “The sole author of all posts on this blog.” That would include four months of what appeared to be diary entries from Amina Abdallah Arraf, a self-described 35-year-old lesbian born and raised in the United States but now living in Damascus, and two posts attributed to Rania O. Ismail, a cousin of Ms. Arraf’s, who relayed news of her arrest to the blog’s readers last week.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Monday morning, Mr. MacMaster, who is currently in Turkey, said, “I sort of by accident… created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.” He explained that he had initially created Amina, his Arab lesbian character, as “a handle” he would use when he wanted to contribute comments to online discussions. His aim, he said was to use the character to present “a perspective that doesn’t often get heard on the Middle East and that was also a challenge for me, as somebody who has aspirations as a novelist, to write in a voice of a character who is absolutely not me.” 

He got the idea to start a blog in the guise of his character, he said, when a Web site called Lez Get Real published two long comments about Syria that he had submitted in Amina’s name in February. That Web site published a long apology on Friday, explaining that its editors had helped to start the Gay Girl in Damascus blog. In the comment thread beneath that apology, one of the editors of the site explained that the blogger’s 135 contributions to Lez Get Real in recent months had all seemed to come from computers located in Scotland, not Syria. Mr. MacMaster moved to Scotland from the U.S. last year to study history.

Before Sunday, Mr. MacMaster had denied that he was the blog’s author when reporters from two publications, The Washington Post and The Electronic Intifada, confronted him with circumstantial evidence that seemed to connect him to Amina Abdallah Arraf. Both reporting teams had discovered that someone who claimed to be Ms. Arraf had asked several years ago for mail to be delivered to a house in Stone Mountain, Ga. which was owned by Mr. MacMaster at the time. (An old invitation to a barbecue at the house, posted on Facebook by Mr. MacMaster in 2008, is still online.)

Mr. MacMaster initially told The Post, “Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, ‘Yeah,’ and write a book.”

After he published his apology on the blog on Sunday, Mr. MacMaster confirmed to Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian Web site, that he was indeed the blog’s author. His wife, Britta Froelicher, who is pursuing a degree in Syrian studies, later hinted to N.P.R. and confirmed to The Guardian that her husband was the blog’s author in an e-mail.

As part of an investigation led by Andy Carvin, N.P.R. had discovered that photographs of Syria sent by the author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog to a Facebook friend in Canada recently had been posted online in 2008 by Ms. Froelicher. Contacted by N.P.R. on Sunday, Ms. Froelicher pointed the broadcaster to the new apology posted on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog and said that the couple was still on vacation in Turkey, “and just really want to have a nice time and not deal with all this craziness at the moment.”

Mr. MacMaster told The Lede on Sunday that he and Ms. Froelicher had been drawn to one another by their shared interest in pro-Palestinian activism. Mr. Abunimah, the Palestinian-American activist and blogger who founded the Electronic Intifada, told The Lede on Sunday, “The fact that MacMaster had moved in Palestine solidarity circles for several years did help us uncover him. We initially found it notable that ‘Amina’ and her apparently equally imaginary cousin ‘Rania’ were part of our online social networks, and this made me concerned that it was hostile and was targeting us.”

He added: “It did not give us pause that MacMaster and Froelicher styled themselves as people concerned about Palestine. On the contrary once we suspected that there was a major deception going on, our concern was to protect our friends and communities from infiltration and harm.”

Mr. Abunimah was given some help in his research by another blogger, Liz Henry, a Web producer at BlogHer.com who suggested last week that the Gay Girl in Damascus blog might be fiction. Ms. Henry had guessed that the blog might be an echo of a hoax that was revealed in 2004, when a diary written in the voice of a young lesbian turned out to be the work of a middle-aged man. On Sunday, Ms. Henry suggested in a follow-up post that Mr. MacMaster might also be responsible for several additional online characters, including the editor of the Lez Get Real site who seemed intent on exposing him.

In the new post he published on the blog on Sunday, Mr. MacMaster called his fictional diary of a Syrian revolutionary an attempt “to illuminate” the uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, “for a western audience.” He also wrote: “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

In his subsequent interview with The Lede, however, the writer, who acknowledged having carried on a Facebook relationship with a woman in Canada in the guise of his lesbian character, said, “I feel bad for the people I hurt and led on.” He added that “one of the issues that’s most troubling for me” is the fact that his deception took place at the same time that Syria’s state-run media has argued that reports of a violent crackdown on dissent by the Syrian security forces have been fabricated by the foreign journalists or arebased on Internet hoaxes. “The fact that they can use this as an example of how the media makes up stuff really is something that troubles me,” he said.

He also said:

I would never have done any of it, in retrospect. The biggest thing that I regret is that there’s been a lot of media attention and there’s a a lot of media attention I believe like right now and you’re talking to me, rather than talking about the actual things going on on the ground in Syria.

It’s a regret. I regret that I’m detracting from the real story. The real heroes. I’m not important.

Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian woman who told The Times last week that she and the blogger posing as Amina Arraf had exchanged about 500 e-mails after meeting online earlier this year, responded to Mr. MacMaster’s admission on Twitter on Sunday night: “I’m deeply hurt. But now it’s time to take care of the ones that actually fight for freedom and deserve it.”

I’m deeply hurt. But now it’s time to take care of the ones that actually fight for freedom and deserve it. #arabspringMon Jun 13 01:38:03 via webSade B.
sade_la_bag

 

Another woman who thought that she had become friends with Amina Arraf through her blog and Facebook account, an Israeli blogger named Elizabeth Tsurkov, told The Lede in an e-mail: “Today has been quite a bad day and I’ve been actually censoring myself on twitter with expressing my anger and pain over this. I feel betrayed and shocked but mostly angry, especially because Tom seems to think that he hurt no one with this hoax.”

She added:

As an Israeli, my only way of getting to know and interacting with Arabs who aren’t Palestinians / Israeli-Arabs is online. I generally don’t interact this way with Israelis, but with Arabs, there’s really no other way. I have made friends (mostly through Twitter and Facebook) with people from almost every country in this region, but I have proof of the existence of only a small percentage of them. In the past, I never thought there was something risky about this; I realized that dissidents in this region have to use aliases or interact with people anonymously, but it never occurred to me that someone would be cruel enough to subjected people who care about the fictional persona he created to emotional agony as part of a hoax.

I reacted more strongly than most people to the news of Amina’s kidnapping because I felt that I knew the person who was kidnapped, but many other people who had simply read the blog were terrified. I’m not sure there is a way to protect oneself from such sociopaths, but I know that I will try to distance myself emotionally from people that I am not very familiar with online.

>via: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/gay-girl-in-damascus-blogger-admi...

__________________________