1. There is no doubt whatsoever that Ishmael Beah’s account of events is a whole two years out of time.
2. As a result of this, he cannot have been a soldier for more than two months rather than the two years he claims.
3. Two months isn’t even enough time for basic training; Beah cannot possibly have experienced the combat he reports.
4. Beah’s chronology is not the only other falsehood in the book; the claimed year long odyssey of wandering from Mattru Jong to Yele he claims could have been completed in one day because the two towns are 6 kilometres apart, not 450 kilometres as Beah claims and as an admittedly (by the man responsible for making it) false map in the book shows.
5. The fight Beah claims happened in the UNICEF refugee camp in Sierra Leone which killed six ex-child soldiers never took place.
6. Beah’s school records prove he was in school in 1993 and 1994, when he says he was a child soldier.
Even without the evident Hollywood character of the book, complete with redeeming white American angels, the entire account is provably false.

Now: does it matter that it is false? Here’s why it does:
First, dishonesty is dishonesty, and it becomes more so when one makes a career out of it, and a lot of money besides. The Beah Camp is all complicit in this; they are frauds now, if they weren't all along. When the evidence is presented them that Beah is lying, and they choose to ignore that evidence, they are frauds.

Then, by presenting himself as a de facto spokesman for child soldiers worldwide (and far more than Kabba Williams, it is Beah who's a recognised figure), our Ishmael is in effect hijacking their tales, whether such tales are from Congo or Cambodia, Sri Lanka or Sudan. Once his own transparently false tale is exposed, everyone's tale becomes doubtful by taint of association. Unfair, but that's how these things go.

Thirdly, by reinforcing the notions of Hollywoodised salvation of poor victimised blacks, Beah is hiding the truth of the situation, where thousands of child soldiers (and child sex slaves, whom Beah doesn't mention) can never re-integrate into society and live lives of drug abuse, poverty and crime. All this is a crime against people who have no voice, whose voices the Beah Camp has stolen.

Fourth, Beah’s account trivialises the very real sufferings of genuine child soldiers. Since Beah crammed his fictional experiences with cliches of child soldiering (except, notably, sex slavery) and stole the experiences of a large number of other ex-child soldiers, he appears to have suffered much more than they did. If you believe what he said he suffered, you can’t have that much sympathy for someone who was “only” made to cook and clean and carry weapons for rebels or sent into human wave attacks, and you wonder why those people can’t re-integrate into society while Beah did such a wonderful job of it.

It’s time Beah, and his apologists, were forced to confront and admit his sins.

Jane. More info came in. Maybe that guy above was right? This appeared in USA magazine called New Republican in DC….

The New Republic

The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold

by Gabriel Sherman

Is the author of a new Oprah-touted love story the next James Frey?

Post Date December 25, 2008

I just got email fro agent Ira Silverberg too. he says he cannot help me but to go with what i’ve got, “I cannot help you but i think you have a lot to run with….”

Planned Holocaust “memoir” said by some to be a hoax now

This is pure conjecture, but interesting nonetheless…

NEW YORK — When Oprah and the Assciated Press trumpeted the amazing
love story of two Holocaust survivors who
allegedly met on a blind date in 1958 in the USA and recalled that
same night that they had been young “friends” in a Nazi camp in 1943,
when she, living in nearby village and posing as a Christian girl
(although she was Jewish) threw apples over a fence to feed the young
teenager — his “angel at the fence” — little did the media outlets
know that he was telling a great big fat fib. His
autobiography, ghostwritten by an un-nnamed writer and coming in at
300 pages from a major New York publisher and set for a February 2009
national laydown, has now been said to be shown to be
a hoax. Perhaps. Think James Frey and other Holocaust “memoirs” that later
turned out to be fake.

A respected Jewish historian has discovered that the entire backstory
that he the media — and also a Newsday reporter in New York a few
years ago — is
a maybe iffy so so hoax.

This man is greatly concerned about the autobiography
soon to be published. He knew of the story for many
years now, had been asked about it by other survivors, and he worries
about its impact.

“The story is a figment of his imagination. There is not a word
of truth in what he is saying. I feel sick…. (by the appearance of
the story),” “Even his late older brother , now dead, was embarassed and ashamed
by his story. He didn’t know
where the story came from.”

