All last week the knights in shining armor at MSNBC did their level best to rescue the fair damsels of the realm from the vile “War on Women” waged by the vicious ogres of the Right, you know, like Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum. But in the midst of hyping Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (March 8), the liberal network failed to highlight a real story of women’s oppression: a Pakistani-Austrian woman’s tale of death threats and beatings at the hands of her reactionary Muslim mother.
What’s more, this story, entitled “Why My Mother Wants Me Dead,” was published at none other than The Daily Beast, a site whose writers and editors frequently appear on MSNBC programming.
“When I was 18, my parents threatened to kill me. And they meant it. If they had their way, I would probably be dead today,” Sabatina James began her March 5 article at Daily Beast:
The trouble started when I was 15. At the time, my family was living in the Austrian city of Linz, a world away from our native Pakistan, where I had grown up in a rural village in the shadow of the Kashmir mountains. I loved the freedoms of my new life in Europe—the T-shirts and jeans, the lipstick and eyeliner. My conservative parents didn’t. We fought about swimming lessons and acting classes, which my father said were for prostitutes. Tampons were an issue, too—my mother thought they would ruin my virginity.
When my mother found my diary one day and learned that I had kissed a boy in the park after school, she cracked me across the cheek, slammed me against the wall, and kicked my legs, calling me a whore. When she herself was my age, she was settling into an arranged marriage. She thought it was time for me to do the same.
I disagreed. Thus began a violent three-year battle with my mother.
James eventually escaped her abusive family, but she still lives in fear to this day of an honor killing
Read the article here.
SOURCE: IOTW
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