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.
White guys ... What would the world do without us? We're the straw that stirs the drink.
A commenter notes: As Donald Rumsfeld would say, pudgy white American nerd bloggers will stand down when hot lesbian Syrian bloggers are ready to stand up.
A commenter notes: As Donald Rumsfeld would say, pudgy white American nerd bloggers will stand down when hot lesbian Syrian bloggers are ready to stand up.
Hot?
ReplyDeleteI googled the name...
Yes, hot! Thank you, Steve. You brought joy to my Monday morning.
Ive openly wondered how much of the dissaffection behind these 'Arab Spring' uprisings has been inspired by Western astroturf. We weren't beyond throwing sand-in-the-gears back in the Soviet days to undermine a percieved enemy state, so I can't imagine we are shy about pulling the same thing now. I know the neocons wouldn't have any scruples about it.
ReplyDeleteThe girls at Feministe couldn't believe it - they thought the NYT was running cover for the fascists again.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/06/07/syrian-blogger-amina-abdallah-kidnapped/#comments
The internet, the new frontier where men are men. And women are men. And 12 year olds are FBI agents.
ReplyDeleteLooks like gender, ethnicity and sexuality are social constructs after all.
ReplyDeleteGilbert P.
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteYou just gotta love the internet.
Hahahaha so typical.
ReplyDeleteWhite people LOVE having members of minority groups repeating their beliefs. "She's not white, (or straight), so she has moral authority!"
Conservative white people often have a hard time finding appropriate shills for their beliefs, so half the time they just end up making them up.
For example, there's a popular Tea Party comic where the main character is a black mail.
I love this kid. He seems to be a leftist, what with the Che t-shirt, but he made liberal MSM look completely foolish. Jayson Blair has nothing on this(40 yr old)kid.
ReplyDeleteIs 40 the new 17, btw?
This is the funniest and most effective--albeit inadvertently--subversion of MSM political correctness since those two white kids pretended to be a pimp and prostitute at the Acorn office.
I can't stop laughing..... just look at the dude's face. WTF. Is he gonna get sued by the woman he lifted the photos from? This should go on Judge Judy.
MSM, which raised a big stink about Sarah Palin's emails, not only came up with no smoking gun against her but now put a gun to its own head and pulled the trigger for having fallen for this hoax for so long.
Maybe Steve should filch some photos from facebook and pretend to be a gay black woman. His views might be shown more respect by MSM.
ReplyDeleteHow about he go by the name Steisha Salongo.
Looks like some socially awkward loser with way too much time on his hands. Plus a personality disorder. No need to mythologize him as a drink stirrer.
ReplyDeleteThe media should go back to video coverage of Levantine babe protesters, that way they won't get fooled.
ReplyDeleteWell, let's put it this way. What this guy did was still more creative than twittering one's penis.
ReplyDelete"On Sunday, MacMaster apologized on the blog. “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground,” he 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.”"
He should go into politics. Or journalism. Or academia. He'll fit right in with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Jay Gould, John Edwards, Barack Obama, etc.
Besides, in this 'gender-bending' age when school kids are told that they can be a boy or a girl or whatever, who's to say this guy isn't an Arab lesbian if he/she feels like it?
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=306493
If Obama can 'transcend' race and be everything and nothing, surely a white guy in Georgia can be anyone too in our globalist gaytrix world. Hope means the hope to be anything you wanna be. Change means, well, you can change into whatever you wanna be. This guy should be lauded and made into the posterchild of our globalist pomo-homo age when anything is everything. He had the audacity of hope and the dreams from humanity.
Keep in mind Aaron Sorkin's SOCIAL NETWORK is no less bogus than what this guy did. Sork didn't so much give us Zuckerberg as use him as an avatar to conceal and push through his own personal Jewish neurosis.
ReplyDeleteWell it was certainly a big surprise to all my Facebook friends, from Warren Buffett to Harrison Ford to Vince Lombardi. We should have recalled the old CompuServe adage of "Guy-in-Disguise-Unless-Proved-Otherwise..."
ReplyDeleteI was sceptical from the start.
ReplyDeleteBasically there are no self-confessed Syrian, Lebanese or indeed any Arab lesbians.
