Contributed by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui

Tom MacMaster and his wife Britta Froelicher. This picture was in a Picasa album titled "Syria/It's THE BEST!" This picture was is in the same album that contained the nine pictures Amina Araf sent to a friend. (NPR's text)

In a queer turn of events it has been exposed that Amina Arraf, known to most as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” is no more than a contrived Orientalist avatar of one 40-year-old white man from Georgia, Tom MacMaster. The first words that came to mind upon hearing the news, were “ILAAN KOS…” but we’re trying to refrain from wasting our indignation on curses (albeit justified) and re-orient the conversation into a productive analysis of what MacMaster’s hoax means for the position of Arabs in western media.

The Violence of Representation:

More than just speaking for Syrian activists, or Syrian women, or Syrian lesbians, as so many righteous liberal Westerners “interested” in the Middle East so often do, Tom MacMaster, in his own words,  “created a voice,” and in doing so redefined what representation means for Arabs in western media – we call it ventriloquism. In creating the “dummy,” Anima, through the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, MacMaster became the mouthpiece for an entire class of Syrian people while denying Syrians (activists/women/lesbians/all of the above) the right to a voice in an already one-sided global media.

In this violent act of representation in which language and meaning was appropriated, MacMaster detracted from the stories of REAL Syrians who risk their lives daily in opposition to the dictatorship of the Assad regime. Not only did the attention received by MacMasters fake blog rob Syrians of their own voice, it put them in danger in a very real way.

MacMaster, in all of his privileged splendor as a straight American white man, appropriated and “outed” his avatar Amina as a lesbian activist, and in doing so put numerous queer Syrians at risk. Writing from a cozy home in Georgia/Edinburgh/Turkey bares no risk, allowing for plenty of slack when it comes to accuracy and accountability. Yet the victims will ultimately not be the MacMasters of the world, the phony bleeding heart liberals, but the people on the ground that Amina fails to represent.

Daniel Nassar, a moniker for a Syrian Lesbian activist, blogged a furious response to the hoax, explaining that MacMaster, “took away my voice… and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog…you single-handledly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause.” LGBT folk, like Nassar, who have been doing the ground work to better the conditions in which they live now have to combat the overreaching imaginations of gung-ho white men in the West as much as they do the unjust laws and social stigma of their own regimes.

In creating Gay Girl in Damascus and appropriating the identity of a gay Syrian woman, MacMaster violently drowned out the voices of so many Syrians undergoing REAL persecution, and detention for their dissent (and identities) against the brutal regime. As much as MacMaster relishes his role play an Arab lesbian, he fails to realize that the politics arising from that identity are earned through a lifetime of hardship and inescapable pleasures and punishment, not enthusiasm for the romanticism of a region.

Neo-Orientalist Media Titillation

Regardless of whatever lazy apology MacMaster nervously reaches for, Amina was never intended to be a fictional character for the betterment of women or LGBT people in the Middle East. She is a western fantasy intended to arouse and titillate the western sensibilities to feel, not act. This is the ultimate neo-orientalism as it not only re-imagines an existing geographic location, but invents an entire human landscape.

Because the avatar in question is a gay woman, the international media was quick to eat it up, already confirming their notions and desires for how LGBT people and women live their lives in the Middle East. In fact Amina’s story tells us more about the West than it does Syria. The cyber ghost was so easily welcomed  by the media and concerned readers because she is symbolic of all the tropes which Westerners use to position themselves as superior interpreters of Middle East society and culture.

One shouldn’t need the sensationalized fictional narrative of a lesbian Syrian woman to affirm the rights of Syrian demonstrators who are being brutally repressed by their governments. But if the goal is to arouse emotion and entertain, then MacMaster has succeeded in proving that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.

MacMaster has succeeded in proving that that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.

Reaffirming this point is the Washington Post article on MacMaster in which the authors claim that,  “the hoax raised new questions about the reliance on blogs, Tweets, Facebook postings and other Internet communications as they increasingly become a standard way to report on global events.”

For Arabs grasping on to the short end of the media stick, MacMaster’s mess is not a nuanced analysis of the importance of fact checking. To the contrary, this is a particular issue that speaks to the agency of Arab voices slowly being drowned out in a world of lazy journalism, and false reaches for objectivity.

