I HEART CHAOS

Last week, we told you the story of an openly lesbian blogger in Damascus, Syria by the name of Amina Araff. For years, she had posted on her blog about government crackdowns and harassments in her home country and then last week, she was “abducted”. But… there was no such blogger. It was all a long and detailed hoax, perpetuated over a number of years by 40 year old Tom McMaster of Georgia. That’s the douchenozzle above on the right.

On Sunday, MacMaster wrote an apology on his 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. 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.”

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. Information from online sources has become particularly important during the Middle East uprisings, especially in countries such as Iran and Syria which severely restricts foreign media and has turned technology against the protesters.

MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is now working on his master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience. Amina’s story may have remained believable, but he wrote of her arrest, his fans — in a desire to help the woman they had grown to care about — found a trail of evidence that led back to MacMaster.

Trying to bring attention to the plight of women and gays in the Middle East? That’s all cool. Staging an abduction that gets everyone, even the US State Department all riled up? Fuck, the State Department was apparently on the verge of sending Hillary Clinton out there to demand the release of this woman. And because of that, Mr. McMaster is a total douchefuck.

Via