The "Gay Girl in Damascus" Hoax: Some Reflections

It's been not 24 hours since the mystery behind detained Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Abdallah Arraf Al-Omari has been solved. What began as an international outcry over the arrest of a popular blogger giving voice to the queer side of the "Arab Spring" quickly turned into a frenzy of Internet investigations, carried out by journalists and bloggers, that has reached a sad and predictable end - there was never an Amina in the first place. The blog, and even more disturbingly, an entire online identity going back almost four years, was the creation of a 40 year-old American man from Georgia now studying in Edinburgh, Tom MacMasters, and his wife Britta. In what follows I'll quickly recount the story, from first suspicions to this morning's denouement, then offer a few thoughts on what this might mean in the larger context of queer politics and the Middle East.

It all began with this post detailing Amina's capture by Syrian security forces, ostensibly put up by Amina's cousin Rania Ismail. The response was swift, with several newspaper reports and a flurry of "Free Amina" facebook groups, like this one and this one, mobilising concerned people around the world. But within a few days, as reporters and State Department officials in Syria attempted to contact Amina's family, doubts began to emerge. No one, it seems, had ever met or spoken to Amina, not even her girlfriend in Montreal, Sandra Bagaria (they had only communicated via e-mail). One of the first to publicly question the story was NPR's Andy Carvin, who was sceptical yet cautious to declare that she didn't exist. Maybe she was simply very good at concealing herself, as all activists living under repressive regimes must be. But then a Croatian woman living in London, Jelena Lecic, noticed that the photos of Amina being circulated were actually of her. There were hundreds, including all the photos on Amina's personal facebook page, all apparently stolen from Jelena's facebook. Troubled, she went on the BBC to prove her identity, and wonder how all this had come about. The evidence was increasingly pointing to an elaborate hoax.

I began following the controversy at Liz Henry's blog, where commenters took to the Internet to uncover as many details about Amina as could be found. The mass of details was confusing, and involved an extensive cast of characters, some real and some fictional. Amina had stated she was born in Virginia and went to high school and college in Georgia. She had a previous blog where she declared her intention to mix fact and fiction; she had also been active in posting on alternate history Yahoo mailing lists, declaring her interest in medieval Byzantium. There were several online dating profiles, one in which she listed her language as Hebrew. Some used pictures of Jelena Lecic, some of another woman. Her cousin Rania Ismail's facebook page turned out to be a likely fake; no one had been able to contact her either. Anything seemed possible. Was she the creation of Rania, a married Syrian woman looking for an escapist fantasy? Did Rania even exist? Was Amina a creation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian girlfriend? Or perhaps it was Jelena Lecic herself, whose first statement to the media was released through a suspicious P.R. agency? These theories may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but only through this kind of free-thinking exercise could all options be considered. The truth, when it came out, was perhaps stranger still.

Parallel to Liz Henry's and Andy Carvin's efforts, which later turned out to involve e-mail communications with someone likely to be the person behind the hoax, the website Electronic Intifada and the Washington Post were putting together a story based on two concrete leads. One came from Paula Brooks, an editor at the website LezGetReal (which was the first to introduce Amina's blog to a wide readership). She provided two IP addresses used by Amina, both in Edinburgh. The other came from Scott Palter, a moderator on the alternate history boards, who had once gotten a mailing address from Amina in Stone Mountain, GA. This, it turned out, was Tom MacMaster's home. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place: MacMaster was born in Virginia, had lived in Georgia, currently studies in Edinburgh, and plans to write a thesis on medieval Byzantium. He is a pro-Palestinian activist, and his wife Britta, a Quaker, was involved in organising events on Syria and Israel. Britta is a fellow at St. Andrews in the Centre for Syrian Studies, writing a thesis on the Syrian textile industry. She had posted pictures of her travels in Damascus, the same ones also used by Amina. The game was up.

