28 March 2011

Vogue to Syrians: Eat Shit

This is old news but still worth a rant:

Okay so you don’t buy Vogue for its insightful political analysis but there must surely be times when even the producers of such a piece of glossy fluff like Vogue must wonder if they are utterly out of tune with reality.

I wonder what Anna Wintour and the Vogue editorial board were thinking when they put the March edition together.I doubt they gave a single jot of care for the situation in the Middle East in general or the people of Syria in particular.


Joan Juliet Buck

The issue in question  included the following Asma Al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert , written by socialiite ,former French Vogue editor in chief and palpable are arselicker Joan Juliet Buck.

Here are some selected excerpts:

Asma al-Assad, Syria’s dynamic first lady, is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region—and to put a modern face on her husband’s regime.

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies….She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.”

The Assads

It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark.

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. In Syria, power is hereditary.


The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian cardiologist and his diplomat wife. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College. She studied computer science at university, then went into banking..

She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash.


The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”


Blah, blah blah, Louboutin, Chanel and other expensive brands the Killer comes in the next post

But clearly Joan Juliet Buck has the political nous of a maggot.

2 comments:

Kimberfreak said...

Thank you for posting this. Evidence of the Vogue article is completely disappeared from the internet and your blog was the only place I could find anything about it.

jams o donnell said...

You're welcome!