The "Gay Girl in Damascus" mystery was solved, up to a point, on Sunday when Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old postgraduate student at Edinburgh university, announced that he was the person behind the blog, and apologised. 

The confession came after investigations established a link between him and the imaginary author, "Amina Arraf". 

Clearly, I was mistaken in thinking that a real Arab woman lay behind the fake identity created for the blogger. 

The remaining mystery is why MacMaster did it. As he says in his statement, the blog was not misleading as to the situation on the ground in Syria, but he has undermined the credibility of that picture by fictionalising it and not making clear from the beginning that it was fiction.

His claim that he was only trying to "illuminate" these things for a western audience just doesn't add up. There are a fair number of genuine lesbian and gay Arabs writing on the internet about their lives and thoughts, often in English, and their writing is easy enough to find with a little help from Google.

MacMaster claims in the apology that his fake blogging has also confirmed his feelings regarding "the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism." His efforts have certainly diverted some attention from very serious – and real – events in Syria but to blame that on "liberal Orientalism" or the media's superficiality is somewhat wide of the mark.

What primarily interested the media was not the supposed novelty of a gay woman living in Syria but the apparent courage of "Amina" and her father when the uprising broke out. The media can hardly be criticised for admiring that – and it touched many others too, as can be seen from the expressions of public support after her imaginary arrest.

Further, if the intention had been to test the media's gullibility (which I doubt), MacMaster went about it the wrong way by making the blog's content too plausible. For a proper test, there have to be some fairly obvious clues that a conscientious journalist could reasonably be expected to detect. In this case, there appear to have been none, especially when the difficulties of reporting on Syria are taken into account.

Meanwhile, I hope people will not forget that there are still real Aminas out there. MacMaster, whatever his excuses, has done them a disservice.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 13 June 2011.