KUALA LUMPUR: The newspaper lays flat on the table. Sohar sits quietly, her hands shaking slightly as she picks up her juice and sips slowly. For her, the anger hits close to home. “I am in shock,” she told Bikyamasr.com on Saturday afternoon as she discussed her relationship with her husband of 12 years. He is South Africa, and black. “I just can't imagine how someone would see this article and publish it. It is the most racist thing I have seen in recent years and I am so angry.” The article she is referring to is a Sin Chew Daily newspaper story concerning a Pakistani man who threw his two children from a building before jumping to his death this past week. His wife, a Malaysian woman, lives on. The article posed the question: “Why are Malaysian women trusting of foreign men?” For women like Sohar, who have been happily in a relationship with a foreigner, the article struck a chord, and one that has created a stir of anger. “How could they? The man was obviously deranged and mentally ill, so why blame a Malaysian woman for loving him? It is just racist,” she said, pointing to a passage in the article that she argued should be enough to take the writer to court. “When a local young lady sits inside the luxurious sports car of her African lover, does she ever find out from where he has got his vehicle? Or when she moves into a Middle Easterner's apartment, does she pursue whether he has a valid visa, or a family back home?” the article asked. To make the assumption that African men, foreign men in general, are doing something illegal, are in the country illegally, for Sohar is tantamount to “a racist diatribe that should be fought in the court. It is hate speech.” The article continued: “Perhaps she is lonely, and needs the gentle caress of a foreign man. Or perhaps love is just blind. But such romance often comes with an exorbitant price tag.” Other women around the table, all with foreign husbands, shake their heads in unison. For them, this fearmongering and overt racist tone is not new, but they do think the media should be more responsible than to “tell lies to our children.” Chiara, 34, married her Bangladeshi husband three years ago, and has faced racism on the street. “People will often call out horrible names at us when we pass because he is different. But what gets me the most with this article is that it seems to tell people that foreign men are killers, bad people and will only hurt Malaysian women like us,” she argued. “And this is avoiding the reality that Malaysian women are attacked, murdered, raped and burned by their Malaysian partners. This is so wrong,” she added.
