Jonah Goldberg takes up the case of "A Gay Girl In Damascus."
I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important -- this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian-American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus." According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing.
A couple of problems here. For one thing she was a he. Further, he was an American not a Syrian. And then there was "her" story.
...how dare "advocates of war, occupation, dispossession and apartheid" use Arab and Muslim hostility to gays as "'evidence' that the primitive sand-people don't deserve anything other than killing by the enlightened children of the West."
Besides, "she" has never been harassed by Arabs for being gay. But in America, "she" has been "struck by strangers for being an Arab" and "had dung thrown at me" for wearing the hijab.
Except that is a lie.
Worse, it's propaganda. McMaster's fake-but-accurate lesbian was perfectly pitched to Western liberals desperate to alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance. No longer must you think too hard or make tough choices if you're, say, anti-Israel and pro-democracy, or pro-gay rights and in favor of the self-determination of Muslim fanatics. Heck, you can even stop worrying and love a lesbian feminist who sees no big deal in wearing a religiously required sack over her head. With Amina, all contradictions are resolved -- in favor of the incoherent biases of the anti-America and anti-Israel left.
But that's what they do on the left. They make stuff up.
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