Sex, lies and literary fraud

[SaffronofMeshed]

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,21134084-7485,00.html


Sex, lies and literary fraud
By Caroline Overington
January 29, 2007


SHE is a literary hoaxer, a conwoman and a thief - and now, if you can believe it, she's also the victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Norma Khouri, author of the notorious 2003 blockbuster Forbidden Love, has told Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski she was abused by her father since the age of four, and then beaten by her husband.

She says this partly explains why she has told so many lies over the year - to police, publishers and, it seems, to many of the people with whom she has come into contact.

Khouri's book, published by Random House, was billed as the true story of an honour killing in Jordan. With sales approaching 500,000 and an advance rumoured to be $1.2 million, the tale made Khouri an international literary star.

Khouri originally claimed she had opened a unisex hairdressing salon in Jordan with her best friend, Dalia.

Dalia, a Muslim and - to make the tale more shocking, a virgin - was supposedly murdered by her brother after she fell in love with a Christian client. Khouri says she fled Jordan after the murder.

She was granted permission to live in Australia after the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs was told her life was at risk.

In fact, Khouri never owned - or, it seems, ever went near - a unisex hairdressing salon in Jordan. Such places do not exist.

She left Jordan at the age of three, was raised in Chicago, and married at 19. She abandoned two children with a neighbour for three months after her hoax was revealed. Now she is the unabashed, sobbing star of Broinowski's irresistible new documentary, Forbidden Lie$, which will premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival next month.

Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Khouri continues to insist in the film that she knew a woman (now not called Dalia, but a woman nonetheless) who was stabbed (or shot, it depends on which version she is telling) for falling in love with a Christian man at a hair salon (although, in this new version, the woman who is not Dalia doesn't fall in love while running her fingers through his locks, as happens in the book. Indeed, in the new version, she is not permitted to cut men's hair).

Khouri emerges from the film as a shocking liar, a wonderful actor and something of a modern-day siren, able to lure men if not to their deaths, then certainly to their financial ruin with her seductive ways.

The film features an interview with multi-award-winning journalist David Leser of Women's Weekly, saying he took Khouri back to his hotel room after a literary festival. They talked for five hours. She appeared to him as a dangerously vulnerable, frightened girl. So deeply connected did they become, he asked if she'd ever had a lover; she whispered: No.

In fact, as the time, she was married with two school-age children. He did not suspect a thing.

The hoax unravelled in 2004 when a journalist from the Jordan Times, Rana Husseini, went through Forbidden Love and found too many errors to count.

But Khouri says in the film: "I never deny that she existed. I'll never deny that she was killed."
_________________
O learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
Shakespeare

[diotima64]

Saffron, you may wince and whine and spread stories like that all you want - the FACT remains, that THOUSANDS of women get "honour-killed" in islamia over much LESS than a tryst with a christian.
Even OFFICIAL Turkish sources claim, about 1 woman EVERY DAY of the year in Turkey alone... and that does NOT count those, that get forced to commit suicide, or are slain by jealous husbands.
And that is TURKEY - the least vile of the vile moslem hell-holes.

[MsWesterner]

Saffron .....when you used the phrase "counted too many errors to count" the book that immediately came to my mind was the koran!!!

[SaffronofMeshed]

[katlike]

[SaffronofMeshed]

[katlike]

Oh dear, here we go again, I spelled it wrong yet again. iman, imman, imann, however it is spelled. You all try googling the word and coming up the correct spelling...go ahead, try it. It says, did you mean...**** and I click yes and then it never fails, it is wrong!
Anyways, I just meant, she must be an islamic preacher. Who else gets off on spreading so many falsehoods in one woeful tale. (did I at least manage to spell the last 23 words correctly?)
_________________
[/islam].
FYI~ It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times.

[TheMadTurk]

[yeezevee]

[TheMadTurk]

[anna]

TMT

[TheMadTurk]

[quote="anna"]

[almaz]