Thread by @DrTermagant

Husband idly asked me a couple of hours ago 'what happened to the Gay Girl in Damascus guy?' Cue a wander round the web and HOLY SHIT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY LET HIM BACK IN AS A PHD STUDENT A FEW YEARS LATER. WTAF? #thread

For those who don't remember/didn't know about this scenario, in 2010/11 Tom MacMaster, an MA student at @EdinburghUni, invented a gay, Syrian woman called Amina. He blogged 'as' her during the early period of the Arab Spring in Syria, gaining press attention, writing...

... for queer publications 'as' her, and even forming a relationship. When people started suspecting a fake, he had 'Amina' kidnapped by the Mukhabarat, triggering international calls for her release. When research by various people including @acarvin and @AliAbunimah rumbled...

Amina as a hoax perpetrated by a white guy from Georgia, studying at Edinburgh Uni. There also seems to be a lot of genuine doubt as to the involvement of his wife, Britta Froelicher, at the time a PhD students in the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews. Certainly her...

pictures were used on the blog but some writers seem to think that she was more involved than that. Who knows. There are innumerable reasons why the hoax was profoundly dangerous and offensive: the claiming of a privileged white man of a gay Arab woman's voice; the focusing...

of attention and international action on a non-existent person when serious violence was being meted out on genuine Syrian activists by the Assad regime; the apparent failure of MacMaster and Froelicher to grasp what was so wrong with all of this. Etc. Etc. Furtling around...

on the internet, however, I managed to find out that 'Tom MacMaster' as was now goes by 'Thomas J MacMaster' and, despite all their promises at the time to condemn his actions, Edinburgh University quietly let him come back to do a PhD several years later. His profile...

on the @HCAatEdinburgh website is here: ed.ac.uk/profile/thomas…. He also seems to have been teaching as an adjunct professor at @Morehouse College in the USA, and to have been active as a junior academic in medieval history. He doesn't seem to have gotten any nicer or more...

honest over the past decade, though. People in the field such as @warpath and @DrMatthewMesley have pointed out that he uses social media to hassle anti-racist and queer medievalists. He's also been accused of transphobic behaviour here: clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/tom…. Despite all...

.. this, @BloomsburyAcad have published a book co-edited by him, although it kind of looks like they might have tried to bury it a bit? Or maybe their website is just poorly structured. Whatever the case, MacMaster doesn't seem to have learnt from the Amina story, and...

still seems to be showing a lot of deeply problematic tendencies. And I'm still gobsmacked (but also kind of not surprised) that Edinburgh Uni took him back. That's their ethics for you.