Therese Taylor - "Gay Girl In Damascus": Analysis of a Cyberhoax (2017)

Therese Taylor: And today, I want to talk to us about the Syrian gay bill lava, which was a hoax, which emanated supposedly from Damascus, at a time when the media was beginning to take a great deal of interest in Syria in around 2011. And this was at the time of a growing insurgency and false foraging change in Syria. And the media at that time, very much needed, voices from Syria that would reflect their own point of view. At that point, almost magically, a blogger from Damascus started up a widely circulated blog, and it was the work of someone called Nina Adola, who was part American, part Syrian, had returned to Syria and was becoming caught up in the democracy movement, was a creative writer, was a member of the gay community, and was a very media-friendly character. The blog, as I say, was widely circulating, including on authority sites on the Middle East that would refer to it. The blog was a mixture of factual reporting and some creative writing, and was greatly praised for its fresh approach. I can't tell you how many people really read the blog. As a matter of fact, I had to read it for doing my studies on it. And it's an awful blog. One of those dreadful things about it is that she adds poetry. And the worst poems that they've ever written. The bird flies free, knowing no boundaries. Borders mean nothing when you have wings. My heart and my soul long to follow and soar out over mountains and deserts and seas. And that poem goes on verse after verse after verse. After I read her poems, I always have to go and have a lie down. But they were, you know, very popular in their way. Of course, most of the blog was connected to the Syrian situation, the evils of the regime, and the good nature of the democratic movement which was brassing up against it. There was a great need for such a voice in the sense that consulting such a blog prevented you from looking any further, and the blog quite skillfully alighted the viral nature and the foreign nature of the movement for regime change in Syria. And, of course, it was all written in English, which, and no matter what I think, of the style of the poets, et cetera, written by someone who's obviously has English as a first language. That's an example there from the blog. That's from May 2011, Why We Fight. Note that While We Fight is a reference to American culture, and there was a famous series of propaganda films during World War II by Frank Capra called While We Fight. And the blog is full of references like that, which will cue immediately to a Western audience. And she talks about torture in Syria. She always claims to be an eyewitness of all sorts of various scenes. which are always described however in vivid language but without any authenticated details. She says, it's what all of us expect that's to be tortured. It's why we keep our nails as short as possible so they can't be pulled off. It's why we're slow to come out into the streets. It's why there's little crime here. It's why there's little crime in places like Syria and Jordan is in case someone tortures you. It's why you don't see so many women in these protests. Isn't that clever? because the lack of women in the protest was an early indication of Wahhabist agenda, but they've got a much nicer record there. She was also the gay girl blogger, and I'll return to the question of what the sexual messages meant, the gender politics involved in that, and wrote about all the various sexual counters and being an out woman in Damascus, and it was awful because it was more of these and my sex and your sex grinding in time with sounds of the city stretched out below, et cetera. Whoever wrote this does not have any future in the very lucrative field of erotica. And as a matter of fact, when you read these sections, you sort of know something about the gay girl parlor. These women are all gay girls. They're not dogs. They're a male fantasy of what a lesbian is. They're all these slender, long-haired girls embracing on a terrible, they're not like the women that you would actually meet if you were interested in the gay scene in places like Amman or Damascus, where you would find yourself among a group of women, not one of which weighs less than 100 kilos, slamming Arak in a game that they play. You don't, crude, just stress it like that in the Gay Girl from Damascus blog. And that's one of the first hints, to start with, that she knows that she wants to write about lesbian sex doesn't seem to know a lot about it. This is one of the indications that maybe something else is going on. She talks with more fluency about her youth when she was a student in the US and things like this. And again, the tone is sentimental and of a poor quality of writing. I was a teenage idiot. So if I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self not to be who it is that she thinks everyone else wants her to be. I tell her, you know that girl you like, tell her about it, the worst thing, she'll reject you and you'll move on, et cetera. And if you tried that even on the editor of a teenage girl's magazine, they'd send it away and tell you to polish up your writing. However, this is, as I say, a blog which is getting more credence by the day and is being followed by people and being referred to people who express concern about Syrian human rights questions were often indicated, including by scholars in the Middle East University, to follow this blog, which is pretty disgusting. The title of the blog, all throughout, is apolitical. The gay bill in Damascus makes the point that she is against foreign intervention