DIANA MUIR APPLEBAUM: WHO IS AHMED MAHMOUD?
http://www.dianamuirappelbaum.com/?p=766
It is hard to make a living telling stories about yourself. Since one lifetime will contain only so many good stories, it is pretty easy to see what would tempt someone like Mike Daisey to just make stuff up – it sells.
Ahmed Mahmoud apparently thought so, too. By his own description he is a “Palestinian writer, director and academic based in the UK”. He is working on a novel, but last year he published an essay about his family. Problem is, he appears to have greatly enhanced the drama of his childhood by making stuff up.
I imagine that Masoud or his supporters will use the Mike Daisey defense, “If you think this story is bigger than that story, something is wrong with your priorities.” Lying is fine as long as it’s for a good cause, the ends justify the means. But I hope he doesn’t. I hope that he simply apologizes, and pledges to stick to the truth going forward. I don’t have a lot of hope that he will, since he has already failed to respond to the evidence of fabulism.
“If it’s a memoir – or an appearance as a journalistic source – the material better be true.“
Answering Mike Daisey’s comment:
Yes, I have followed it.
This comment of yours to the Washington Post on July 12 interested me particularly: “I would still do it. And since I would still do it, I think they should take their best shot at me. Anybody who’s upset, they should go ahead and be upset.”
Overall, I think Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post says what needs to be said: “It bothers me that people want to find excuses for Daisey, and are doing so in ways that confuse the issue…” Weingarten says he only knows Daisey’s work from the January This American Life episode and subsequent fallout. “Think about the underlying reality here: Mike Daisey has such contempt for his listeners that he is willing to invent facts—powerful, evocative, central facts of his narrative—to make people believe what he thinks they should believe. He is saying: I, Mike Daisey, believe a certain truth about the world. I want you to believe the same thing, so I will distort reality to make you believe it, and not tell you I am doing that.”
Addendum on Ahmed Mahmoud:
Sadly, Mahmoud has been given the opportunity to apologize for fabulizing, and has not taken it.
Radio Netherlands, which broadcast his story as a non-fiction memoir, is now uncomfortable with calling his story non-fiction. “Mr. Masoud’s use of the term “raid” is misleading: it’s treated more like a background fact rather than a perception or misperception. We’ve therefore altered the language describing his story on our website.”
Radio Netherlands: “We based our interview on an article in The Guardian newspaper Saturday 19 March 2011. Mr. Masoud describes how as a teenager he’d come home from school. His parents were crying as they watched a TV program about children who were mixed up at birth in the hospital. Mr. Masoud describes his father at that moment: “Then he wiped his eyes and held my hand, and my mum’s hand, and he started telling the story about what happened when I was born. At the time, the hospital was being raided and I was evacuated to a special care unit before my mum had even seen me. My dad heard news that the hospital was being bombed and went straight there…”
Mamoud’s response: “As you can read from the article, I never make the allegation of the hospital being bombed which seems to be the focus of the complaints. Raided doesn’t mean bombed.”
Radio Netherlands: “I’ve tried to verify independently if there were any Israeli raids of any sort on hospitals in Gaza in the early 1980s.” There weren’t
Mahmoud’s response: “I have made my position clear to these allegations before: I never made a claim that the hospital was bombed. I mention clearly that my father heard [sic] on the news. The story is about the parent/son relationship and not the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where facts can be muddled up depending on which side of the fence you are. I hope this answers your questions.”
The facts are facts. Facts don’t get “muddled up” all by themselves. They get muddled propagandists and writers who try to boost their careers by making stuff up and selling it as a memoir.
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