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‘Gay Girl in Damascus’? Not So Much

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Posted on Jun 13, 2011
damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/

A screen shot of the website A Gay Girl in Damascus, taken Monday, shows the author’s apology as the blog’s top story.

In a curious case of scrambled online identities, a 40-year-old American man has been outed as the writer of an attention-grabbing blog by the name of A Gay Girl in Damascus, which was supposedly written by a Syrian-American lesbian. The Washington Post reported that the blogger is a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh.

MSNBC:

The post entitled “Apology to readers” on the “A Gay Girl in Damascus” blog was signed by “Tom MacMaster” in Istanbul, Turkey. The Washington Post identified him as a 40-year-old American man from Georgia. The newspaper described him as a Middle East peace activist working toward a master’s degree at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh.

In the post, the author says the narrative of a lesbian’s life and kidnapping in Syria was fictional but insists “the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground.”

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By Spike, June 20, 2011 at 3:06 am Link to this comment
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IJWTS wow! Why can’t I think of tghnis like that?

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doughboy's avatar

By doughboy, June 13, 2011 at 11:05 am Link to this comment

The media is as gullible as the public. We had reports of 30,000 Iranian soldiers
crushing the freedom lovers. Few “reporters” had the intelligence to question
the logistics, let alone the logic, behind this lie. Reports went viral when the
democracy marchers broadcast that Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters to
shoot down the demonstrators. Once again, no reporter questioned the
authenticity of why Hezbollah would denude its front with Israel and send what
would be its entire fighting force to Syria. The Gay Girl blogger is another story
that fell apart.  The news coverage of the events unfolding in Syria certainly
does not qualify as news reporting finest hour. Each day, reporters provide the
death count and resurrect the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama. The number
of dead of Hama fluctuates, according to who is using the story, from 10,000
to 40,000. It seems that the US/EU media is disappointed that the present
death toll is not as high. News stories and video transmissions keep using
terms like massacres, mass graves, intense tank fire and machine gun fire,
crushing, etc. Apparently there are a lot of people who want to make a bad
situation worse.

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