MacMaster's so-called apology on the blog, posted this morning, is a remarkable display of narcissism, self-delusion and self-righteousness. He declared, "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," with the exception, of course, of all the key facts on the blog - that a gay woman, living in Damascus, was experiencing the revolution and had been detained by security forces. He had the gall to claim that, "I do not believe that I have harmed anyone." Let me count the ways:
1) Closest to home, it was Sandra, the Canadian girlfriend, who had been privately lied to for months. Reading her tweets from before the abduction story, one is struck by the sincerity and passion with which she speaks of Amina. She had to endure constant media questioning, when it became clear just how deep the deception went. Interestingly, the abduction story was posted only a few days after Sandra attempted to call Amina at home in Syria and got no answer. That day Amina wrote about security forces visiting her family and her subsequent need to go underground. It may be that this is the point at which Tom and Britta freaked out and looked for a way to take their character off the stage, at least temporarily.
2) Everyone else who had an online relationship with Amina, and who has been affected by the investigation. The website LezGetReal, for example, was subjected to intense scrutiny because Paula Brooks and other editors, who have families working for the federal government and do not wish to be outed, write under pseudonyms; they, too, were suspected of being fake.
3) Finally, most obviously and most importantly, this is a devastating blow to queer activism in Syria and everywhere else in the Middle East. These furious reactions from actual Syrian activists give a sense of the damage. Not only does the hoax make it more difficult for Syrian bloggers to be heard in the future without undue suspicion, but it puts LGBT activists currently in Syria under the spotlight of the authorities. In every way, MacMaster has done about as much harm to the Syrian revolution as could be imagined from a computer in Scotland.

It is, however, the following sentence that deserves the greatest outrage: "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." Not only is MacMaster not apologising, he is in fact blaming everyone else for the very sin he has committed. In a sense, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was the perfect instantiation of liberal Orientalism, wherein Western audiences are enjoined to sympathise with a young, attractive, Westernised and courageous individual battling against the forces of dark, oppressive Islam. If Amina didn't exist, one would have had to invent her. MacMaster's twisted activist vision piled on all the desirable characteristics for what he thought the West should know of the Middle East, but didn't bother because of the biased, Zionist media. The cruel irony is that in not finding a real Syrian who could represent some or all of these things, he confirms the very fantasies he set out to dismantle are just that, fantasies.

It is also troubling, it must be said, how those sceptical of Amina's story from the start have slipped into the same traps of Orientalist fantasy. One of the earliest arguments for the hoax was that, "No one in Syria would ever kiss their girlfriend in public," or speak so freely, etc. Though this may be in a very general sense accurate, it further adds to the erasure of the public presence of LGBT Syrians. Another argument from a commenter on one of the investigating blogs was that MacMaster had wished to show that being gay in Arab countries is not so bad, when in fact he had proved the opposite. There could be no one as free as Amina in Syria; but, the commenter added for good measure, there could be in Israel. It was MacMaster's anti-Israel bias that made him paint such a rosy picture of an Arab country. Both Amina's blog and the arguments of the sceptics are symptomatic of a wider set of highly debilitating discourses. In effect, it is becoming impossible to speak of what being queer in the Middle East is like without falling into one extreme or the other.

All of this brings to mind Jasbir Puar's extraordinary theoretical work Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, in which she tracks the complex ways in which queer activism in the West has become implicated with imperialist projects and mindsets. One effect is the erasure of Muslim queer sexuality, and its converse -Israel's propaganda efforts to brand itself as the only "gay-friendly" country in a homophobic region (known as "pinkwashing"). One of her tasks is to affirm the voices of queer Muslims and queer Arabs speaking out against state violence, against religious intolerance, and against US and Israeli colonialism all at once.
This is the kind of person whom MacMaster, no doubt familiar with this literature, wished to concoct. Two of Amina's blog posts, for example, were on the phenomenon of "pinkwashing." What this odious, despicable individual has managed to do instead is produce the perfect mockery of queer scholarship and activism, a farce that feeds right back into the very discourses he sought to resist, feeding them to the brim and sustaining them for years to come.