.

This man is especially concerned that a concoction like this puts a
lie to and undermines serious Holocaust memoirs.

“It is really sad,” who doubts the truth of
his backstory, says, and notes he has proof to back it up. ” I
read these stories (i.e., untruthful or
embellished stories). They always upset me. If someone would
investigate it, he would expose it easily. They (such authors) are
not even aware of the inconsistencies.”

the focus turned to
his publisher and the news organizations that helped publicize what
appeared to be a genuine and true Holocaust autobiography.

The book’s publisher said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that
he or the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author
from embellishing.

“In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked
for or found,” he said. “The fact is that the author went to
extraordinary lengths: he provided people who vouched for him. There
was a Jewish historian professor who vouched for his backstory, and a
writer who had written about him that seemed to corroborate her
story.” He added that the author had signed a contract in which he had
legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” the
editor said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”

The publisher has recalled nearly 50,000 copies of the book and is
offering refunds to book buyers.

The editor said she also trusted the author because his memoir had come
through “a respected literary agent” who had in turn been referred to
the author by a writer whom the editor had worked with previously.

Despite editing the book in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding
James Frey, author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little
Pieces,” who admitted making up or exaggerating details in his account
of drug addiction and recovery, the editor of the new book said
she did not independently check parts of the man’s story or perform
any kind of background check. She said she relied on the author to tell
the truth.
“In the post-James Frey world, we all are more careful,” she said. “I
had numerous conversations with him about the need
to be honest and the need to stick to the facts.”

“There was no reason to doubt him , ever,” the book’s agent said.
Similarly, reporters from major wire services and top newspapers who
interviewed him were also taken in by his
backstory.

“The way I look at it is that it’s just like when you get in a car and
drive to the store -’ you assume that the other drivers on the road
aren’t psychopaths on a suicide mission,” said one book critic.

The editor now said she wished she had been more skeptical and done
further fact-checking. “Of course I wish I could do it differently,”
she said. “I think a lot of other people were fooled before me.”

The book critic said: “I was to some degree trusting that the vetting
process of a reputable book publisher was going to catch this level of
duplicity.”

In a publishing landscape that has been rocked by scandals like Mr.
Frey’s fabrications and the hoax perpetrated by Laura Albert, the
woman who posed as the novelist J T LeRoy, a supposed addict and son
of a West Virginia prostitute, other publishers and agents said their
business still operated on trust.

“It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail,” said
an agent who represented J T LeRoy (without knowing he
was actually Ms. Albert) and Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling
memoir “A Long Way Gone,” who was recently accused by Australian
journalists of distorting his service as a child soldier in Sierra
Leone’s civil war during the 1990s, a charge that he and his
publishers have repeatedly denied. “So to present yourself as
something you are not betrays all the trust.”

Nan A. Talese, who published Mr. Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,”
said the combination of these recent episodes could start to change
the business’s practices. “I think what editors are going to have to
do is point to the things that happened recently and say to their
authors, ‘If there is anything in your book that can be discovered to
be untrue, you better let us know right now, and we’ll deal with it
before we publish it,’ ” Ms. Talese said. But she added: “I don’t
think there is any way you can fact-check every single book. It would
be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.”

Sarah Crichton, publisher of her own imprint at Farrar, Straus &
Giroux and the editor of “A Long Way Gone,” said she did some
background checking on Mr. Beah. “I come out of journalism and so I
certainly wanted to make sure the historical record was accurate,”
said Ms. Crichton, a former editor at Newsweek. “But I will confess
that I did the checking that I did also in part just to protect us,
because I knew that we were going to be publishing into a changed
landscape.”

please email me here. I have news of a new unpublished but soon Holocaust memoir that many in the Jewish historian commuinty feel might be a hoax, or in the last, highly EMbellished…….the man is a Holocaust survivor, that is true, but the tale he has told to media in USa and soon in OZ, get ready, is right out of an OPRAH show or Hollywood movie, and mostly likely NOT TRUE….but i cannot prove this….although i have the smoking gun…the media in the USA won’t listen to me, can we break this story in OZ?

danny

(in response to Benedict, above ^^^)

The publishers were approached privately but brushed the person approaching them off so he went to the newspapers.