It's something Arab women hate.
The presumptive future leader of the 2nd largest sect of Shia Muslims, centered in India and East Africa, is the older of the three tow-headed little children in the bottom of this photo:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ismaili.net/timeline/2006/200609/20060916PrinceHusseinWedding01.jpg
You'll want to call him Imam Aga Khan.
This happened because their father and grandfather both took blond euro wives, the grandfather an english fashion model and the father a german.
As a result of similar arab royal europhilia, the crown prince of Syria looks like Harry Potter, and should something happen to him his younger brother looks like Dennis the Menace:
http://knowingtheroyals.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/hussein-bin-al-abdullah-crown-prince-of-jordan/
http://www.life.com/image/81247355
Sorry, the last royals are of Jordan, not Syria.
ReplyDeleteThis is priceless.
ReplyDeletehttp://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/06/bird-songs.html
BIRD SONGS
The bird flies free
Knowing no boundaries
Borders mean nothing
When you have wings
My heart and my soul
Long to follow and soar
Out over mountains
And deserts and seas
I have no wings
And earth presses in
Wrapped in a sheet
Forever to lie
Weighed down by dirtclods
Never to feel
Wind on my wings
Sun on my back
Soaring and flying
Freedom is coming
Here am I wanting
To know it one day
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/06/still-sunni-after-all-these-years.html
ReplyDelete"Still Sunni After All These Years"
----------
For heaven's sake, this is too SWPL to fool anyone except... swapples who hope and dream that all people around the world will one day share their values--like 'gay marriage'.
Who else but a SWPL dork would come up with 'sunni after all these yrs'?
Could the 'gay girl' be this guy?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5psUZqkYgpo
"How about he go by the name Steisha Salongo."
ReplyDeleteSatisha Ives
This blog loads very slowly on IE8, takes a lot of CPU and 200 MB RAM, while it's OK in Opera.
ReplyDelete>Thinking that there is any such thing as a "lesbian" who isn't faking it for attention.
ReplyDeleteI certainly hope you guys don't do this.
If I had to profile the kind of guy who would do this, this guy's picture about nails it- 40, dumpy, beard,human bumper sticker.
ReplyDeleteTaking a look at that photo I think I now know another reason why so few American Whites are pro basketball players.
ReplyDeleteBBC has an interview with the real hot girl (a Croatian named Jelena Lecic) whose photos were used without her permission here. The whole thing is surreal.
ReplyDeleteThe girl is hot! Croatian women, who knew?
The entire arab pring revolution is created by such trouble makers who create rumors. Well, maybe CIA is really behind this.
ReplyDeleteA forty year old "peace activist" (wearing a Che shirt of course) who's getting a masters degree? In what? Peace activism? I wonder who's paying for his extended adolesence.
ReplyDeleteYou mean she wasn't half sigma?
ReplyDeleteHis site is pretty critical of Israel.
ReplyDeleteAnd what is a 40yo Menonite doing in grad school in Scotland?
I also would not have guessed he was married.
What would Feminist X say? She was also a forty-something white guy!
ReplyDeleteWow! I've been reading his/her blog, and I have to say I'm impressed, both by the volume of posts (e.g., nine posts on June 5 and six on June 6) and their creativity. Check out, for example, "Still Sunni After All These Years" (which talks about Islam and "the Anthropomorphic principle") and "My father, the hero".
ReplyDelete??? I may just be confused, but I do believe that while I was reading the blog the blog title changed from "A Gay Girl In Damascus" to "A Hoax"! And a new post has shown up, with further apologies and explanations. I wonder how much further this will go?
I've actually known a couple of lesbians from various Muslim cultures. I'm not so certain the "lesbian" part of their behavior is what might get them into trouble. Instead it would be attitudes towards men, drinking alcohol and failing to comply with restrictions on public behavior.
ReplyDeleteWould that that guy had enough shame at drawing attention to himself with a fraud to hang himself with that Che t-shirt!
Gays being melodramatic to the point of dishonesty? Shocking!
ReplyDeleteHis "Che" shirt has Che wearing a t-shirt with Bart Simpson on it. I get the feeling he's mocking Che, not idolizing. No lefty, that one.
