Posted on 06/19/2011 11:05:22 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men.
On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog A Gay Girl in Damascus had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, Miss Brooks and Miss Arraf were colleagues. Amina had posted at LezGetReal before starting A Gay Girl In Damascus. As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:
Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.
Who knows what romance might have blossomed had not Amina been arrested by a squad of Baath Party goons dispatched by Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Tom MacMaster then created Rania, a fake cousin for his fake lesbian, to try to rouse the world to take up the plight of the nonexistent Aminas nonexistent detention.
A Free Amina! Facebook page sprang up.
The Obama Administration must speak about this, declared Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. This woman is a hero.
On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into the kidnapping.
Now consider it from Assads point of view. Unlike Amina, Rania, and the three armed men in their early 20s who hustled Amina into a red Dacia Logan, you have the disadvantage of actually existing. Youre the dictator of Syria. Youve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep. Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a reformer only 20 minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger. Any moment now Sarkozy or Cameron or some other Europoseur will demand anti-homophobic NATO bombing missions over your presidential palace. On CNN Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing each other back and forth all day long about the Gay Spring sweeping the Arab world. Youll be the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism. Youll be a laughing stock at Arab League Where-Are-They-Now? nights.
Who needs it? Release the lesbian bloggers! commands Assad.
Er, what lesbian bloggers? says his vizier. This is Damascus, remember?
Oh, yeah. And he spends another sleepless night wondering if this is the most devilish CIA dirty trick of all, or if one of their satellite drones merely misinterpreted the grainy footage from the Colonel Gaddafi Lookalike round of Syrian Idol.
The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of Paula Brooks, shortly before Paula was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio. He would have got away with it if I hadnt been such a stand-up guy, the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, Paula told the Associated Press that he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.
He got that one right, sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.
Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprahs late Book Club was distressingly partial. Greg Mortensens now discredited Three Cups Of Tea took it to the next level, not just near mandatory in the usual circles (grade schools and sentimental punditry) but also compulsory in the Pentagon for commanders en route to Afghanistan. After centuries of disdain for the preferred beverage of imperialists, American officers in the Hindu Kush now drink more tea than the Brits, and they dont even like it. But a charlatan told them to do it, so the tea allowance now consumes 23 percent of the Pentagon budget
Yet Tom MacMaster topped even that. He took an actual, live, mass popular uprising and made an entirely unrepresentative and, indeed, nonexistent person its poster girl. From CNN to the Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?
Because they wanted to. It would be nice if Amina Arraf existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at Number 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each others diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the others attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that days Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.
Yes, yes, I stereotype. But stereotypes become stereotypes because theyre grounded in observable reality. Amina Arraf is grounded in nothing more than a fetish fantasy as preposterous as those lipstick lesbians in porn movies who cant wait for some hot straight guy to jump in and make it a threesome.
It would be statistically improbable for there to be no women attracted to other women in Damascus. But Amina Arraf is nothing more than the projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are too lazy to try to figure out. In 2007 in The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palins birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, announced that, never mind his policies, Barack Obamas visage alone would be the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan. As he explained:
Its November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man Barack Hussein Obama is the new face of America. In one simple image, Americas soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obamas face gets close.
For crying out loud. The assumption that a young Pakistani Muslim in Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into Obamas face for just a moment, they might notice that in Benghazi democracy activists have been rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. In Bahrain democracy activists have attacked hundreds of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, ripping the tongue out of one muezzin and leaving him brain damaged. Whats so multicultural about the pampered middle-aged narcissists of the Wests leisurely activist varsity pretending that the entire planet is just like them?
You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. Amina Arraf was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. Thats because the liberal worldview is a fiction.
LibsGetPwned!
IMHO, this is priceless Steyn. However, during yesterday's '503 error server issue day' it did not receive any replies. Is there a way to BTTT or should I just repost?
bbttt
Mark Steyn ping?
Or maybe, Lawrence Of A Labia?
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