More comedy. Christ! Everywhere I turn, it's hustlers peddling bogus history. Check out this sweetheart: Norma Khouri.
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From The Victims of ‘Victimhood’ :
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Norma Khouri’s international best-seller “Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan” is an indictment of “honor killings”: the practice of killing women whose behavior has shamed the family. Khouri’s lifelong friend Dalia, a Jordanian Muslim, was murdered in Amman by her father for falling in love with a Christian.
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Fearing for her life, Khouri fled Jordan to asylum in Australia. The sensation caused by the book is flawed by one thing—the story may be a lie from beginning to end.
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An 18-month investigation of “Honor Lost” (titled “Forbidden Love” outside the U.S.) was conducted by the Australian Sydney Morning Herald and Amal Sabbagh—the Secretary-General of the Jordanian National Commission for Women.
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On July 14, the resulting expose rocked the literary world.
Khouri’s book is riddled with factual errors as well as what Sabbagh called a general “lack of knowledge of Islam and of Jordan.” For example, the book refers to Kuwait as Jordan’s neighbor when the two countries share no border. It describes the Jordan River flowing through the capital of Amman when no such tributary exists. These are strange errors from someone who hails from Amman.
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More damning was the revelation that Khouri had left Jordan at the age of three and lived in Chicago for almost 30 years.
Lying for fame and fortune is nothing new. The intriguing aspect is how our society has become so gullible as to gulp down claims of victimhood without pausing for evidence.
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From Chicago police reopen file on Norma Khouri :
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AMMAN — The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday that Jordanian author Norma Khouri had allegedly defrauded close friends, family and the sick of around $1 million over “the best part of 10 years.”
The Herald's Chicago correspondent Caroline Overington said 34-year-old Khouri has been on the run from the Chicago police and the FBI for more than five years.
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Now, following the Herald's investigation of her literary hoax, the police have reopened a metre-thick file on the author — known in the US as Norma Toliopoulos — with the aim of charging her with a decade's worth of crime, Overington wrote.
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“We believe she is a con woman,” a source within the Chicago Police Department told the Herald, “one of the best we've ever seen.”
Khouri has allegedly netted at least $1 million from her crime, according to the Herald.
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Chicago police were about to issue a warrant for her arrest in 1999 but she took flight, eventually resurfacing in Australia as the best-selling author of the supposed memoir Forbidden Love, the newspaper said.
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Documents obtained by the Herald show that in 1996, Khouri took 97 US government bonds worth $408,000 from a safety deposit box owned by her elderly neighbour, Mary Baravikas. Police believe that she also stole Baravikas' house and $33,000 in cash that was also in the deposit box, according to the Herald.
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Khouri has also been accused of taking $40,000 from a man who claims he was her lover. According to documents obtained by the Herald, a man called John Closterides told Chicago police in 1999 that he had a “romance” with Norma Khouri. She told him she was a Jordanian princess, the Herald said.
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From Betrayal but a small part of the larger deception :
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When I wrote my novel Somewhere, Home, based on my grandmother's life, I realised that in spite of all the difficulties she faced, and at a very young age, she never felt sorry for herself. She chose instead to be resourceful, to make a new life in her adopted home and with her adopted family. While my book fictionalised events, I hoped I had conveyed a real sense of her feistiness and of her strength of spirit, the way she had succeeded in looking beyond her own traditional upbringing. I wanted the book to be in that sense truthful.
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Which is one of the reasons I was so upset by Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love, the "memoir" about a Jordanian honour killing which was withdrawn by its Australian publisher after being exposed by the Herald as a fraud. The book, published in 2002, became a bestseller in the US and was sold to publishers around the world; in Australia it sold more than 200,000 copies.
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To cop a phrase from Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, these people give me a royal pain in the gulliver. Watching this silliness seems to help:
http://www.craptv.com/coop/america.htm
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Biff Cappuccino