in Syria, and she comments civically on US policies where they support various retrograde regimes in the Middle East. She also comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict ostensibly as a supporter. Now I've put the writings on the Israel-Palestine conflict just to point out what is wrong with this voice. There's several things here. One is that it is profoundly reactionary. Another is that it is not authentic to the Middle East. In May 2011, there's one idea that the rise of the Palestinian struggle, it isn't about killing Jews or Jihad or being inspired by Hitler or Stalin or bin Laden or whatever the haters claim on Fox. And it isn't about the holy cause of Islam or the struggle of the Arab nation or even of a person like the CIA or an Al Jazeera. Religion has nothing to do with it. Nationalism has almost nothing to do with it. It's all about the It's about the refugees going home, not to a state called Palestine, but home, a particular house in a particular village to gather oranges from particular trees and live in the street. It's about living as you want in your own small space where your ancestors died and breathing the air that they exhaled and knowing that your children's children's children will be looking after the same trees when you're remembered, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, it is worthy of analysis. It is picturing the Palestinians, for one thing, as perpetual peasants. The idea that it's not about nationalism is very interesting. It's about an atavistic return to the past. She says, it's simple, but maybe you have to be a Levantine Arab to get this. Oh, wow, the conversation. And of course, the truth is, if you're a Levantine Arab, you'll never have written that. It's very fake, and it's very offensive. Those of us who've studied studies on nationalism will see a very strong resemblance there to writings by the English. English nationalism was positive as state-building and forward-thinking, and Irish nationalism was stubborn nostalgia of the peasant people for the past. And that is what we see in there. And on the other side, a single idea grows within me. What then of Israel does today? It's about autonomy and having a Jewish state. The Jews and stuff, in Herzl's title. A state where Jews collectively would have control of their own destiny and set their own standards, where they have a refuge and a flag and a secret table. A state, an independent state, as Jewish as England is English, was the phrase I recall. And that doesn't mean an autonomous region in a bigger country, or a non-sectarian, secular, democratic, unified state, or a self-governing militant. Golda Meir explained to Emilia Abdullah, we didn't come all this way just to sit in your parliament. And they didn't come to rob the Palestinians of their patrimony either. They came for solid, reasonable, intelligent, and understandable reasons. Note the difference, solid, reasonable, intelligent, and understandable, and note the romantic pat about the Palestinians. To be free, to escape persecution, to be masters of their own destinies, to flourish just like everyone else. Indeed, everybody reading that, as I say, should really have thought very carefully about who might be really the author of this blog. And it was a bad show in a lot of ways. One thing about it is this, some Palestinians read that, got right up their nose, and they started making inquiries about who was behind this blog. That's more about the Palestinians and the idea of two states, peace is conceivable, but unfortunately the nature of the people, especially the back of the Palestinians, is the problem with the Palestinians. So, about Syria. The Israel-Palestine conflict is still a very good litmus test for putting all voices for the region up against. It gives you a pretty clear idea of who is on what side. The Gabriel blogger, of course, is charting the future for Syria. Another Syria, it's possible. The new Syria will be a better place for Kurds, it will be a better place for Muslims, it will be an even better place for communists. And one thing's becoming clear, we're done with dictators and rules are strong, no more generals, et cetera, et cetera. We've learned to respect one another even when we disagree. It's so tragically false because of course this is a period in which a huge amount of bloody dissent is driving conflict in Syria, including between the opposition groups themselves. And Syrian Salafis, they are as likely to take power here as they are to do with Tennessee. The only thing keeping us from freedom is fear. Nice note there, not to Roosevelt, et cetera. Another serious possible, and we can see it from here. Well, this is self-evidently nonsense. And screens like this went up on the blog. Well, there really is nothing that I have been able to find, unless it's buried in those trickle ponds, which is authentic descriptions of Damascus around us. It is extraordinarily lacking in a sense of place. And yet I've often seen people who have seen the blog say that that was what drew them to it. And they must be missing it, that it's not there. For some reason it's this thing that you don't, if you expect to see a thing you will find it and you don't notice its absence. Aside from having no specific details about Syria, none of that kind of thing which an old person puts on their blog saying, I'd last with having strawberry drinks again, this is the height of summer, et cetera, et cetera. Not even things like that, which you could do if you got a proper guidebook. She didn't have anything like that. She had some monstrous errors, which I think only an English-speaking