The BEAST: America's Best Fiend

Note the crude, phonetic misspellings of several words which would be elementary to the real Niman, who teaches classes on writing. It is impossible to believe that a politically aware man of letters wouldn’t know how to spell the name of such a topical city as “Baghdad,” or such a common word as “jowl.” It’s not as hard to believe that even an educated person might have a little trouble with the trickier “oscillates,” but to render such an atrocity as “osolates,” one would have to be some kind of Cro-Magnon halfwit, something the real Michael Niman surely is not. Even the name of the very publication he works for is comically misspelled as “Artvoive.”

What’s worse, this Niman-imposter’s mental flaws go far beyond errors of spelling. This “Niman” appears to assert that “Al[l]an Uthman” couldn’t be an Iraqi name, whereas the real Professor Niman, a worldly scholar who wrote in January 2001 that he had “been following the Iraq situation for the past two decades,” would surely know that “Uthman” is the Arabic counterpart to the Turkish “Osman,” and a common surname throughout the Sunni-Muslim world including Kurdish Iraq, from where Uthman’s paternal family originates. Also, the real Niman, an impeccable researcher, would have easily unearthed, through a simple Lexis-Nexis search, several short newspaper articles from 2003 about the very real story of how Uthman’s father treated Saddam Hussein’s teeth in the early ‘70s, including one by our very own Buffalo News (“Local dentist had an unusual patient: Saddam,” 4/11/03).

As if all of that weren’t enough, there is the uncharacteristically crude, ad hominem nature of this faux Niman’s attacks regarding the relative physical beauty of both our editor and publisher. But it’s not just the callous and inaccurate nature of these insults (our editor is clearly more froggish than toad-like) that rings untrue. The truly incredible aspect to these spiteful aspersions is the preposterous notion that someone who looks like this:

Writing to someone who looks like this:

Would criticize anyone’s appearance.

Furthermore, as Artvoice publisher Jamie Moses assured us in a recent e-mail, he’s simply disinterested and almost completely unaware of The BEAST’s existence, and bears us no ill will. So clearly, the notion that he would “put a curse on” our publisher, Paul Fallon, is totally absurd, a fiction borne of the deranged mind who concocted this strange, spurious message.

So, obviously the e-mail is a fake, a decoy (although Fallon, shaken by the horrific specter of a Moses-driven pox set upon him, is taking no chances and has hired a Shaman to exorcise whatever evil, monopolistic spirits may encircle him). But what motivation could there be for such fakery? We can only conclude that we were the intended victims of a “gotcha” false story plant, the sort of tactic Karl Rove has been credited with, most famously in the case of the forged memo which found its way into Dan Rather’s ill-fated report on Bush’s National Guard record. This rogue e-mail was a vicious attempt to drive a dagger into the heart of Buffalo’s usually tight-knit progressive community, a divide-and-conquer deception crafted to turn like-minded allies against each other. But Mike and Jamie should worry not, because we know them better than to believe they could be so bitter, petty and ignorant as to have anything to do with this unsophisticated rubbish. As always, we remain Artvoice’s—and Mike Niman’s—best friends and biggest fans. Keep up the good work, fellas!