Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Not only was the author of the blog "A gay girl in Damascus" not gay, not a girl, and not in Damascus, but it turns out that "Paula Brooks" editor of the LezGetReal lesbian website, is also a man.

"Paula Brooks" – really Bill Graber from Ohio – had a complex relationship with Amina Arraf – really Tom McMaster, an American student in Edinburgh. The pair had flirted heavily online. Each believed the other to be a gay woman at the time of their flirtation. When McMaster's hoax was exposed, "Paula Brooks" was one of the first to condemn him, before himself being exposed as a hoaxer.

McMaster and Graber both claimed to be raising serious issues and, in a sense, they were. Discrimination against lesbians in the US is far from unknown, and the hoax abduction of "Amina Arraf" was wholly credible. They Syrian government is engaged in a vicious crackdown on regime critics, and prosecutes homosexuality as a crime even during its ordinary day to day tyranny.

Just as oppression of gay people in Syria is much more widespread and more severe than in the US, the consequences of McMaster's hoax are much more serious than Graber's. McMaster faked the abduction of Amin, leading to an international campaign for her release. He claimed that Amin was born in Virginia, and had dual US-Syrian nationality. The State Department became involved, wasting consular time on entirely fictional story.

McMaster claimed that his narrative was wholly credible, and served to highlight the real plight of gay people in Syria. It is true, of course, that people are hardwired to remember and respond to stories. A narrative surrounding an indvidual victim of oppression is easier to relate to than a mass of statistics about the numbers brutalised by the Assad regime.

But McMaster's hoax is more damaging than the specifics of gay repression in Damascus. Almost the whole of the Arab world is held captive by brutal dictators. The last assessment by Freedom House rated Kuwait, Morocco and Lebanon as 'partly free' and every other Arab country as 'not free'. Right across the Arab world people are rising up against appalling regimes. Especially in Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, we depend on people to bear witness to repression. This bearing witness by digital activists helped depose the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. 

Dictators around the world are taking comfort from McMaster's exposure. Every time someone bears witness to their crimes, they will be able to respond that it is probably another fake.

So where is the positive lesson in all this? Perhaps it is lies in the vision of Douglas Adams. In response to critics who pointed out that information on the internet is not checked and is therefore unreliable, Adams pointed out the absurdity of our assumption that anything in wiriting ought to be reliable. As Adams – ten years gone, but as prophetic as ever, put it:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

If there is a lesson in the McMaster and Graber hoaxes, it is this. It is time to turn our critical thinking faculties back on. We need them, and we were crazy to think we could manage without them.