The Violent Aftermath

Ultimately MacMaster has aided the Assad regime and other dictatorial bodies of government by confirming what the Arab dictators have been saying all along: that the uprisings are simply a conceived Western ploy. With the creation of the “Amina dummy,” MacMaster has managed to turn anti-revolutionary regime propaganda into truth by providing evidence that certain narratives of the revolution are fabrications of the West. Because this revolution is being fought on a battle field of (mis)information and truth, every single contribution is a decisive battle in which the outcome of an entire people is at stake – something MacMaster should be held accountable for jeopardizing.

The Arab revolutions are not events for the Western gaze to speculate and draw inspiration – they are real lived and often-times bloody moments that shape, destroy and rebuild the lives of living, breathing people.

Equally infuriating is the insincere “apology” MacMaster posts on his blog in which he ironicly echoes the rhetoric of the Assad regime and explains that his fabrication of a person and misdirection of a people was for the greater good. So if we are to take MacMaster’s “apology” sincerely then we are inadvertently embracing his philosophy – the belief that your voice doesn’t matter if you’re a (queer/female/activist) Arab because some white man in American can always write your story better.

Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui 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.

Contributed by Omar Baddar

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a different brand of extremism, still in its marginal infancy, is trying to stir up trouble in our community. These are people who stridently claim to be the only authentic Arabs who care about justice for their communities in the US and in the Middle East, and they assign the term “house Arab” to any Arab American who promotes engagement with US policymakers or participation in the American political process.

While Islamophobes oppose Arab and Muslim involvement in American politics on the grounds that we are a potential threat and cannot be trusted, these guys oppose such engagement on the grounds that the US political establishment is such an unmitigated evil that there is no reason to engage it (the permeation of either ideology increases the “otherness” of Arabs and Muslims and the sense that they don’t belong in or are an integral part of this country). Anyone who does engage, so their logic goes, must be doing it to gain favor with the political elite, or for personal enrichment and empty self-promotion as a fake community leader with high connections.

Some with this ideology have anonymously (that is to say under pseudonyms) created a blog called “Ikhras,” Arabic for “shut up,” which is aimed at what they describe as “House Arabs.” Its content is about 5% spot on (occasionally they do go after people in a deserved fashion), about 10% funny and entertaining, but the remaining 85% is malicious, juvenile, and destructive. Intellectual consistency and clarity are completely abandoned in favor of feeble and often self-contradicting ad hominem attacks that are simply too extensive and convoluted to explain in detail.

To give just one example, the anonymous writers at Ikhras pleaded with the youth of the Egyptian revolution (particularly Wael Ghonim) not to associate themselves with the Arab American Institute (AAI), but when these activists took part in AAI’s Gala they were accused of being fake revolutionaries (including Jawad Nabulsi who was shot in the eye while protesting on the streets of Cairo – dare I speculate that this is more than what the anonymous bloggers of Ikhras risked for the revolution?). This is pretty indicative of their doltishly arrogant “either you’re with us or against us” mentality. If they truly believed in such personal attacks, why don’t they have the courage of their convictions to sign their real names to such vitriol?

Recently, Ikhras contributor Tammy Obeidallah (who I’m told is not Arab but who signs her real name) wrote a screed on Ikhras attacking Arab American comedian Dean Obeidallah as “the father of all House Arabs.” What was his crime? He didn’t condemn Israel and the United States in the course of an interview he did on CNN. During an exchange in the comments section on Ikhras and on twitter, Tammy accused Dean and Maysoon Zayid (another Arab American comedian) of being “Zionists” (consistent with Ikhras’ style of wild and baseless accusations). Once you’ve reduced yourself to making enemies out of Arab American comedians and staunch supporters of Palestinian rights like Dean and Maysoon with personalized vitriol, you’ve basically made it impossible to identify the limits of the depths to which you are willing to sink in vilifying anyone who disagrees with you. This type of strident orthodoxy demanded by Ikhras to spare oneself from baseless attacks is the sort of nasty bullying that must be confronted by all of us who value political and ideological diversity within our community before it becomes a poisonous source of unnecessary division and antagonism.

Journalist Laila El-Haddad, author of the blog Raising Yousuf and Noor, has been held for over 24 hours in Cairo while attempting to go home to her parents who have survived the bombing campaigns against Gaza only three months ago.

