Missing, A Gay Girl in Damascus and internet access

One of Syria's most influential and groundbreaking bloggers has gone missing just days after the Syrian government shut down the internet, taking a page from Mubarak's playbook amid ongoing protests. Amina al Omari broke many barriers with her blog A Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog she used as a platform for what she described as "An out Syrian lesbian's thoughts on life, the universe and so on." According to a post today by her cousin on her blog:

Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

 Is Amina's disappearance a warning to other bloggers? Syrian authorities have clamped down on the media, forbidding foreign reporters from entering the country and targeting domestic journalists who don't tow the line. The death toll in the ongoing protests stands at more than 1,100 people, with reports that more than 10,000 people have been imprisoned since the outbreak of protests in March.

Yet Amina is not what one might call a 'typical' cyberactivist, focusing less on Politics than on the personal, though as I and others have observed elsewhere, the personal is political in the Middle East (and elsewhere, but especially in repressive societies where the public sphere is colonized by the state). She tore down barriers and destroyed stereotypes by writing about her identity as an Arab, an American, a lesbian and a faithful Sunni Muslim. As in one recent post Ana min Virginiya (I'm from Virginia) where she wrote:

I am complex, I am many things; I am an Arab, I am Syrian, I am a woman, I am queer, I am Muslim, I am binational, I am tall, I am too thin; my sect is Sunni, my clan is Omari, my tribe is Quraysh, my city is Damascus ….

And I am also a Virginian. I was born on an afternoon in a hospital in sight of where Woodrow Wilson entered the world, where streets are named for country stars … I grew up on a battlefield of the American Civil War in a town where other ancestors have lived and died for 250 years. And I learned this language in Virginia.

 I live so close to her Virginian home and hope that one day we will have the opportunity to meet in person. For now, the campaign for her release by whomever has taken her has begun. A page has been started on Facebook, a letter writing campaign to congress and the State Dept. urging them to call for the US to take action is underway, and several organizations have begun to speak out.

*** UPDATE: Please note that this whole thing turned out to be a hoax by a 40-year-old American guy based on Scotland.***