EDIT: On point #2 above, regarding the website LezGetReal and its editor, "Paula Brooks," evidence came to light one day after I posted that this person, too, was a man masquerading online as a lesbian blogger. After providing the information that helped expose MacMaster, a 58 year-old man from Ohio named Bill Graber was forced to admit that he had been involved in several online communities using the persona of a deaf lesbian woman. This raises many, many further questions about a possible widespread effort to infiltrate progressive movements, and reminds us once more of the need for vigilance and careful verification in online activism. The indefatigable Liz Henry has a summary of the whole sordid Bill Graber affair here.

Danger! More on Indian Muslims and the Possibility of an "International Communalism"

If what I read in the Wall Street Journal is indicative of things to come, then we're in trouble. A report that should have been innocuous on the Jaipur Literature Festival by journalist and author Sadanand Dhume on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech turns into something very sinister. I expected the commentary to briefly mention that she is "controversial" and maybe say a thing or two about her reception. Instead, the title of the article promised much more, purporting to show how "globalization is changing the debate" about Islam in India:
http://www.asianwindow.com/books/indias-groupthink-on-islam/

Alright, let's go. Right off the bat, Dhume is shockingly brazen in asserting that Ms. Hirsi Ali's well-rehearsed screed about the evils of Islam is delivered "with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians." As Charu Gupta's excellent work on the Hindi public sphere in the early 20th-c. has shown, the stereotype of Muslims as sexually and developmentally backward was entrenched in the earliest formulations of Hindu nationalist identity, and was widely disseminated (see her Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India). Moreover, when respectable Hindu social reformers (like M.G. Ranade in Maharashtra) in the late 19th-c. sought to explain the deplorable state of Indian women under indigenous patriarchy, they firstly and loudly blamed the Muslim invasions for putting an end to the "Golden Age" of women's freedoms under Hinduism. But we don't need to go that far backward and into that much detail. Speak with many educated, "globalised" and "modern" Indians today, or flip through the news channels, and you'll see a picture of Indian Muslims (a disadvantaged minority, after all) quite consistent with Ms. Hirsi Ali's generalisations. Unfamiliar? Hardly.

In a surreal escalation of stupidity, after once more repeating that only with the past 20 years of globalisation is India "starting to grapple with the faith [Islam]" (rendering the past 800 years of coexistence on the subcontinent irrelevant), Dhume claims that the failure to think about Muslims in the way he wants Indians to is due to "the kind of groupthink fostered by decades of socialism." What in the world is he talking about? He cannot possibly mean that the relative absence of serious communal violence during the first few decades of Indian independence, at least when contrasted with the past 20 years (post-Ayodhya, Gujarat), is something we should blame Nehruvian socialism for. Or maybe he means that today's presence of radicalised strains of Islam (i.e. terrorism) had its roots in state socialism's failure to...do what exactly? And how come these radicalisms have proliferated precisely in the era of globalisation he claims is helping Indians "think" better about Islam? Dhume doesn't care to elaborate.

Aha! This is what it's all about: apparently, "mainstream intellectuals...tend to trace the Muslim world's problems almost exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of Israel and the United States." What kind of media is this fellow watching, and what is he smoking all the while? Lest he be accused of unfairness, Dhume admits that the Hindu right isn't all that great because it has a "tendency to group all Muslims together" (tendency?) and its policy "shades into bigotry and religious chauvinism" (shades??). Amazingly, he then claims that Ms. Hirsi Ali is a moderate walking the middle path (whatever you think of her, a moderate of any kind she is not). While she may say bad things about fundamentalism, she also "urged the audience to think of Muslims as 'individuals who are capable of changing their mind.'" My oh my, how charitable of her!