ReplyDeleteI guess he's straight since he's married. His Che Guevara t-shirt had me fooled. ;)
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Usually it is an American leftist that creates an American hoax in which American white guys are the Evil American Male Perpetrators. Here we have a case in which an American leftist created a hoax to bring attention to Evil Muslim Male Perpetrators.
ReplyDeleteWhen the American hoaxes are discovered there is always some liberal facesaving when the College President who helped whip up the frenzy says, "OK, it was a hoax, but it was a useful hoax because it whipped up the mob frenzy against white men and they are still the real Perpetrators". Or as it is equivalently excused: "The hoax was good because it raised sensitivity about the issue".
What would cap the climax would be if the Syrians brought a criminal action against the Georgia dude for fomenting race hate. Here he is, a good leftie himself, trying to rescue lesbians in Syria. Now the tables get turned. Perhaps the international criminal court? Maybe the Syrians seeking the Georgia dude's extradition to Syria?
I know AIPAC and other lefties are trying to establish international jurisdiction over race crimes and anti-Semitism. What a wonderful opportunity to actually use those provisions against the very lefties that dreamed them up!
Maybe Steve should filch some photos from facebook and pretend to be a gay black woman. His views might be shown more respect by MSM.
ReplyDeletePretending to be a gay black woman is not enough. He must be pretend to be a physically attractive gay black woman. No way that white dude would have generated the same readership had he used a picture of an ugly Syrian lesbian.
I'm on board with the switch to Satisha Salongo.
ReplyDeleteBut it needs to go farther. From now on, every Salongo post simply needs to switch Black/AFrican-American with White/Caucasian.
"How come the NBA has foreign blacks like Dirk Nowitzki but few African-American stars?"
"The 1 SD superiority of American Blacks to Whites is one of the most durable statistics in social science."
-Osvaldo M.
"Basically there are no self-confessed Syrian, Lebanese or indeed any Arab lesbians."
ReplyDeleteUh, completely false.
"White guys ... What would the world do without us? We're the straw that stirs the drink."
ReplyDeleteYeah...but it's a Molotov Coctail.
Well, there is a Damascus, Georgia . . .
ReplyDeleteA fully grown adult male graduate of a good university feels the need to pretend to be a non-white lesbian in order to make an impact and be heard in the political conversation. Makes you think. Shows how confused he is or how confused our world is.
ReplyDeleteFor the people pointing out what he is wearing: that is not a Che t-shirt.
ReplyDeleteThat is a t-shirt of Che wearing a Che t-shirt.
It is a joke. A neverending loop.
What about the much more common phenom of false rape and false hate crimes like nooses, church bombing, graffiti, etc? They seem to do most of the stirring these days.
ReplyDeleteHoaxes primarily work on the unthinking and uncritical who desperately wish the world to match a patently inaccurate world view.
Our entire educational system, MSM news and most other mass media constantly prime the masses to fear Nazis and KKKers under every bed. It's the same way the Soviets in their most paranoid era violently raged against the specters of counter revolutionaries and Capitalistic running dogs everywhere by murdering millions.
Do conservative white males perpetuate such hoaxes? I can't image our current environment would allow it and it seems to go against the grain of viewing the world as is (vs as one would like it to be).
Reminds one to be more critical rather than accepting things at face value. Lots of individuals and groups, as well as the government, are out there trying to fool people. This guy found an original angle to carry out a hoax, one that tapped into the needs of many such-minded people. The world has been waiting for all the Arab lesbians to step forward and join the anti-oppressor coalition.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Aga Khan, the hereditary leader of Ismaili Muslims, a decent picture of the family is here. This is a wedding with another blonde wife, so the next generation of Ismaili leaders will be even blonder than the last.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of the villain in the James Bond movie "Octopussy," who is an Indian prince named Kamal Khan but who is portrayed by...Louis Jourdan.
"That is a t-shirt of Che wearing a Che t-shirt.
ReplyDeleteIt is a joke. A neverending loop."
Still isn't funny.
The real question is whether or not the practice of lesbianism receives any censure as long as it is kept private. This guy is imposing a Western worldview and agenda on a Muslim culture.
You have to wonder about a guy so egocentric he might invite ridicule from the very population he's purportedly trying to save.
