Duped? What could go wrong?
On Tuesday, I reported on a claim by
Joan Juliet Buck, the woman who wrote the infamous profile of Asma al-Assad in Vogue shortly before the Syrian people revolted, that Buck had been duped.
Claudia Rosett seems to have
very little trust in Buck at all.
If Buck was unhappy, as she says she was, with Vogue’s plans to run the piece, or with the headline Vogue gave it, she had options other than compliance and silence. She could have pulled the piece before it ran, or publicly recanted and apologized as soon as it came out. Instead, more than a year later, she now explains: “I didn’t want to write this piece. But I always finished what I started.”
By these lights, she was the victim. Faithful to Vogue, faithful to her own work ethic (and her desire to see the ruins of Palmyra). They made her do it!
And having produced that gusher of propaganda, having been outed and humiliated by subsequent events in Syria, she now presents a much revised tale that is first of all a defense of herself as a culture-loving dupe.
The truth was there to see all along. Plenty of it was right under her nose, though she chose to not share details of that with her readers until now — including in her apologia a raft of disturbing incidents and signs she witnessed in Syria, but omitted from her Vogue story last year. Beyond that, there has been abundant documentation available for years on the horrors of the Assad regime’s assassinations, surveillance, torture, and terror techniques. Even before the violence that erupted into public view in the streets of Syria last year, there were reports on offer everywhere from Amnesty International to the State Department web site, to the testimony of Syrian defectors, the bomb craters in Lebanon, etc.
Credit Joan Juliet Buck that she has shed her infatuation with the “fun” first lady of Syria. But her current confessions, coming this late in the day, dwelling as they do on how she was “duped,” seem less about setting the record straight on Syria than about distancing herself from responsibility for one of the most mortally embarrassing pieces of journalism produced in recent times.
In her own convoluted defense, Buck describes the rationale with which she took on the Syria assignment. “I was curious…Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject.” She then delivers to her readers the bizarre journalistic creed: “I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.”
Really?
Read it all.
Labels: Asma al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, Syrian uprising, Vogue
Writer who profiled Asma al-Assad claims she was duped
Joan Juliet Buck was the author of the
infamous profile of the Assad family that appeared in Vogue shortly before Bashar al-Assad started murdering his own people (the profile was
flushed down the memory hole when the killing started).
She claims she was duped.
I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer.
There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.
In December 2010, there was no way of knowing that the Arab Spring was about to begin, and that it would take down the dictators of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.
There was no way of knowing, as I cheered the events in Tahrir Square, that I would be contaminated because I had written about the Assads. There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I had had with Vogue since I was 23.
I met the devil and his wife, with full fashion-magazine access to their improbable fishbowl apartment where they lived out their daily lives on display to the eyes of thousands, like a Middle-Eastern version of The Truman Show. They showed off their fantasy lives for me.
Assad told me just who he was, but I didn’t use it; he repeated it a year later to Barbara Walters, but no one heard him.
The Assads’ PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, took care of my visa. In the offices, flat-screen televisions mounted on walls played only Al Jazeera—one of their clients, along with Gaddafi’s son Saif and the government of Qatar. Lloyd and James were absent, but Brown turned out to be Peter Brown, a bearded Englishman with a languorous voice who’d once managed the Beatles.
Asma al-Assad was about to sign an agreement with the Paris Louvre, about Syrian antiquities. We sat with Brown’s associate Mike Holtzman. I wanted to know about the ancient cities, Aleppo, Damascus. They brought in their intern, a 22-year-old named Sheherazade Ja’afari, the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. She and Holtzman would be in Damascus with me.
...
Asma unwittingly gave me a glimpse into the Assad way of thinking: “I told my kids yesterday there’s a journalist going to be writing about me,” she said, “and my eldest, Hafez, asked, ‘What’s she going to say?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he asked, ‘How can you get her to write about you if you don’t know what she’s going to say?’?”
...
I was told there was no crime in Damascus. A few days later, on a pretext involving wooden spoons, I returned to the souk alone except for a driver I could not shake. I think I saw why there was no crime.
A mysterious metal box on wheels was parked outside the souk. It was about seven feet long, six feet high, with one barred window in the back. Its surface was dangerously unfinished, raw, full of metal splinters. It looked like a mobile prison. Later, I asked a local about the box. He said he’d never seen such a thing.
...
Back in my hotel room, I found the Ethernet cable ripped out of my laptop so violently that the plastic tab on the end had broken off.
...
I sat in the hotel bar with the French ambassador and asked what was really going on in Syria. He took the battery out of my Syrian cell phone and then did the same with his. This must have set off an alert, because suddenly Sheherazade materialized in front of us.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Aren’t you sick?” I asked. “Go back to bed.”
...
The next day Sheherazade took me to Ma’loula, the village where they still speak Aramaic, the language of the Bible.
She said: “We don’t want you to talk to the French ambassador.” “You can’t talk to me that way,” I said.
When I opened my laptop at the Vienna airport on the way back to New York, an icon on the screen announced itself as the server for someone named Ali.
I arrived in New York on Dec. 21, 2010, and quarantined the compromised laptop.
...
I handed in the piece on Jan. 14, the day President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. “The Arab Spring is spreading,” I told Vogue on Jan. 21. “You might want to hold the piece.”
They didn’t think the Arab Spring was going anywhere, and the piece was needed for the March “Power Issue.”
I got an expert to clean Ali out of the laptop. “They weren’t very skilled, but they were thorough,” he said.
...
On Feb. 11, Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt. I cheered, inspired and touched by Tahrir Square. There were protests in Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Bahrain, then, unbelievably, in Libya.
I asked Vogue’s managing editor if we could meet to discuss how to handle the Assad piece. A meeting was held, without me. I was asked not to speak to the press.
On Feb. 25, as Libyan protesters demanded an end to Gaddafi, my piece on Asma al-Assad went online at Vogue.com. They had excruciatingly titled it “A Rose in the Desert.”
I was attacked as soon as it went up. How dare I write about Asma al-Assad? By describing Syria’s first lady in Vogue, I had anointed her.
Syria stayed quiet until the middle of March, when a small incident set off the horrifying massacres that have now gone on for 17 months. In a town called Daraa at the end of February, 15 children broke the country’s silence. I don’t know if it was the euphoria of the Arab Spring or if they had been empowered by the Green Team from Massar.
The boys, ages 9 to 15, wrote, “The people want to topple the regime” on the walls of their school.
The police arrested them. When they had not been released after two weeks, their families staged a protest on March 15.
At a second protest, on March 18, Syrian forces fired on the crowd and killed four people.
The boys were released from prison. Their families saw that they had been tortured and took to the streets. On March 23, a grenade was hurled into a crowd of protesters in the Daraa mosque.
Assad’s forces began to kill Syrians every day. They fired on mourners at funerals, men gathered in mosques, women and children in the street.
They arrested more children. They tortured more children.
On April 29, a chubby 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was arrested during a protest in Saida, near Daraa.
On May 24, Hamza’s mutilated body was returned to his parents. The report by Al Jazeera said: “The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned the corpse, it bore the scars of brutal torture: lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face, and knees. Hamza’s eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly. On Hamza’s chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.”
Asma al-Assad had said that “Massar” meant destiny.
Bashar al-Assad blamed the uprising of the Syrian people on terrorists from both al Qaeda and the United States.
Through 2011, I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she not know what was happening? How could she stand by and do nothing while the Syrian regime ate its young?
In May of 2011, Vogue took the piece off its website. I kept my word and did not speak to the press. At the end of the year my contract was not renewed.
I was now free to react to the Syrian carnage with the only medium I had: Twitter.
Read it all.
Labels: Asma al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, Syrian uprising, Vogue
Corruption, Syrian style
How does a government minister with a $900 per month salary, which might come to $2,000 with perks, afford a $2 million mansion in Aleppo, Syria?
You might find a clue
here.
Maybe they can write his mansion up in
Vogue? Heh.
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Syrian uprising, Vogue
Vogue flushes Asma al-Assad down the memory hole
Remember that disgusting
Vogue story on Asma al-Assad, which showed her husband the dictator
playing with the kiddies at home? Vogue kept that story on their website until April 30.
Now it seems that story has been flushed down the memory hole.
Thanks to the wonders of Google cache, you can still find the original story online by going
here.
But since April 30, if you go to the original link, this is what you will see:
The rose in the desert has withered.
Labels: Asma al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, Syria, Syrian uprising, Vogue
No longer in vogue
Due to the community in which we live, well over 90% of the weddings that Mrs. Carl and I attend are 'separate seating' - men on one side of a screen and women on the other. As a result, it is frequently the case that one of us (usually me) goes to a wedding, while the other (usually Mrs. Carl) does not, because I know the husband and Mrs. Carl does not know the wife (or vice versa).
Mrs. Carl and our daughters have learned not to ask me about the bride's gown when I come home from weddings. Leaving aside the fact that I only see the bride during the ceremony and possibly during the Grace After Meals (if I am there for either of them - often I come only for dancing at the end and to wish the fathers of the young couple and the groom 'Mazal Tov'), my stock answer for questions about "what the bride wore" is "a white dress." So there's not much point in asking me questions like that and for the most part the females in the family have learned not to ask me.
So when the most recent issue of Vogue did a story about the
Assad family of Damascus and the 'glamorous' lady of the house, Asma al-Assad, I decided to
let others
blog about
it (that last link is Alana Goodman, from whose picture I conclude is particularly better qualified than I am to discuss an article in Vogue). I was going to let the 'rose in the desert' (yes, they really called Mrs. Assad that) go by the wayside, until I saw
this story in the Wall Street Journal, which was too good not to share. And it's thanks to this story that the other three get their links, for reasons that should become obvious below.
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.
Read the whole thing.
So why didn't I link those other three blog posts (and several others that have written about this story) earlier? Well, until I read the Journal article, I didn't know what Louboutins are (Mrs. Carl has much simpler tastes). I clicked on the Journal article from Twitter because of its reference to what the 'dictator's wife' is wearing. And I still haven't read the Vogue article, and therefore would not have linked any of the other blog posts. I can't cover everything! I don't plan to read the Vogue article either. It's too long and probably a waste of time for me to read. I'm not going to imitate Mrs. Assad's style - nor her husband's - anyway.
But I will read those other three blog posts now....
Labels: Asma al-Assad, Syria, Vogue, Wall Street Journal
