pyraxis | When a white man encounters racism and fights back

or, What not to do when crossing the fourth wall.

Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, the author of the popular activism blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus", has just admitted that she is really Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old student in Edinburgh.

The blog recently got major media attention when a family member of Amina reported that her cousin had disappeared near the Abbasid bus station, seized by three young men who were probably members of the Baath Party militia. Gay activists in Syria have been investigating her arrest and attempting to contact her at personal risk to themselves.

"Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to write fiction but, when my first attempts met with universal rejection, I took a more serious look at my own work and I realized that I could not write conversation in a natural way nor could I convincingly write characters who weren’t me." Tom wrote in his apology today. "I was involved with numerous online science-fiction/alternate-history discussion lists and, as a part of that process, I saw lots of incredibly ignorant and stupid positions repeated on the Middle East. I noticed that when I, a person with a distinctly Anglo name, made comments on the Middle East, the facts I might present were ignored and I found myself accused of hating America, Jews, etc."

When he was unable to improve his writing using conventional exercises, he invented the Amina persona, who began commenting on the same blogs and mailing lists that Tom was already a part of. Almost immediately, he discovered that Amina's posts provoked friendly reactions, where his own had only provoked hostility. The momentum grew - he created a Facebook page for her, found photos online of a woman who looked like her, created her blog. Amina started getting requests to write articles, which she delivered. She exchanged hundreds of emails with a Canadian woman, developing a romantic relationship. She posted a story about her father's love and protection and it went viral. (A timeline of the events)

Now, Tom MacMaster is frantically and humbly backpedaling, while the pageviews of his blog approach 900,000. Sami Hamwi, the editor of GayMiddleEast.com, wrote, "To Mr. MacMaster, I say shame on you!!! We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us. Your apology is not accepted, since I have myself started to investigate Amina’s arrest. I could have put myself in a grave danger inquiring about a fictitious figure."

I am struck by how similar his story might be to the experience of a member of a multiple system who fought for equal treatment and didn't compromise on their own personality, opinions, and background.

What would the media response have been if, instead of saying "I made it all up," Tom had said, "Yes, I am multiple; Amina is a member of my system"?

It also hilights just now pervasive is the new disenfrancisement that white males believe they face in a world where minority groups are rapidly gaining control of social discourse. "I didn’t mean to hurt the causes which I myself believe in," Tom said. "I only wanted to set forth real information through the use of artfully crafted fiction."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From what I have heard, things going viral on an ordinary person can be really really stressful and disturbing. Not, shall we say, a situation we really evolved to deal with. If his/her work had never gone viral the outcome of the story might have been very different?

i think that's probably really true. we feel pretty sorry for him. while it doesn't really excuse his mistakes, we definitely can put ourselves in his place and understand why he made the mistakes he did. his apology seemed mostly sincere, if still probably pretty overwhelmed by the whole situation, and a bit in denial about some of it turning out the way it did. we also get that he doesn't want to feel like everything he did was worthless and wrong, and on some level i have to hope that it doesn't all go to waste. he wrote some very powerful stuff when we read some of that blog a month or two back.

~kat

I feel a bit sorry for him too. We have a show on tv here that has highlighted a couple of times the randomness of things going viral on the internet and how adversely it can affect the people involved - though often it makes them very rich!

Did you read the blog before or after you knew it wasn't "real" so to speak?

yes. i had actually made a mental note to subscribe to it and follow the next time we got on blogger(which we don't do that often). this was i think two months ago or something. i felt worried and sorry for her when i first heard it on the news that she had been abducted or imprisoned. when i found out the other day along with everyone else that she had been a fake it was weird. i think also part of the overall outrage comes from people who genuinely cared about her as a person. the shock of her suddenly not being "real" explains a lot of what is being said by her former colleagues now who risked their lives to try to support her when she was imprisoned.

i actually experienced something vaguely similar the first time i came out to anyone as plural. their reaction was "so that person i've been friends with for the past few years was a fake?!" and then anger and a feeling of betrayal. this was from someone who later came to completely accept us and to understand us better than most other non-plurals who really know us.