person with no familiarity to Arab and Islamic culture would have. Oh, sorry, I'll go on ahead. Just use the scroll on the mouse to go back. My whole series of errors. She wrote a post called Still Sunni After All These Years. Again, note the reference this time to a famous top song by Paul Simon. And she says that she believes in God, etc. And that's why I call myself a Sunni, not for sectarian reasons. She says, though I bear in mind that Martin is damned by those to some, but for reasons of my belief, I reject the idea of a special people having a special access to God. I reject the notion of popes or imams who are infallible. I reject the idea of the faith. I reject the notion of priests and prelates needed to mediate the experience of God's ordinary people. I believe that all of us men and women are capable of comprehending the Bible, etc. That's a nice extract. It combines a kind of hateful sectarianism that would be very offensive to a lot of Shias and a lot of Christians who read it. with an assertion of her own identity. But she's made a extraordinary error with this thing that she says that her name, Amina, is a name that marks and is damned by birth to son. And that's stupid. The name Amina does not have any pejorative associations in any sect in Islam. And it cannot have because it is the name of the Prophet's mother. It's a very common name in all sects. What she's got is she's mumbled the name Amina with Aisha. The name Aisha is not favoured by Shias. If you meet someone with the name Aisha, they are most probably Sunni. Just like if you meet someone called Bernadette or Therese, they're most probably from a Catholic family. And she's got Aisha and Amina mixed up. Oh. That's like, as an error, that is just like incredible. As I say, Amina is a name used in respect of local support. I'll just put Amina Asada in there. a noted Shi'a Muslim writer from Iraq, Bint al-Khudr. She really was, really was an Arab, really was a writer, really was arrested and disappeared. And wore the name Mina. Then, the sixth of two, A fateful day in the Middle East. It's the anniversary of the Six Day War and also of the invasion of Lebanon. It was announced, oh, two things came on the blog. There was one of the circulated blog posts, My Father the Hero, where she claimed that Syrian security forces had come to the house to arrest her. They were the usual boneheaded, ascetic thugs. They were full of anti-Semitic insults to her and anti-gay rhetoric, but her father drove them off with his noble defense of freedom This post, my father, who you'll still find all over the internet, was widely repeated on all sorts of blogs and posts, thus showing how terribly ignorant people are. The coverage of the Middle East, as our two very able previous speakers have shown, is so inaccurate. that if you read too much of it, you end up knowing less, not more. And that's how they mistook that for My Father the Hero as an authentic post. I don't have time to pull out all the gender implications, et cetera, and cultural things, but it is, to put it mildly, it's very colourful and improbable, and it's written in a clumsy rhetorical style. It was followed shortly afterwards by the 6th of June post, which announces that Elena has been kidnapped apparently by security forces off the streets of Damascus. And the disappearance of the gay girl in Damascus was reported in the international media, and it was the lead story in the British Bullshit Corporation. Oh, I'm sorry, the British Broadcasting Corporation, who announced this awful event. I'll put him in for the BBC, I really do. And this is the picture that was circulating as Amina. As someone who's written a great deal about hagiography and saints, I find that an entirely typical picture. It's of the passive woman, and not the averted gaze, which is for studied admiration. And a very strong aspect of many of these representations of women is that the world looks at them and they don't look back, because you couldn't really call this faking this blog. And then... Yeah. The sudden announcement of her disappearance and the annoying stories on the BBC, who should have just left it, meant that a whole lot of people started to look for the real origins of the person who was writing the blog. And it attracted the attention of several people. The first was the Book Maniac blog, a very small, small blog, by a woman who does a long coverage of gay women's writings. And she said she was troubled about the Amina blog because it greatly resembled a previous hoax that she had been involved in where someone called Odin Solly had been running the plain Jane blog about a bisexual woman who was a victim of sexual assault. He turned out to be a middle-aged man. And she said very tolerantly of Odin, He was fun to be around, as well as being a good writer and superb online performer of identity. His late stories evolved later into a novel, A Mexican Year, which were, by the way, about a Muslim woman. If you read all three of these writing projects, you may see some stylistic and thematic similarities. was getting very, very good point there. She said that only being able to point to these stylistic similarities wasn't very strong evidence. In fact, it is very strong evidence. Her blog, Women She's Sewing, is short. She then got involved, she then linked up to the Let's Get Real blog. Let's Get Real blog. Oh dear, I can't get to my book. It was another gay blog, but in the West. And it had been featuring special writings from gay girls in Damascus But the editor of the Let's Get Real blog, who at one stage had a passionate online relationship with Amina, had a falling out