Political correctness has added new dimension to the words earnestness and credulity.
ReplyDelete"Mom, Dad, I am Lebanese. . ."
ReplyDeleteThe t-shirt is of Che wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt and is based on a cartoon by Matthew Diffee that appeared in the 2/2/2004 edition of The New Yorker.
ReplyDelete"White guys ... What would the world do without us? We're the straw that stirs the drink."
ReplyDeleteWhat a perverted and twisted loser. And this is what you are proud of, as a white man?
If so, the world can do with a lot less of this type of white perverts and deviants.
"I also would not have guessed he was married."
ReplyDeleteFrom the NY Times: "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."
Must be a great way to attract chicks.
I hear he was quite traumatized by the photoes sent to him from Cong. Weiner!
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great guy, really.
ReplyDeleteNo Arab lesbians? Does the name Huma Abedin ring a bell?
ReplyDelete"Pretending to be a gay black woman is not enough. He must be pretend to be a physically attractive gay black woman."
ReplyDeleteBut would that not lead to Steisha vs Satoshi controversy?
This reminds me of something: every Chinese American with whom I've ever talked about China defended the Chinese government and its policies from what they perceived to be Western media bias. I don't know for sure who the Chinese "dissidents" are - ethnic minorities agitating for separate states, figments of the NYT's imagination, a little of both - all I know is that none of the real-world Chinese with whom I've spoken about China viewed their motherland and its government the way the NYT always implies that they should view it.
ReplyDelete"What a perverted and twisted loser. And this is what you are proud of, as a white man?"
ReplyDeletewow, sarcasm just ORBITS your head, doesn't it?
Wait a minute. How do we know Steve is really Steve? Maybe he's really 'Truth' who hijacked photos of some white guy and pretending to be Mr. HBD specialist as a joke.
ReplyDeleteHas any of you actually met 'Steve'?
The old joke: on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Or a hottie, evidently.
ReplyDelete>For example, there's a popular Tea Party comic where the main character is a black ma[le].
There's also a Tea Party-beloved presidential candidate who's a black male.
>We weren't beyond throwing sand-in-the-gears back in the Soviet days to undermine a percieved enemy state, so I can't imagine we are shy about pulling the same thing now. I know the neocons wouldn't have any scruples about it.<
Go to movements.org and browse around. It's the GHQ of the "Arab Spring" - compososed of every variety of bloodthristy busybodies: straw-stirrers, international activists, would-be cafe Lenins, tikkun olam'ers in heat, "force democracy on the homophobic wogs" types, nation-wreckers, creative destroyers. All these in possession of seemingly unlimited funds and free time. Interesting to trace where it's coming from.
Political correctness has added new dimension to the words earnestness and credulity.
ReplyDeleteWhich is really driven home by how relentlessly those traits are mocked in every other part of our culture.
"White guys ... What would the world do without us? We're the straw that stirs the drink."
ReplyDeleteWhat a perverted and twisted loser. And this is what you are proud of, as a white man?
If so, the world can do with a lot less of this type of white perverts and deviants.
Speak of the devil...
You know, we laugh at this, but it actually says about a lot about human psychology and religious mindset. Though liberals say they're secular, if you ever listen to NPR or BBC or attended liberal gatherings, there is an air of sanctimony--seriousness, commitment to justice and truth, dignity, etc. It's almost like being inside a church. But COMMITMENT to truth is more about emotions than actual truth; also, social 'truth' is defined in terms of a set of values and goals. Since 'gay is good' is one of the great truths of modern liberalism, the commitment to truth in this case wasn't skepticism about the 'gay girl in damascus' but the nobility--hers and ours--in fighting the good fight.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the liberal 'commitment to truth' can be seen in the hoary mythology of MLK as perfect saint, the cult around Stephen J. Gould, the 'compelling' lifestory of Obama, etc. There's also the Magic Negro icon, a favorite of conservatives too. The complex race history is reduced to Ali-as-hero, a bogus story about Rosa Parks 'just happening to sit on the bus that day'--when it was all pre-planned, and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and MISSISSIPPI BURNING. And WWII has been simplified into the 'good war'.
