The Wrong Kind of Attention

By now, everybody knows that the "lesbian Syrian blogger" was a hoax perpetrated by a 40-year old married man, a graduate student in Scotland. The West, eager for anything that reflects badly on the Arab world, ate it up for these past five months. His excuse is that he wanted to call attention to the situation in Syria and other Arab countries.

Well, he went about it the wrong way. It's one thing to write fiction based on real-life situations, and quite another to create a character that is supposed to be a real human being that tells stories about suffering persecution, thus increasing the ill feeling against a government or regime, no matter how bad it might be. Fighting for democracy, freedom and human rights must be done with the truth and nothing but the truth.

Anything less than that is to use the same tactics of those who represent tyranny and the dark side of the human condition.

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