with her before she disappeared off the streets of Masters. And the editor of the Let's Get Real blog was so annoyed by this that she allowed book maniac blogger access to the emails that she had got from Amina. And if you get the original of an email, you can get a whole lot of information out of the header, including from where it has come from. And it turned out that this, had never been routed through any server in the Middle East. In fact, they were directly linked to an email account at Edinburgh University. So we're starting to, yeah. So the editor of the Les Kittrell blog, Paula Brooks, had other issues with Amina that had some sort of spark. She said, you know, gang women have such high ideals and such passionate feelings Because it also rebounded on the editor of the Let's Get Real column. I love, of course, Get Real, because Paula Brooks was, in fact, a fake identity created by Bill Graeber, a 58-year-old man. And he's right. And it always caused a regular consternation. Let's get real. Are all these men doing half the job? What are the problems? Perhaps if it had been only, this is in 2011, if it had been only two or three years later, perhaps these men could have passed themselves off as taken part in some sort of transsexual thing. That was still not the thing back then. And it just appeared to be something halfway between fraud and mental illness. And they were sadly denounced by lesbians, speaking with the authentic voice that you don't find on gay girl blog. One of the people put on denouncing the Let's Get Real walk, she said that men have to leave them alone. She said they can take their dicks and leave. She said, well, dicks are gross. That is exactly the kind of thing, as I say, you never read. It's very distressing to read. Anyway, well, outing the Let's Get Real editor was the activity of some people, and other people were getting onto the rather serious issue of who was behind Gay Girl in Damascus. Various, another writer tried, who does a lot of coverage of the Arab revolutions, et cetera, he went through Twitter and he, what he discovered was that no one had ever spoken to Alina in person. Again, this was negative evidence, but it was rather compelling. And then, on the 12th of June, only a week after the announcement of the arrest and huge media outcry, while there is a huge campaign going on, Facebook have got 15, thousand members in a single hour, et cetera, to free Amina. On the Electronic Intifada blog, a Palestinian blog, the editor Ali Abinimar and Benjamin Doherty presented their evidence, which showed that the Amina Araf character is closely linked to a post-graduate student at Edinburgh University, an Anglo-American called Tom McMaster and his wife, Bridgina Froelker. And Tom McMaster's links to the blog are multiple, There were things like private emails sent to the blog's author contained photographs identical to pictures taken by Frolick and posted on her page in the Picasso photo-sharing website. At one stage, Amina had been running a discussion group on Yahoo Group some years back, and Yahoo Group requires that you put in an address when you put in as administrators, and it was his address which would be traced to him through rate records, et cetera, et cetera. The electronic intifada crew did a devastating job in a short time and the master did admit to being a Syrian gay girl, Gwaga. He said, the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on it were true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground. This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage in the Middle East. and pervasiveness of new forms of liberal orientalism. I can't believe I said that. You're talking about your sophomore. However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers. And he's lucky to have been out of reach of some of the readers. So, once exposed, the media then went into a sort of cover-up mode. The Washington Post, which is a great peddler of fake stories about the Middle East, it's almost a point of connection between many of them, said, if McMaster had not been so emotionally resonant, so detailed, so seemingly real, nobody would have cared much when Amina disappeared, and nobody would have worked so hard to figure out what might have happened to her, and nobody would have learned that she was a pale man from Georgia, which meant that at least in a chilling and narrow definition of what it means to be real on the internet, McMaster was very good at being Amina. And really, I mean, perhaps I haven't been fair, I've only shown you some extracts from the blog, but wouldn't you say they were emotionally resonant, detailed and seemingly real? Of course, there was something wrong with the voice I was using when reading them out. On the 11th of June, when doubts about Amina were beginning to circulate, the BBC ran a story stating that Amina, the gay girl blogger, might not be real. And this was time for them to cover their positions. And they described her writings as compelling stuff, but is it true? Mahmoud Hamad, a Syrian rights activist in London, is an inclined to think so. This is a quote from the BBC's article. Her level of writing, her sophistication, her interest in knowledge of Syrian society, for someone who doesn't know Asha from Alina, and what's happening right now politically in Syria compels you to believe that this person is actually a genuine political activist and homosexual, he told Newsmax. I don't know why he thinks that he can define who is and who isn't a gay woman, but be why he thinks he can. But he admits that she couldn't be a man of group of individuals or anyone really. Nobody