She’s been twittering and blogging on the event using Cairo airports wireless. As others have pointed out, this is an interesting break from the days when those in holding cells disappeared for all accounts and purposes, unable to reach the outside world to tell about their conditions.

This is despite a signed letter of consent I received personally from the Egyptian consul-general in Washington the day of my travel from the US.

To quote the Egyptian officials here in the airport “so sue him”.

I tried to plead that it was not my fault Egypt was in the way of my home- that if I could,I’d parachute in; that i simply wanted to go back home.

For now, we wait and sleep on the roach ridden floors of the transit hall as our own “Borders” film (a classic Syrian satire by iconic actor Dreid La7am about a man who is stuck between the borders of two fictional countries who speak the same language) unfolds.

In the film “Borders,” Dreid La7am is stuck in between the borders of the two countries “Eastistan” and “Westistan,” and since neither will let him enter the country to renew his passport, he finally builds a squatter house in the middle and grows a giant beard.

For more coverage, see Global Voices Online, and Huffington Post.

[Tarboush Tip: Jillian]

Mirsayafi’s case received very little coverage. It didn’t come to light in the English media until after his trial last November, and despite pleas to mainstream media, the Huffington Post (in a piece that I wrote) was still the largest outlet to cover the story. I spoke with Omidreza a number of times, up until the day before he was summoned for interrogation on February 7. The interrogation came as a surprise, and he was detained; his lawyers were not notified of the reason. Since then, as far as I know, he had not been afforded contact with outsiders.

The cause of his death remains unknown.

The group interviewed communities particularly impacted by the recent Israeli offensive, including medical personnel, humanitarian aid workers and United Nations representatives. The delegation examined three legal issues: 1) targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; 2) illegal use of weapons and 3) blocking of medical and humanitarian assistance to civilians.

They found strong indications of Israeli violations of the laws of war. Though we blogged about the delegation’s findings before, several delegation members have since written about their experiences:

Reem S. of Deaf Walls was also there and put up several posts about her trip. Her most recent post, Justifying Israeli War Crimes, is a powerful overview and reflection that gives context and a fearful look at the road ahead.

Noura Erakat wrote in the Huffington Post a rebuke of Anthony Cordesman’s methodologically-flawed report finding that Israel was complicit with the laws of war. His report could be summed as arguing, Israel obeyed international law because Israeli officials say so.

Why do they say she’s crazy? She thinks land-for-peace is a formula worth pursuing.

They quote her since-corrected statement to Jewish leaders, “we need to give up half of the Land of Israel” for peace. I would have been shocked too. That was more of Palestine than the United Nations offered the Palestinians in the 1947 partition plan! Since they posted her quote, it was soon corrected by the AP. “Half” was downsized to “parts,” which admittedly is more than the “none” Netanyahu’s talking about.

And the Jihad Watch zionuts go along with his nothing-for-peace strategy.

Even in the updated version, the AP article still excluded “Jewish” from the title of the sponsoring group of the convention she addressed. The article calls it, “Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations.” Hey now, not all Americans are Jewish. Just 2% of us. Man, the wire articles are more erroneous than blogs these days.

By the way, didn’t the font Jihad Watch uses on its header go extinct in 1998?

The article written two weeks ago by colleague Alaa Hlehel in Fasl al-Maqal provoked a sharp debate within the Balad party and extended further, to the point that the Islamic Movement demanded his resignation. How did the affair begin? How was the decision to put a “clarification” [to the article] taken by the Political Bureau? How did Hlehel decide to resign from his post after this “clarification” was imposed on him? What was he accused of in Friday sermons? Who is behind this whole affair? Al-Madina Newspaper documents the story in detail and interviews Hlehel about what happened.

Reportage: Majd Kayyal, Al-Madina, Haifa
September 12, 2008

“The Hlehel Case”. That’s how it was named by one of the dozens of bloggers who fiercely debated, from both of the “conflicting” sides, the article titled “A Nightmare Called Ramadan” (August 22, 2008), written by Alaa Hlehel, the (then) editor of Fasl al-Maqal. The discussion went on to far surpass the effect of a normal article.