i hope in a month or two we will be hearing from people who are expressing forgiveness to the guy, especially if he continues to be really genuinely contrite for misleading people. and it's why i think probably the most wrong thing he did was carry on that long-distance relationship with the girl. he broke that poor girl's heart and i'm sure has fucked with her head and given her pretty long-term trust issues at this point. :/

~kat

I can really understand the anger of people who risked their life to support her when she was (presumably also fakely) imprisoned. But also there must surely (I would think) an anger in them that this person who was so convincing in "her" writing that she really did understand the issues and realities that they too were facing, turned out not only to have duped them, and to have endangered their lives in that duplicity, but also demonstrated very clearly in his actions he actually DIDN'T have the understanding they thought he did, otherwise he would never have done to them what he did.

Or only would have if he was a sociopath. Which he doesn't sound like he is.

I do wonder too, that a lot of the more widespread anger is at being duped. No one likes that. People usually base a lot of their security in life on being able to spot fakes and abusers etc from a distance, and not get sucked in. He has shaken that fundamental belief in a whoooooooooole lot of people.

I have only kinda really experienced that "The woman I love is a fake?" from people. My own path through multiplicity didn't consist of any great uncloseting to someone I love, as I was diagnosed so long ago, and told people important to me I was multiple, but I didn't even really understand what that meant in full itself (Sure we knew "I" was "we" hence the diagnosis, but the fuller implications in our wider life took a long time to reveal themselves) so they kinda learned alongside me.

I don't know that this situation is all that comparable to coming out as a multiple. Like... we are er, both (?) multiple, so our paradigm is gonna be that! So we are only able to really understand it from that perspective. I mean if it had been me I would have sat the chick who wrote that blog down inside and said "Oiy! You know the house rules - no hurting our body or anyone inside? Well they apply to others outside too. What the HELL are you thinking in lying on such a massive scale, to people who care about you. YOU might be from wherever, but your body's life experience here ISN'T what you are saying it is."

I just can't begin to understand how it happened in a singlet, and ... and I guess ... what to make of it, because I just can't understand it. I can only judge the consequences. And honestly, for the vast majority of people he duped I would say "well, you ought to know you need to check your sources on the internet."
But I would add in to the list of wrongdoing, the endangering of lives of the people who supported him, in addition to the poor Canadian girl. :-(

Seems to me MacMaster had no conception of multiplicity or soulbonding, though that's a bit surprising if he hung out in alternate-history communities. I was tempted to write to him and say, "Hey, have you ever considered..." I'm sure the message would have been lost, though, in the flood of information.

We actually wrote to someone once, in a smaller but similar conflagration on a newsgroup, long before we even knew there was a multiplicity community, and got "you're the only one who seems to understand me".

Sadly I think you are right about the message being lost in the flood.

How interesting about the newsgroup person's response! Huh!

Yes, I think it would be hugely disorienting in a stage-fright kind of way. Suddenly realizing your words and actions had a much greater impact on the universe than you had ever dreamed.

However I disagree that humans haven't evolved to deal with such a thing. I believe you said elsewhere that as it's currently understood, what humans didn't evolve for is prolonged stress. A viral explosion happens over the course of days or hours. Not quite the immediate fight-or-flight of coming face to face with a bear, but still calling for fast and decisive action.

If his work had never gone viral, he might never have had to face the growing seriousness of the consequences of his actions... or never realized that his voice was being heard.

I got the impression the effects of going viral were, although very quick to start, quite long-lasting. Like once you are famous on the internet you tend to stay very high profile, which can take a lot of skills to handle well, a fair few high profile people don't seem to have!

Meh, don't know, just throwing thoughts out there.

You might be right. I had been thinking the fame was lost as quickly as it came, as people's attention got diverted elsewhere. It probably depends on the circumstances and how the person handles the fallout.

Oh heh, well, you see, I was thinking of some kid who was filmed having a bit of a chew on his little brother's ear in England, someone stuck it on youtube a few years back and it went viral. Apparently the entire family went into hiding but it STILL gets so many hits they earn 700 pounds a week from advertising.

Me I would have said "I don't care how much money this earns us, enough is enough" and taken it off. But obviously they feel the money is worth the disruption and intrusions to normal life for both their kids and them *shrugs*

When a white man encounters racism and fights back

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