Mr. Hamad knows has ever met Amina Abdollah in person and all contact with the blog has been by email, he says. It's interesting that the BBC would put up with such a shimmy shabby excuse of a story, obviously trying to cover up their own credulity. And who is this Mahmoud Hamad whom they are quoting as a Syrian human rights activist? He is actually, I find him again on 27 October 2015, he has a byline, he's a BBC Arabic producer, so he's a member of our own staff. He's not the independent voice at all. And I did not see any of the news media who gave extensive coverage to this host ever live up to their journalistic responsibilities and look at the story in detail and admit to their failures. Well, since then, there's been a couple of, a couple of analysis of this case, and I myself hope to publish something on it myself in the future. A filmmaker called Sophie Deras released a film, a documentary film, A Gay Girl in Damascus, The Amina Profile, in 2015. The film was largely about her own online relationship with Amina, and they used to have lots of emails on all of this, And the film gets so much into her personal story that it tells you very little about the political national context. And it is largely reconstructing her personal story of love, loss, and betrayal. She doesn't think it's funny, so she's not like me, she's not. She doesn't have a tough Australian sense of film. Distant Witness, a book by journalist, He discusses the Alina hoax and he was one of the first people on Twitter to be reporting doubts about her identity. And he describes basically just going through all his contacts and trying to find someone who knew her and finding it a bit strange that no one did. And also the fact that Syrian gay activists privately contacted him about the My Father the Hero post pointing out the utter improbability of the whole thing. However, neither he nor anyone else published these doubts until she was out and does a fraud. And I can understand that because there's sort of this terror that you're attacking an innocent and already oppressed person. And I do think that male writers have a justifiable bit of sense from the gender gap that they shouldn't be fairly attacking a woman's voice. Powerful resource. Another analysis of the Syrian Gay Girl blog is by British blogger, Bethany Rose, of the Milk Teeth blog, and she looks at it as an example of the simulcra. So she's taken the Doridian literary analysis. And the simulcra, what it is, is a copy of something which is so perfect that it supersedes the original, often crowding out the original. And the simulcra is a problem of our time because we live in a world of advertisements and representation And the Milk Teeth blog points out very fairly that how Macasta took pictures of a Croatian woman that he found online and presented them as a Mina. And there's so much she said about that hoax, how in relation to the simulacrum, the appropriated image and the press attention and the later outrage They show how an American man's opinion on what a Syrian girl should look like is more important than any actual Syrian girl. And here we're reminded of Camille's argument that the simulacra is not probably but an alternative. That if people of color, particularly in the third world, are not doing, suffering poetically or photogenically enough, they'll be replaced by a simulacrum. I think that's very true and a very good one. My own analysis, I don't exactly follow that analysis. I think it's an excellent point she's making. I think that the best way to look at gay girls in Damascus is in studies of propaganda. Wartime propaganda has features which are now infiltrating many aspects of news coverage and entertainment. We are in many ways a society suffused by war. One of the characteristics of propaganda is that it works on perceived ideas. It also exalts innocence and peace, but in terms which allow the infliction of the most extreme violence in order to protect them. There's a scene in the play by T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, where St. Thomas of Beckett is tempted by a demon who arrives after all the other temptations and he says, I only hear, Thomas, to tell you what you know. And he sketches several glorious features and St. Thomas says, I've thought of these things. And the tempter says, that's why I tell you. Your thoughts have more power than kings to compel you. And the poet is pointing out here how the articulation of our own thoughts appears extremely real. and has a rhetorical power which makes outside realities quite weak and distant. Like the demon in Eliot's poem, the wartime propagandist is always telling us what we already know. So such images of the garment, they free us from the arduous effort of understanding other people and other contexts, and instead we're entertained by the manifestation of our own subjectivity, which takes on the guise of a reality beyond us. This is a reflexive problem in our understanding when we understand others through ourself, and it's the reason why the girl blogger was gay, In our world, sexuality is essential to identity and self-actualisation through erotic desire is a key aspect to our culture. Since that is true for us, it needs to be true for Syria as well. And it's not only true, but it's the opposite of the truth. The opposition movement in Syria is actively hostile to the forms of sexual expression and choice which Western culture deems essential to individual freedom. And that wouldn't be a problem The inversion of reality is alarming because it indicates that in believing this source, readers will be drawn into believing a whole series of consequent