The first week after the publishing of the article was “relatively calm”, with only somewhat angry responses from the newspaper’s readers, who considered it “provocative”. On the second day after its publishing (Sat. August 24), a party meeting was convened in Nazareth, in which Tamim Mansour, member of Balad’s Political Bureau, opened fire on Hlehel by accusing him of being an “atheist, infidel, apostate and ignorant [jahil]”, detailing that his article was “impudent and insulting to Muslims.” But the affair was blown wide open as an issue a week after this, when Mansour published an article in Hadith al-Nas, where he launched a sweeping attack on Hlehel, both personally and for his article.

In this situation, Balad saw it fit to publish a “clarification” to the readers underneath the article. But this clarification reached the newspaper on Thursday afternoon, without the knowledge of the editor-in-chief and without him being consulted in this decision. The clarification stated that the expressions in this article “do not represent the position of the Balad party and the management of Fasl al-Maqal, and that its printing in the newspaper was a mistake.” Hlehel rejected this, refusing the imposition of this clarification on him without consultation and eventually decided to resign from his post. He indicated that this (or any other) kind of “clarification” has to be agreed upon by the editor-in-chief, at least in terms of its content, stressing his refusal on principle of any kind of “clarification”.

Three days after the happening, things took a sharper turn, when Zahi Njaydat, the Islamic Movement’s official spokesperson, presented a letter to the leader of Balad’s parliamentary bloc in the Knesset, MK Jamal Zahalka, that decried the article as “a disdainful and mocking insult of one of the five Pillars of Islam” and a series of ill-informed, ungrounded attacks on the holy month, thus an offense to the sentiments of every Muslim. And in an unprecedented step for the Arab parties [of Israel/Historic Palestine], the Islamic Movement demanded Hlehel’s removal from his post as editor-in-chief.

The letter reached all the major Arab online portals and garnered a lot of attention. `Awad `Abd al-Fattah, Balad’s General Secretary, issued a reply to the Islamic Movement’s letter, saying that Hlehel had tendered his own resignation after the imposition of the above-mentioned clarification. But things did not calm down, since readers had begun to get interested and there were far more comments than the average. There was a clearly sharp tone against Hlehel and his article to point of losing control against him, though there were also some commentators who considered his article as falling within the freedom of one’s expression and that it was the author’s right to use a sarcastic tone.

The discussion extended to the issue in question and did surpassed the bounds of the internet, as al-Madina learnt that it was brought up in Friday sermons of some of the mosques in Arab [Palestinian-Israeli] villages, in which a sweeping attack was launched on Hlehel. Some of the accusations against him reached the point of describing him as an “infidel” and “apostate”. “This kind of an attack,” said Hlehel, “cannot be taken lightly. I don’t know what it holds for the future.”

“I have not changed”

al-Madina asked Hlehel some of the questions posed by observers on the contradiction between the freedom of expression and the interests of one’s party. “Until the crisis arose, I saw no contradiction between the two,” says Hlehel, “as I am in a secular, liberal party that calls for the democratizating of the Arabs, and who’s chair [Azmi Bishara] teaches the rest of the Arab world what it means to be democratic. Its manifesto and literature indicate that clearly. The contradiction arises from changes within the party itself, not in its principles. I see no contradiction between editing the newspaper and my individual belief in a party that represents my thoughts and principles.”

He adds: “The painful part is that the first shot in this war came from a member of the party’s Political Bureau and not from outside the party. That member published an article attacking me and accusing me eleven times of being ignorant, an infidel and unbeliever, demanding I be countered. This gave the Islamic Movement the green light to go ahead…but at least they do not claim to be liberal or democratic, they viciously defend everything sacred and spiritual, so we shouldn’t find it strange coming from them. They haven’t suddenly become hard-liners after talking about secularism or the Enlightenment, there hasn’t been any shift here. We are the ones who’ve shifted. And I also tie in the way the party has dealt with these things to getting ready for elections and to opportunistic calculations that are unacceptable.”

He goes on: “Whoever attacked me did so from a personal standpoint, merely because I requested him to lighten up the tone of writing to so as to make space for other writers in the paper. Suddenly, this person transformed into a ferocious defender of Ramadan, while six months earlier he had been demanding that veiled women be barred from entering universities, and was one of the symbols of radical secularism!”

