More on the reporting of Ruthie Ackerman from her "fixer" in Lebanon

I told Moe Ali Nayel (whose fed-up letter I posted under the headline of an angry Arab fixer) that many Western journalists go to Lebanon claiming that they want to study potatoes when they really want to write about other matters.  He wrote me this:  "To tell you the truth now that you pointed out the fact that some come to Lebanon pretending they are doing fluff stories like she tried to do, I remember that when I first met her she started asking about HA and how they use the internet to mobilize people and then later in the conversation when I was explaining that people use internet cafes a lot in Lebanon, she asked me if we could go to HA areas, villages etc and talk to people in internet cafes, I refused. Another day when we met she said that she heard HA has many hackers and would it be possible to talk to them. I was surprised and said it's impossible to do such things. I had a weird feeling about her after she kept insisting on doing things in HA areas, that’s the term she kept using, and I decided that I was going to keep her away from doing any story about HA. She kept insisting until I finally gave her the number for...Honestly, sometimes I meet journalists who come to Lebanon and are only interested in HA, and their insistence makes me suspicious and I might be wrong but I just avoid them and let them go. I always find myself stuck because I want to tell someone but I don’t know who to go to, or what to say if I want to alert HA, or what is the best way to approach them. With the Ackerman incident, khalas, it made me decided that I should speak out. Before I wrote to you I spoke to journalists friends who I trust and asked them how I could get my piece out, but all I got was "oh it's too personal" and "you might not get jobs after it in the future" "you need to take out the personal element" but the personal element (disappointed with journalism) was a big motivator for me.I had sleepless nights reading both her articles word by word and I caught her lying here where her writing differs from one article to another: “In the women's section, where I was standing, young girls cheered every time Ahmadinejad's face appeared on-screen. Few could understand his speech—he spoke in Farsi, and it was hard to hear the translation—but it didn't seem to matter.”  It was hard for her to hear the translation because she was on the balcony far away; unlike in the rally everyone could hear the translation fine. Note how she is lying about her being among the people because in the Atlantic article she said:” A friend who lives in Dahieh invited me to his mother's apartment to drink tea and watch the festivities from her second floor balcony”. In the slate article she lied about her being there and I was there in the journalists section: I did not see her there,  she had asked me to get her quotes from there, and finally she was not permitted from Hiz, so if she really was there then she sneaked in and that is not easy to do and worrying. This is troubling because she did not know where Daheyeh was, and for sure she did not know anyone from there.  As I said before, the money was not my motivation, when I decided to write exposing her, but just another reason why she is an unprofessional and ignorant journalist. I have seen many journalists lately coming to Lebanon wanting to write about us, continually using sectarian references, something we ourselves need to escape from and not be compounded by the western media, who think they know more about us then we know about ourselves. I hate that.  I know I said this before but thank you for endorsing my piece, and I’m honoured to have it posted on The AngryArab. I can’t explain how much I’m encouraged to write more and the fact that it was okayed by you makes me feel I don’t need any other western journalist to tell me if it’s right or wrong."