Contradicting the straw man he has himself set up, Dhume lists several authors at the festival who similarly challenge the "mainstream Indian narrative": Tunku Varadarajan, Max Rodenbeck, Lawrence Wright, and Steve Coll. Notice that not only does he not define what this mysterious "mainstream" narrative is, but he can't name a single person who defines it or subscribes to it. Thus, it would seem from his own evidence that the majority of "mainstream intellectuals" (the authors named above come from The Economist, Daily Beast, and the New Yorker) are of his, and Ms. Hirsi Ali's, opinions about Islam.

But the most blatant abuse of journalistic integrity and common sense comes when Dhume attempts to show the "other side." What kinds of arguments might be made against Ms. Hirsi Ali's positions? He cites no academic studies, no political commentaries or respectable authorities who might have intelligent rebuttals. Instead, he refers to "slightly hostile" audience members who are not so "tolerant" (this is just open condescension on his part, as if any kind of contradictory questioning is intolerance). Let's see who he finds:
1) A "young Kashmiri Muslim man" accuses a panel discussing the "Arab-Muslim penchant for conspiracy theories" of "promoting stereotypes" and being "spokespersons for the mainstream media." The way he writes it, we're supposed to think he's crazy. It sounds to me quite reasonable to say they were promoting stereotypes, and the credentials of the panelists indicate they are precisely spokespersons for the mainstream media, no quotes needed.
2) A professor of history at Delhi University "said he would 'defy anyone with the slightest sense of justice' to say what was happening in Palestine was 'fair.'" Tellingly, the professor is not named or interviewed later, as he is the only source with some kind of authority that might destabilize Dhume's argument. Also, this is again presented as a rambling diatribe when in fact it's a very sensible little statement: very few people with a sense of justice would say that what's happening in Palestine is fair. Yet we move on...
3) Javed Akhtar, the great Urdu poet and lyricist, presented as a "writer of Bollywood lyrics" (he's like, their Randy Newman, you see!) says some extreme-sounding things like that all Islamic fudamentalism is supported by the US (this was kind of maybe true until the late 1980s, but obviously stupid to say about today), and that the US is deliberately concealing bin Laden's death. So he's a bit nutty. But Javed Uncle is NOT an authority on policy and shouldn't be the best thing Dhume can muster for his article. That's like running an article about an academic forum on contemporary Jewishness to which Mel Gibson shows up and quoting him as a dissenting view. Pathetic.

In the end, Dhume predicts "the slow but inexorable knitting of India into the mainstream of global discourse on a sensitive subject." He means it as a triumphalist statement, but the state of global discourse on this very sensitive subject is abysmal. Herein lies the danger, and I do not use this word lightly, of this kind of thinking. Dhume's article by itself won't do the damage, but the trend that he is describing (if we notice it to be true) will.
India, a country with ca. 160 million Muslims, has been able to maintain internal religious harmony, with several grievous exceptions. These very exceptions point to its vulnerability; if the Indian public sphere does take on a more strident anti-Muslim tone, as promoted by neoconservative radicals like Ms. Hirsi Ali and the "mainstream" experts admired by the hapless Dhume in the West, disaster would follow. It's easy for the Swiss to fret about four minarets and symbolically punish a few thousand "black sheep." In a country with a long and bloody history of communal violence, rhetoric of this kind is playing with fire. Ayodhya is the test case, so this need not be a hypothetical. Not only would the consequences of escalating mistrust and conflict be grievous for the safety, security and peace of millions of Indian Muslims, it would further radicalise Islamic fundamentalist elements and give rise to more acts of terrorism. India would no longer be a country that knows how to "deal" with its Muslims, which even Ms. Hirsi Ali acknowledges in her speech (though this is too subtle for Dhume to pick up on).

If this odious little piece is to be believed, we may have to worry about more than just the communalism of "khaki shorts and saffron flags," but of a more insidious "international" communalism that seeks to disturb what is, for the moment, a tensely peaceful scene.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/