Some have criticized Hlehel for resigning from Fasl al-Maqal and for “quitting the battle”, even as he revealed that he was pushed to resign: “Even though I’m a person that tends to be rebellious and tries to cross boundaries, in the end I believe in personal responsibility and administrative and professional hierarchy. When the chair of the board of directors wants me to resign, I cannot stay on by force. I was clearly pushed to resign, after they imposed the publication of the ‘clarification’ on me. It is sad and insulting to me and Bal
ad that some of the front-line leadership in the party who spoke tried to absorb the Islamic Movement’s anger by saying I resigned, instead of countering attempts to forcibly intervene, demanding the Islamic Movement withdraw its request, and defending the party and its establishments, instead of going on the attack as any body with prestige and dignity would do. But the party did not act as a frontline alternative for secularism and enlightenment. I am amazed that a party that follows an enlightened leader that teaches open-mindedness and rationality to the rest of the Arab world, cannot even achieve this in its own newspaper.

“I see that there is an essential misunderstanding about the place of an editor-in-chief. His job is not to review the paper’s headlines, or correct grammatical errors, even though that’s one of his duties. His job is to put together the newspaper’s agenda and it’s intellectual, political and social trajectory. The newspaper’s (and its editor) job is to expose corruption, to ignite debates and wars. They ask why the editor-in-chief is provoking trouble? His job is to be fearless in front of these ‘problems’ to prove the power of the fourth estate. This defines the integrity of the journalist and the newspaper. My basic intellectual agenda is in part taken from the party literature and from Azmi Bishara, and my work is to put in place on a weekly basis the thought of Balad according to what was in the National Democratic Delegation, the party program and Bishara’s writings. Whoever has issues with this can re-read the party’s literature.”

He concludes: “I was representing a current, the free, liberal and enlightened current. We as a current oppose an alliance at any cost with the Islamic Movement. It is unfortunate however that those I relied upon, those that filled our ears with talk about enlightenment, women’s liberation, secularism and freedom of expression have suddenly vanished. Where are you? There is incitement against me in all the mosques and no one writes a word. Not even a letter. Why this spinelessness? Except for three articles supporting the freedom of speech, by Nawaf `Othamina, Marzuq Halabi and Haneen Zu`bi,[a couple of others added their support a few days later] no one, whether groups or parties, has spoken a word.”

Abdel Fattah: “We respect Hlehel while differing with some of what was in the article”

In response to what Hlehel said, the General Secretary of Balad, `Awad abdel Fattah, said to al-Madina: “First and foremost, we take pride in the writer and intellectual `Alaa Hlehel, just as every society and vanguard party should. There were some sentences and expressions in the article written by Hlehel that were considered offensive by a portion of the readers. Publishing it in a newspaper tied to the Balad party was thus a mistake.

“We agree with some of what was written,” he added, “and stress on rejecting some of the negative social customs in this month, such as over-extravagance and the enslavement of women, that is imprisoning women in the kitchen for the whole month. But the writer presented the subject in a style that contributes to the social changes we believe in as a party, and that he too believes in. We call for a serious and civilized dialogue on all issues, sensitive or not, in our society.

“From another angle, we refuse the meddling of any political groups in the administration of our newspaper as moral guardians,” he concluded, “and we decry the use of this topic for political goals, as this was not an offense to any political party or movement, but an offense to one of the pillars of Islam. And we reject offending any pillar of any religion.”

Press Release from the `Ilaam center and the Arab Journalists’ Forum

In light of the article by the journalist `Alaa Hlehel, editor-in-chief of Fasl al-Maqal, and the responses and actions that followed it, we confirm the following:
• Respect of the freedom of expression as a basic human value that applies to everyone, meaning the right to write an article and consequently, the right to respond to it.
• We reject dealing with the practicing of one’s freedom of expression in a punitive or provocatory fashion, just as we reject intellectual policing. Based on this, we call on those concerned to reinstate our colleague `Alaa Hlehel to his position as editor-in-chief of Fasl al-Maqal, if he had actually been dismissed based on this, just as we reject incitement against him based on this.
• We demand all the concerned parties to not inflate the matter and raise it to a degree that it does not actually deserve, and to not employ it in intra and inter-party conflicts.
• We turn to all our journalists and writers to deliver the idea [of his article] in a form that heeds human and religious sentiments, by relying on our great Arab-Islamic culture, which encompassed and co-existed with different religious interpretations and political and intellectual movements, without its history witnessing inquisitions.