And the Hollywood Ten, we've been told were perfectly innocent American patriots hounded by 'paranoids' without a shred of evidence. So much for 'truth'.
The psychology of the willingness of liberals to believe in this 'gay girl' story isn't much different than the psychology of people who claim to see miracles, like image of Jesus on a toast. A mind calibrated to be sanctimonious in one way will readily accept anything that adds to the warm glow.
Though this guy is a real putz, in some ways, he did what St. Paul did. Paul took a story about some Jewish reformer who got killed and spun a whole new fantasy around it. And boy, did it ever take off. So, what we witnessed was, on one level, a hoax. But on another level, it was a new myth in the making. He created his own Anne Frank(who has become the Virgin Mary figure of Holocaustianity).
And he has good company. Lillian Hellman created a totally bogus story about some woman named Julia who supposedly saved Jews and worked for the German underground but was killed by Nazi goons and disappeared. It became a big best seller and was made into a movie, and as a child, I saw it on PBS many times and wept and wept. Then later, I read Paul Johnson's chapter on Hellman in INTELLECTUALS.. and did I feel like donkeyheaded fool.
But there are nuts on the right too. Some still say Holocaust is a hoax, a claim that is truly a hoax or a form of retardation.
ReplyDeleteAnon 12:37
ReplyDeleteAnd here I was guessing she was really the war nerd....
Steve,
ReplyDeleteI can't ever see women doing this as it would take a special combination of sociopathy, energy, and passion. I can't see other races doing this because it seems kind of aspergery to try to con people for a *good* cause.
Generally, women and others who invest in a protracted, long con job will do so only to line their pockets.
On FemX, I wish Half Sigma would tell us what he learned, seriously; not being sarcastic. My advice for the future? Take more pictures in more places! No self-respecting young hot woman would only take a handful of pictures in the span of so many months, ESPECIALLY ONE WHO WAS FINE WITH NUDITY. Facebook has taught us this!
Speaking of incredulity:
ReplyDeleteRacial hoax causes PR headache for McDonald’s
...the toll-free number given at the bottom of the sign is actually the number for ... Kentucky Fried Chicken.
69 comments... I don't get. Why does anyone care?
ReplyDeleteLOL, It Gets Better (pun intended)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/paula-brooks-editor-of-lez-get-real-also-a-man/2011/06/13/AGld2ZTH_blog.html
The Arab Springs (not really descriptive) are food riots. The ME imports something like 75% of its food, and about 90% of its cooking oil. Both spiraling upwards as China bids up prices.
ReplyDeleteWhat some attention hog posing as a "hot lesbian" (in reality they look like Rosie O'Donnel) doesn't realize is that people in those places will settle things themselves. And it won't be pretty. Brutal hereditary dictatorships replaced by Ultra Jihad.
Lets get real. The Tunisian riots were old-fashioned food riots, against a repressive and hereditary regime. But the rioters are not "longing for democracy" only Jihad and Islamism in a desperate attempt to get something to eat. Same with Egypt, same with Syria (which is using tanks, planes, and artillery against towns near the Turkish border). Turkey is experiencing a mass wave of refugees from Syria, as the regime collapses in spasmodic violence.
ReplyDeleteThe corruption, which kept the regime in power, was unable to handle the need to dial the corruption down to import enough food cheaply to prevent starvation. That's the whole Arab Spring -- food riots at its most basic.
As are the "flash mobs" in Chicago and NYC and elsewhere. No the ghetto is not starving, but all available money goes to food leaving nothing for ipods or ipads. Hence the flash mobs to achieve dominance and loot places.
We've had 60 years of cheap food, now coming to an end.
You should write about hot lesbians more often, Steve. Guaranteed to boost your traffic. Hey, it worked for Howard Stern.
ReplyDeleteWe should all say, I AM ARRAFARTACUS!
ReplyDelete"Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."
ReplyDeletePriceless!
He looks like Whiskey, imo.
ReplyDeleteIt's my experience that use of the phrase "gay girl" is a dead giveaway that something's strange. Lesbians usually insist acidly on use of the word "lesbian" - as if they belong to a different species.
ReplyDeleteBeached White Female
Well, there *was* me.
ReplyDelete