and they all require courage.
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-father-hero.html
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and they all require courage.
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-father-hero.html
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Washington Post, By Melissa Bell & Elizabeth Flock, June 12
For nearly a week, the world followed the saga of Amina Arraf, the blogger who was celebrated for her passionate, often intimate writings about the Syrian government’s crackdown on Arab Spring protesters. Those writings stopped abruptly last Monday, and in a posting on her blog, “A Gay Girl in Damascus,†a cousin said Amina had been hauled away by government security agents.
News of her disappearance became an Internet and media sensation. The U.S. State Department started an investigation. But almost immediately skeptics began asking: Had anyone ever actually met Amina? On Wednesday, pictures of her on the blog were revealed to have been taken from a London woman’s Facebook page.
And Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia.
[…]
MacMaster had used Amina as an identity online for at least five years. He started the blog in February, shortly after Amina told people she moved back to Syria from the United States. Amina’s story might have remained believable, but when he wrote of her arrest, her fans — in a desire to help the woman they had grown to care about — found a trail of evidence that led back to MacMaster.
In telephone interviews and e-mail exchanges with The Post over the past three days, MacMaster initially denied any connection to Amina. He insisted he had never heard of her or the blog before the news of the arrest broke.
Weiner, weiner!
One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth.
Real author of the blog ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’, Tom MacMaster who is based in Turkey, posts apology but insists his fictitious account was truly reflective of the situation on the ground in Syria.
Haaretz, June 12
After the story of the Syrian-American lesbian blogger who went missing during President Bashar Assad’s crackdown made headlines worldwide, it turns out the entire account was a hoax.
Over the past few days, several news reports have surfaced indicating that the author of the blog was from Scotland, after the Washington Post has linked the alleged lesbian blogger’s IP address to Edinburgh.
Pretending to be Amina Arraf, who wrote a blog called “A Gay Girl in Damascus” which documented updates about Syria’s uprising, Tom MacMaster confessed Sunday that every post on the blog has been written by him, including the whole account of Amina’s disappearance and her detention by Syrian security forces which has been reported on by various news outlets.
MacMaster, indicating his location as Istanbul, Turkey, posted a last entry on the blog on Sunday apologizing to the readers, emphasizing that the facts in his posts were truly reflective of the situation on the ground in Syria, even though the narrative voice was fictional.
Via Digby: Stupid Net Tricks
One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth.