Lib media bias at its finest.

How stoning of a woman riled the world – CNN

“We were shouting for help, but nobody listened,” said Muhammad Iqbal about the slaying of his pregnant 25-year-old wife, Farzana Parveen, at the hands of her relatives, who gathered to kill her in front of a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan.

More than 20 members of the woman’s family stoned her to death for the “crime” of “dishonoring” her family by choosing to marry someone she loved rather than a husband her family had chosen. A police officer said “one family member made a noose of rough cloth around her neck while her brothers smashed bricks into her skull.”

Social media immediately picked up on the horrific and very public killing. #Farzana became a hashtag that provoked a conversation about the crime of so-called “honor killings” and society’s tolerance and the police’s alleged indifference to it. Suddenly a crime that not long ago would barely have elicited a headline was now a source of conversation and consternation among those on social media both within and outside Pakistan. And discussion about the slaying turned up another grim fact: Iqbal told CNN he killed his first wife so he could be free to propose to Farzana.

The #Farzana hashtag comes on the public heels of another long-known and rarely noted issue that caught fire in the public’s imagination and provoked a storm of well-deserved outrage: the kidnapping of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria by the militant group Boko Haram.

A Nigerian lawyer created the #bringbackourgirls hashtag to call attention to the mass abduction of young women who gathered at school to take their exams.
Once the word got out, people around the world began talking about the issue over social media. Reporters and politicians rushed to follow their lead, and discussions about girls’ education and the crimes of Boko Haram at last punctured public indifference.

In America, another horrific crime unleashed a gush of online discourse. This time it was a 22-year-old man on a quest for what he called his “day of retribution,” when he would torture and kill “good-looking people” before launching a “war on women” to punish girls and women who he said had “starved (him) of sex.” The misogyny in the killer’s more than 100-page diatribe led women to begin using the #Yesallwomen hashtag to push forward a conversation on Twitter and Facebook and Tumbler about the rarely discussed though frequently experienced issues of violence against women, from sexual assault to harassment to domestic brutality.

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HT: Jazz Shaw