notions. It begins with a readiness to support a freedom of a non-existent ideal Syrian citizen. It progresses from there to a political and military intervention to a sovereign nation, which is known through a series of fantastic images. The Syrian gay girl vlogger might appear to be an unusual thing, but as a matter of fact, it is part of a whole deal of hoaxes. There are many, many literary and media hoaxes, and they appear to be becoming more common. Yes, there's him. As far as literary hoaxes are concerned, I will mention the 1995 example of Benjamin Volkanovsky, A Swiss man, his real name is Bruno Dosica, but it was too unromantic for him. He became Benjamin Wilkomowski, survivor of the Holocaust. He wasn't a survivor of the Holocaust. He wasn't in Auschwitz as a child. He wasn't Jewish. But he wrote a memoir, Fragments, in 1995. And Fragments won several awards for Holocaust literature, despite the fact that the Holocaust must be one of the most studied academic topics in our time. It's very ludicrous that those are so easily fooled. And here is, I think, a level of credulity, a level of expectations of a so-called true memoir literature that will meet our expectations, which seems to be almost out of control. And Wilkomersky's memoir had several aspects of improbability, most notably, and this links up blogger from Aleppo, the Twitter feed of the Bill banner. It's ludicrous to speak of a child of three or four, having the kinds of developed thoughts that are presented in those texts, as was presented in Murkowski's memoirs. However, he was everywhere feted. He toured the United States and was greeted by a woman using the name Laura Grabowski. as she said, and she recognised Will Comerski, those men in the camp, together. They used to go on speaking tours together and play musical instruments. They were both childhood musicians. The BBC, who else, recorded a concert held at the Beverly Hills Synagogue on April the 19th, 1998, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which Will Comerski played carinet and Laura sang an original piece, Ode to the Little Ones. Who on earth is this Laura person, and why is she remembering Wilke Merski from the camp if he was never there? Well, she was never there. She was, that was an assumed name, and under her previous name, she had written a very lucrative memoir about being a survivor of satanic sexual abuse. I just mention that Wilke Merski case because you might think that the gay girl from Damascus meeting up with the Les Get Real, or both fictional characters, hitting up against another would be an almost impossible chance, but in fact there's quite a number of such cases if you start to study fake literature. Well, leaving Will Komerski where he is, an out-of-work ex-Israeli journalist who's visiting Switzerland looked into his case, found about 100 things wrong with his supposed identity and out of him, and so his book has lost all prestige. But it is a very good example of the kind of faith which is so easily accepted. Here we have the voice of Homs, Danny Abdul Dayem, a 22-year-old British citizen. He's a British citizen of Syrian descent. He therefore spoke excellent English, which is a very important thing for these folks. And he was at one point a citizen journalist from Homs, and he was the voice of Homs. But in March 2012, Syrian Danny, the voice of Homs, was hastily retired from his media career, because Syrian state television got footage of him setting up scenes where he was supposed to be in a conflict zone, and he was actually directing people to fire their weapons, et cetera, to make a good background for himself. And that, as I say, destroyed his credibility. That's the second one. Oh. Um. Going back to 2003, an example from Iraq. A woman called Jamana Hanna was promoted as being a unique voice about Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. And she was supposedly someone who had been held in prison in Iraq, severely tortured by Hussein in person, and then somehow survived to enter the Green Zone and tell the Americans the truth about Iraq. She was from the Assyrian Christian minority and spoke reasonably good English. Otherwise the Americans couldn't have understood her. They didn't understand her well enough though. In this room is a, who among us has heard of the widely prevalent rumour that Uday Hussain was a rapist? Everyone, he's widely known as a rapist. And yet, one doesn't quite know where one's heard that. It's from her testimony. He apparently raped her when she was a virgin and all this stuff. It was a very lurid story. She was an excellent witness because for, unlike most Arab women, she was willing to testify in explicit terms about sexual crimes. Do you see something similar there with the gay girl in Damascus, a person willing to breach discursive norms which are normally in place in that culture? The ridiculous thing is that, I don't know what her day to say was like. about him, he never met this woman in his life. So he certainly didn't rap her. I think it was, again, it was a very unlikely story. The president's son doesn't torture his own prisoners, just like he doesn't iron his own shirt or cook his own dinner. He's got people that do that for him. However, Joanna Hanna told a very good story and she was, various American judicial figures who interviewed her, who should have been on point, about the King of Witness statements in a critical way, were utterly credulous. Gerald Burke, who was the American pro-Roger case, said, it was a perfect case, someone coming forward with our worst expectations of what the regime was like. There again, you see how his expectations have been met by her. Occasionally, we would even say to ourselves, if this is a calm job, then she deserves to go to the United States or even Hollywood, and I suppose so. In 2005, her story was debunked by Sarah Solovich in Esquire magazine. Joanna had not even been a political prisoner in Iraq. She was, in fact, imprisoned for a short term on foreign prostitution charges. And then was released, and then made an absolute fortune out of her contacts with the United States, which she eventually left and moved to. What conclusions do we draw from this? Well, there's a couple of others as well. That's a quote from one of the Americans who interviewed Jumaana Khan. Isn't that extraordinary? He says he's been to 70 countries, taken testimony about many atrocities. New Jersey Superior Court judge. He should, as I say, be much better at evaluating testimony. I'll have to tell you the story. And of course, in 2003, here in Australia, we had a visit from a Jordanian lady who wrote a memoir about her best friend, who was the victim of an honor killing. Booth's friend was a Muslim, she herself was a Christian, Norma Khoury. Norma Khoury entertained us all, speaking to us in English with an American accent. I actually played a small role in the normal career hopes. I went to a public reading by her, and I wanted to speak to her, but she didn't seem to want to speak to me. You know, I was so lost. Reading to her in Arabic, a language which she seemed very unwilling to speak. And I wanted to ask her about the area from downtown and where she allegedly lived. But she couldn't, she got very rude from Tony, I think. And her bodyguard asked me who. past Random House, or published as an authentic memoir, despite widespread skepticism in Jordan. A Jordanian woman, Mrs. El-Sebag, looked into the background and finally found out Norman Corey's real name by a whole series of steps that I won't go into here. It's a very fascinating story. She managed to get in contact with an Australian journalist, Malcolm Knox, who then took up the story in Chicago and fitted the various pieces of her life together. And at the time when these events were supposedly taking place, she was in Chicago and in fact was being investigated by the FBI for financial fraud when she got a visa to come to Australia and present herself as the author of this book. There's something going on there about government, government corruption. As with the Syrian gay girl hoax, you can sense the presence of the intelligence agencies. They're only one step away of the political focus. Norma Currie, as with Jemima Hanna, had a background in fraud and had that ability of a con arms to sum up their audience. They also very good at saying who isn't the threat. She had a background of a fractured family and sexual abuse in her childhood, which is really awful, but of course does not excuse this kind of But the main, I think, responsibility of this lies with the publishers and the people who are putting these people forward. And Soir Brulé Vivre also came out in 2003. It is a French-language memoir by a supposedly Palestinian woman, and I wrote an expose of this. I went all the way to Jordan and to Switzerland to look up the background of it. And Souad is supposedly a survivor of an honor crime in the late 1970s was brought to Switzerland by an organization called . I questioned every aspect of the story and my writings on that memoir are online. And I just would say that it would be impossible for any fair-minded person to look at my protect and think it is an authentic memoir. And yet it is freely circulated and indeed it's often recommended in French schools for people interested in women's rights in the Arab world. Most unsatisfactory situation. Well, all conclusions that we draw from this is simply there seems to be a lot of fakes. Further, there's very little resistance to such fabrications in the prestige media. Journals are regular, they're not very fact-checked. The voice of the oppressed is favoured. Women and children first. There are male voices here, but they're real, and there'll always be a vulnerable youth for male. The critique of the fake always comes from the margins. When these fakes are exposed, it's always from a small online journal, or from someone like the Or me. I'm teaching history in a rural Australian university and I published my article about rural AV in a small German called The Diplomat, et cetera. It's a platform which is demonstrously distant from the circles of privilege. Whereas the places where these fakes are favoured is in places like the Washington Post and the BBC. The standpoint of the outsider is both why they can perceive the fake and why they're willing to say so. Now the fake, although it appeals to a facile anti-authoritarianism, is always closely aligned to hierarchies and structures of power. The fake speaks to us in our own language, literally. There's a huge resistance to reading subtitles. A person who wishes to be an authentic voice in the Middle East has to be able to deliver their message in English or French. And this links to the position of the audience, who are granted enormous power by fakes. They can demand to be entertained by reality and to pass up the effort of understanding others through contact with the contingent world. The fakes use the structure of human rights, which is defined as non-political, to push a political and indeed an imperialistic agenda. So my final word on this is this is politics for the politics taken out, a narrative which has fluid descriptions and intriguing involvement in fiction while having a serious and even deadly purpose in fact.