Liz Flock
speaker
43 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Liz Flock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I appreciate it.
called Blog Post.
Very original. And what was happening at that time was the Arab Spring. So I was writing about protests in countries all over the Middle East every day for months on end.
And I was writing about all these really complicated topics and I was really scared every day writing about them. Scared of what? Um, just that the responsibility that I had, the tremendous responsibility to write accurately and quickly about all of these really important subjects.
Yeah, it was me and my editor, Melissa. And we were kind of, we're actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for a while. So we would get about 3 million page views a month. And we were encouraged to keep that up. So we posted as much as we could.
She writes about her complex identity of being an out lesbian in conservative Syria, having grown up in the U.S. And on the blog, she writes poetry, she writes history. She writes what are basically like foreign policy op-eds.
She sometimes writes more sexy poetry, I would say. I forgot about this, but I went back to it. And there was one piece called Testimony of Jasmine. And she writes, my sex to your sex, grinding in time with sounds of the city stretched out below. And it goes on and on.
So the second I read her post, My Father, My Hero, I immediately reach out to her for an interview. I mean, we were interviewing lots of activists, but she's like the dream interview because she's so interesting.
I am checking the blogs and social media, and I see that on Gay Girl in Damascus, there's a post not by Amina, and it says, Dear Friends of Amina, I'm Amina's cousin, and I have the following information to share. Earlier today at approximately 6 p.m. Damascus time, Amina was walking the area of this bus station.
and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Bashar al-Assad. The men are presumed to be members of the security services. Amina's present location is unknown.
This was happening a lot at this point that activists were getting kind of hauled off the streets. But this was a person that I felt intimately connected to. Like I knew her whole story at this point. Like I'd read her whole blog.
And so it was really scary. And obviously as a gay woman and a woman speaking out against the regime, like you're thinking that this person's dead. Yeah.
So all of a sudden doubts start popping up about Amina. It really all started very quickly. Like on the same day that she wrote that she was kidnapped or detained by security forces or that the cousin writes that, Andy Carvin, who's NPR's Twitter senior strategist and had this huge following, basically asks Amina, Has anyone met Amina?
Yes. I remember Andy asking that question on Twitter. And I remember thinking, wow, if this person isn't real, I have interviewed them saying that she is and given them a platform and caused this blog to probably increase in popularity. And yeah, that's a really scary moment as a super young journalist.
I don't know if you remember this New Yorker cartoon from 1993 where it says on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, and it has this dog at the computer. So obviously people were thinking about this all the way back to the 90s, but I know I wasn't. It's not that I was trusting everything I read online, but I think I just didn't expect this gay Syrian woman activist...
who was blogging like a lot of other Syrian activists, they were all totally legitimate to be someone so different and Yeah, I mean, as the story progressed, it got creepier and creepier.
Britta was studying Syrian economic development. She had written about Syria for a Quaker group that she was the head of. and she had even posted photos of her visiting Syria with her husband. And she had posted this photo on the photo website Picasa showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with the slogan, Syria believes in you.
I mean, it's not a photo that exists like thousands of times on the Internet. It is only in these two places. And we're like, oh, my God, this is the exact same photo.
We explained the whole situation to her. I remember thinking this is so bizarre. Like, I'm sorry, but I think that your daughter is this person posting on this blog, pretending to be a lesbian woman in Syria. And to her credit, she was not like... Please leave me alone. She basically said, wow, this is so interesting. And I don't think it's Britta. I think it's Tom. Tom. Britta's husband.
Tom McMaster. And she was like, he's so involved emotionally with Syria. Yeah. He, you know, his interest has evolved from there. And she even said Britta complains about him spending his whole day on the computer. Aha.
Showing 1–20 of 43 · page 1 of 3
Next →