The male American PhD student who
confessed to being an internet hoaxer
masquerading as a lesbian blogger in
Damascus has spoken publicly about the
reasons behind his deception, saying he
was motivated, in part, by his own "vanity".
Gay activists in Syria and further afield have
reacted furiously to the revelation that the
blog,A Gay Girl in Damascus, was written
not by a 35-year-old woman kidnapped by
security forces last week, but by Tom
MacMaster, a married, 40-year-old American
studying at Edinburgh University.
Speaking via Skype video to the Guardian,
MacMaster, who is on holiday in Istanbul
with his wife, expressed some contrition for
the blog, which he began in February after
constructing an elaborate web identity for
Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari, a fictional
lesbian Syrian, over more than four years.
He said: "I regret that a lot of people feel
that I led them on. I regret that ... a number
of people are seeing my hoax as distracting
from real news, real stories about Syria and
real concerns of real, actual, on-the-ground
bloggers, where people will doubt their
veracity."
Informed that Syria's official news agency,
Sana, has leapt on the controversy, claiming
the fictional blog had perpetuated
"continuous fabrications and lies against
Syria in term of kidnapping bloggers and
activists", MacMaster said: "Yep. I regret
that."
He had started the blog, he said, because he
believed online posts about the Syrian and
Israel-Palestinian situations would earn
"some deference from obnoxious men" if
written under an Arab woman's name
rather than under his own, where
"someone would immediately ask: why do
you hate America? why do you hate
freedom? This sort of thing."
He had made her a lesbian, he said, in an
attempt "to develop my writing conversation
skills ... It's a challenge. I liked the challenge.
"I also had the thing that I like to write, and
my own vanity is ... if you want to
compliment me, tell you like my writing ...
That's how to make me happy."
But why had he exchanged many hundreds
of emails with a woman inCanada, Sandra
Bagaria, who believed herself to be having a
romantic relationship with the blogger?
"I feel really guilty about that ... I got caught
up in the moment and it seemed ... fun. And
I feel a little like shit about that." He denied
having been sexually excited by the
interaction: "I don't want to go into that
aspect particularly of it."
The student, who was later photographed
by the Guardian at an address in Istanbul,
confirming his location there, denied having
ever met Jelena Lecic, a London woman
whose photographs he appropriated from
the internet and passed off as images of
Amina.
"I found her photo on Facebook a while
back and ... when I saw her photo, I was
like, that is Amina ... So I just nabbed her
photos and was using her."
During the course of his deception
MacMaster masqueraded as "Amina" in
direct communication with a number of
news organisations, including the Guardian,
whose correspondent in Syria had taken
detailed steps, at some risk to the journalist,
to meet the blogger. MacMaster had emailed
the correspondent with a photograph,
purportedly of Amina, which was in fact of
Lecic.
Gay activists in Syria have reacted with fury
to the revelation of the blogger's true
identity and to the suggestion that
MacMaster had written it in an attempt to
help their cause.
"There are bloggers in Syria who are trying
as hard as they can to report news and
stories from the country," wrote Sami
Hamwi, a pseudonym for the Damascus
editor ofGayMiddleEast.com. "We have to
deal with [more] difficulties than you can
imagine. What you have done has harmed
many, put us all in danger, and made us
worry about our LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender] activism. Add to that that
it might have caused doubts about the
authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us."
MacMaster told the Guardian: "I am not
happy about that. And I understand their
concern ... I don't want to put anybody at
risk, or increased risk. And in actual fact,
some of my self-justification was that in
having a completely fictional character being
bold and forward, then it makes it easier for
real people. Which is probably just a self-
justification, but it was something that
crossed my mind."
His post last Monday, in which he posed as a
cousin of the blogger claiming she had been
kidnapped by Syrian security services, "was,
stupidly, my sort of 'away message'", written
as he and his wife left for a holiday in
Istanbul, he said.
MacMaster's wife, Britta Froelicher, is
studying at the University of St Andrews for
a PhD in Syrian economic development. He
said she had not participated in the fiction.
"She is a student of that region - Syria,
specifically. She is extremely knowledgeable
and obviously a great consultant for such a
project. But I am the sole author."
Why was the going-away message "stupid"?
"I wanted to shut down the whole blog for
a while, and I was thinking I would phase
out the character, and having her abducted
was not the way to do it." He had intended,
he said, to post in a few days that Amina
"had been released, had left the country and
was not going to blog any more".
As questions about the identity of the
mysterious blogger became more acute in
the days after her supposed abduction, a
number of individuals and bloggers, among
them journalists from the website Electronic
Intifada (EI), traced internet leads that
increasingly pointed to MacMaster.
Confronted by EI and by the Washington
Post, MacMaster originally denied
involvement, before admitting the hoax in a
confessional post on the blog on Sunday. In
that post, MacMaster said his intention had
been in part to expose "the often superficial
coverage of the Middle East and the
pervasiveness of new forms of liberal
orientalism".
Wasn't there a very bitter irony, the
Guardian asked, that a supposedly young
Arab lesbian woman had been exposed as
being the fictional creation of a
heterosexual American man, and lacking an
authentic voice of her own? MacMaster
replied: "I am very aware the irony is 20
layers thick."
Did he accept that it was difficult to criticise
the media for their coverage of the Middle
East when he had lied explicitly to several
news organisations? "Yeah, absolutely ... I
don't feel incredibly happy with myself, you
know. I wish in retrospect I would have
done things very, very differently."
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