Florence of Arabia

If ever there was a story made for Mark Steyn, “Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax” is it:

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 hadn’t 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 Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial. Greg Mortensen’s 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 don’t 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 No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other’s attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day’s Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.

Yes, yes, I stereotype. But stereotypes become stereotypes because they’re 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 can’t wait for some hot straight guy to jump in and make it a threesome.

Do I even need to say read the whole thing? (Don’t miss the cameo appearance by Andrew Sullivan on the way to article’s killer denouement.)