ISRAEL MATZAV: Another picture John Kerry would like you to forget

Here's another picture John Kerry would like you to forget. On Monday, I posted a picture of Kerry and his wife having dinner with Assad and his wife in Damascus. This picture is part of the same trip. It's from Kerry's April 2010 meeting with Assad. Here's why he went to Damascus. 

On Thursday, Kerry came to town.

Assad on Sunday called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to ditch negotiations with Israel in favor of “armed resistance.”

Kerry, nonetheless, said in Damascus following a three-hour meeting with Assad that Syria was committed to engaging in peace-making and was essential to the Mideast process.

Does anyone in Washington see a contradiction between those two sentences? (I mean 'official Washington').

“Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,” said Kerry, who has long advocated US engagement with Damascus.

“He believes in engagement with Syria, and that through engagement the Syrians can be convinced to play a more helpful role in the Arab-Israeli process,” a Kerry aide noted. “This is part of his ongoing [efforts].”

In Israel last month, Kerry discussed Syria’s relationship with Iran, saying that “no one should be surprised, given the relationship of the last years, that discussions are continuing between Syria and Iran.”

The two countries are neighbors, he said, “and they have obviously been pushed somewhat together by the events of the last years. My hope is that we can offer a better alternative, a better set of choices.”

What has gone wrong?

ISRAEL MATZAV: The picture John Kerry doesn't want you to see

Yes, that's the Kerry's and the Assad's dining together in a Damascus restaurant in better times. On Sunday, Kerry compared Bashar al-Assad toAdolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein. 

Family photo album reveals Assad private life Photographs have emerged showing intimate details of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's family life.

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Bashar al-Assad celebrating the second birthday of one of their children with wife Asma Assad Photo: CAMERA PRESS

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Asma Assad on an aircraft with her husband Bashar al-Assad and children Photo: CAMERA PRESS

Some believe that Bashar and Asma al-Assad are hiding in a bunker deep beneath Damascus, others that the Syrian president and his wife have relocated to a heavily protected palace in the loyalist city of Latakia.

And last week the country was rife with rumours that Mrs Assad herself had fled to Moscow with the couple's three children, soon after the bombing that claimed the lives of four senior regime officials including her husband's brother-in-law, leaving Mr Assad to run the country without her.

Russia's foreign ministry was eventually forced to deny it. "That this is a bad-natured informational trap and I advise you not to fall into it," said spokesman Alexander Lukashevich.

But after the rebel onslaught brought mayhem so close to the palace gates in Syria's capital city last week it is not surprising that such speculation is rife.

Last year Tunisia was among Arab countries which were privately offering the Assads safe haven, if they departed from power. Iran, one of the only remaining allies of the Assad regime, is another possibility; so is Russia, the regime's chief supporter at the United Nations.

Most parents would want to safeguard a young family - and many other Syrians, of all political hues, have already done exactly that by fleeing the country, or making plans to leave.

It is one of the more contradictory facts about the couple who have presided over 18 months of bloody repression of their people - with Mr Assad ordering the arrest, detention and torture of thousands of his own compatriots, or sending tanks to shell rebel villages indiscriminately - that they have tried to preserve the nearest thing possible to a normal family life.

They were never an ordinary family, with their palaces, private jets and billion dollar fortune. But now photographs have emerged - apparently taken for propaganda reasons - showing in intimate detail how they led an apparently warm family life, one to which it may never now be possible to return.

Mr Assad is seen doting on his young children, exchanging a joke with his British-born wife, and blowing out the candles at his daughter's second birthday party. One picture shows the family in holiday mood during a flight – perhaps on the family's Falcon 900, used to fly to their favourite palace near Latakia on the Mediterranean. The president is even glimpsed contentedly taking pictures himself, enjoying his favourite hobby.

The photographs, from Mrs Assad's private collection, were handed to a foreign friend in Damascus before the uprising started in the spring of last year. They are believed to have been taken between five and seven years ago in Syria, probably by a professional photographer, and appear intended to portray the family as happy, normal and modern. Their cosy intimacy looks too natural to be have been staged.

Unseen by the photographer, and by most visitors to Syria, were the torture chambers, tanks and chemical weapons that the family relied on to maintain their brutal rule.

Also unseen among the photographs of Hafez, now aged 10, with his sister, eight-year-old Zein, and their brother Karim, now seven, are images of those less fortunate Syrian children who have died in the course of the uprising: some blown apart in artillery barrages against rebellious suburbs, others slaughtered in their villages by loyalist Shabiha militia who cut their throats in vengeful rampages.

When the photographs were taken, Mr Assad was still a relatively new president, offering a new kind of rule to Syria: he was modern, open, and had promised reform and apparently a change of direction.

He married Asma at a private ceremony in 2000 in Damascus when his promise was at its height.

Beautiful, intelligent and stylish, she threw herself into charity work and won over the hearts of many Syrians who were desperate for a breath of fresh air after years of dictatorship - an asset, it appeared, to her husband's rule.

By her own gushing account – given in an unfortunately timed interview to Vogue magazine under the headline Rose of the Desert, just before the uprising broke out last year – she started "dating" Bashar in 2000, just months before his father died and he inherited the presidency.

She was born to Syrian parents in 1975 in London, grew up in Ealing and attended London schools. She and Bashar had known each other when she was a child – he also lived in London for a while, training and working as an ophthalmologist. At the time of her courtship he was back in Syria and she had her own career as an investment banker, which she gave up for him.

"I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage," she told Vogue. "I couldn't say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a big deal."

The year 2000 was extraordinary for her husband, now 46. His father, Hafez Assad, Syria's president and one of the strongmen of the Middle East, was variously feared, respected and hated by his people. During three decades of his iron rule he supported foreign terrorist groups and carried out brutal massacres of opponents when challenged, notoriously at Hama in 1982 when as many as 20,000 people may have been killed.

Assad senior had originally prepared his ambitious oldest son, Basil, to succeed him, but he was killed in a car crash. So he transferred his attentions to Bashar, who had been assiduously groomed for the presidency for six years when his father died.

The coming to power of his son filled Syrians with hope, even though it was a dynastic transition. Hafez had been a stiff and distant father – a tyrant in both public and private life, and perhaps one reason why the youthful Bashar was shy and lacked confidence. Bashar's warm, modern family was a crucial and very successful part of the image he portrayed to the world.

In a region full of religious extremists, he was particularly keen to show the family as modern and secular.

According to those few outsiders who saw into the privacy of the family at home, the public image was completely genuine. David Lesch, an American author who met the Assads privately many times, told The Sunday Telegraph: "Both wanted to maintain as normal a life as possible for their children, even though the parents are the first couple of Syria.

"They spent most of their time living in a fairly modest three-storey Damascene home that has neighbours right next door on either side of the house. They made sure that each of them, if at all possible, spent quality time with the children every day. And they had a hidden office retreat in Damascus, where I have met both Asma and Bashar separately, where they often bring the children while they are working so they can spend time with them."

The Assads would drive around Damascus, with Asma at the wheel of an SUV – Vogue describes how she drove Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt around the city. Sometimes they would be seen walking around, even startling audiences at theatres by sitting among them. It was exciting for Syrians who had been used to the president's father.

"It was how they tried to live and maintain a fairly normal family life. This image was embellished in Syria, and it endeared them to many Syrians for years, but it was based on truth. Of course, now the normal life they had been seeking is gone for ever."

The style was modern, but the hoped-for reform never happened, and protests which followed the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were met with violence and counter-violence that has now spiralled out of control.

Those happy days of normal family life must now seem a long time ago to Mrs Assad. Wherever she is, perhaps she sometimes flicks through the family photo album - a pleasant escape as she remembers how it was when they were still Syria's golden family.

The Dictator's Wife Wears Louboutins Vogue magazine missed the trend: Middle Eastern tyrants are out this season.

Maybe it takes a fashion dictator to know a fashionable dictator. How else to explain Vogue editor Anna Wintour's decision this month to publish a 3,000-word paean to that "freshest and most magnetic of first ladies," Syria's Asma al-Assad?

That's right. As Libyans braved fighter jets and machine-gun fire in their drive to overthrow the tyrant Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli, the queen of Condé Nast thought it was in good taste to feature the beautiful wife of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Apparently Vogue missed the trend: Dictators are out this season.

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AFP/Getty Images

Syria's First Lady Asma al-Assad

The Assad family—first Hafez and now his son Bashar—has ruled Syria since 1970. In that time, they've killed 20,000 Syrians to put down an uprising in Hama, provoked civil war in Lebanon and then occupied the country to "keep peace," built a secret nuclear-weapons facility modeled on North Korea's, and established Damascus as a hub for terrorists from Hezbollah to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. All part of keeping their countrymen under foot for 40 years.

No matter. The only feet that seem to interest Vogue writer Joan Juliet Buck are the manicured toes of the first lady. Mrs. Assad reveals a "flash of red soles," we're told, as she darts about with "energetic grace."

The red soles are an allusion to the signature feature of Christian Louboutin designer heels—easily $700 a pair—that Mrs. Assad favors. (Mr. Louboutin, says Vogue, visits Damascus to buy silk brocade, and he owns an 11th-century palace in Aleppo.)

Mrs. Assad also sports Chanel sunglasses and travels in a Falcon 900 jet. But, we're assured, she's not the ostentatious sort: "Her style is not the couture-and-bling of Middle Eastern power but deliberate lack of adornment." She once worked at J.P. Morgan, never breaks for lunch, and starts her day at 6 a.m.—all while raising three children! Just another 21st-century woman trying to do it all in style.

And her parenting? "The household is run on wildly democratic principles," Vogue reports. "We all vote on what we want and where," says Mrs. Assad of herself, her husband and their children.

For the people of Syria, not so much. Outside their home, the Assads believe in democracy the way Saddam Hussein did. In 2000, Bashar al-Assad won 97% of the vote. Vogue musters the gumption only to call this "startling." In fact, it's part of a political climate that's one of the world's worst—on par, says the watchdog group Freedom House, with those of North Korea, Burma and Saudi Arabia.

But none of those countries has Asma. "The 35-year-old first lady's central mission," we're told, "is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls 'active citizenship.'"

That's just what 18-year-old high-school student Tal al-Mallouhi did with her blog, but it didn't stop the Assad regime from arresting her in late 2009. Or from sentencing her, in a closed security court last month, to five years in prison for "espionage."

Ms. Mallouhi goes unmentioned in Vogue. But readers get other crucial details: On Fridays, Bashar al-Assad is just an "off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed." He "talks lovingly about his first computer," Vogue records, and he says that he studied ophthalmology "because it's very precise, it's almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood."

So it's the opposite of his Syria: murky and lawless, operating under emergency law since 1963, and wont to shed blood through its security forces and proxies like Hezbollah.

It's hard to believe that a veteran journalist would so diminish these matters, but it seems that Ms. Buck's aim was more public relations spin than reportage. As she reveals, her every move was watched by state security: "The first lady's office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights"—including, in a trip reminiscent of Eva Perón, an orphanage—"in a bubble of comfort and hospitality."

In the past weeks, as people power has highlighted the illegitimacy and ruthlessness of the Middle East's strongmen, various Western institutions have been shamed for their associations with them. There's the London School of Economics, which accepted over $2 million from Libya's ruling family, and experts like political theorist Benjamin Barber, who wrote that Gadhafi "is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat."

When Syria's dictator eventually falls—for the moment, protests against him have been successfully squelched by police—there will be a similar reckoning. Vogue has earned its place in that unfortunate roll call.

Ms. Weiss and Mr. Feith are assistant editorial features editors at The Journal.

ELDER OF ZIYON: Vogue fawns over the wonderful Assads Asma al-Assad is "a rose in the desert" in this puff piece on one of the world's most ruthless dictators.

How easy is it to play the Western media? Apparently, it is trivial.

Vogue went to Syria to show how wonderful Bashir Assad and his wife are. Without doing a modicum of research on Syria's history of ruthless oppression and mass murders, the writers fall under the spell of Bashir Assad's lovely wife, wearing a T-shirt that says "Happiness."

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.

Let's fall in love!

Other gems:

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East.

Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote.

The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, says, “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”

On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.”

Did the writers check out any human rights reports on Syria? Did they discuss freedom of expression? Anti-semitism? Did the word "Hama" escape their lips?

Perhaps the people from Vogue would be interested in how Bashir's father liked to spend his time...

The article is so fawning it sometimes appears to be a spoof. Unfortunately, it is quite serious.

ELDER OF ZIYON: More comedy from Bashir Assad

More comedy from Bashir Assad (ElderToons)

Yesterday we were treated to the humorous stylings of Wacky Bashir Assad, where he regaled us with hilarious tales of "occupation" being responsible for all Arab problems.

Today, his stand-up comedy act continues in the pages of Germany's Bild. Among today's jokes are that there are still Jews in Syria (sure, about 25 of them.)