You will recall that on February 25, 2011, the ultra chic, ultra progressive Vogue magazine published a fawning profile of Syrian first lady Asma Assad and her husband Bashar al-Assad. Not too long after Joan Juliet Buck’s story appeared Syria descended into open savagery and what do you know, the story was flushed from on-line Vogue.
Seraphic Secret preserved and reposted the story because we believe that author Joan Juliet Buck and Vogue editor Anna Wintour—both fervent Obama supporters—should be held accountable for their moral nothingness. For even before Syria exploded into civil war it was a brutish, Jew-hating totalitarian state that occupied Lebanon for sixteen years and eliminated all political opposition through assassinations.
Well, the Syrian regime obviously believes that Wintour and Buck had it right, that fashion and mass murder make excellent public relations. Thus on Sunday, the Syrian regime published a photo of the ultra fashionable Asma Assad smiling, playing badminton and wearing a t-shirt that reads in Arabic: “You, my beautiful country.”
And because Joan Juliet Buck so convincingly summed up Asma’s appeal, let us flashback to Vogue’s scintillating prose:
Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.
