Asma al-Assad, a mass murder’s enabler was enabled by our liberal press

By Tom Quiner

Liberal chic is built on fluff.

How you feel trumps how you act.

Style supersedes substance.

Thought conformity is valued more than intelligent thinking.

Four media outlets help mold modern liberalism: the Huffington Post; the New York Times; Newsweek Magazine; and Vogue Magazine.

Vogue, with its 11.7 million readers, looms particularly large since liberal chic is such a fashion statement. Vogue lovingly advanced the status of Michelle Obama and Texas human abortion advocate, Wendy Davis, on their pages. They championed another emerging icon a few short years ago in a lavish spread, which, mysteriously, has been scrubbed from the internet.

“Asma al-Assad, A Rose in the Desert” was a breathless love letter to the wife of Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad. Mrs. Assad is still in the public eye as she posts photos to Instagram of her reading to Syrian children and cuddling babies at the same time her husband massacres them. How could this enabler to a mass murderer become so chic to liberals?

Several forces were at work.

For starters, liberals don’t like Israel. Syria is a Jew-hating nation that periodically threatens to annihilate Israel. That makes an attractive spouse to a Mideast thug especially attractive to liberals. Mrs. Assad’s appearance was important to the author of the article, Joan Juliet Buck, who described Mrs. Assad as “extremely thin and very well-dressed, and therefore qualified to be in Vogue.”

So three key ingredients were in place to attract Vogue to the story: Anti-semitism. Politically-correct body mass. Style.

One more was needed: money. That would be provided by the Syrian government who contracted with an international PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, to the tune of $5000 per month to buy them a glowing profile from Vogue and curry favor with U.S. liberals.

Writer Buck laid it on thick:

“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. “

There is that word “thin” again. Looks are very important to this crowd.

As Vogue readers devoured this pseudo journalism, Mr. Assad prepared to butcher his people, his “useful idiots” having greased the skids with syrupy propaganda like this:

“Fresh!”

“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.” 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 country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.”

Hey, feminists should love this place since women make almost as much money as men.

“Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.

“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.”

As liberals lapped up this goo, Assad was setting the stage to create a new army of refugees who were beating a path out of Syria. The Vogue article continues. Vogue doesn’t want you to read it and have worked hard to sterilize the internet of any reference to it. Quiner’s Diner was able to uncover a few paragraphs:

“It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla.”

Syria sounds so “magical.” Hey, maybe you should vacation there!

“In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.”

Now you’d better get yourself a quick fix of insulin if you have any hope of surviving this sugar coated snow job:

“The first lady works out of a small white building in a hilly, modern residential neighborhood called Muhajireen, where houses and apartments are crammed together and neighbors peer and wave from balconies.”

Can you picture the scene? A neighbor lady waves from the balcony across the way, “Yoo hoo, Mrs. Assad, how are the mass killings going today? By the way, could I borrow a cup of sugar?”

Writer Buck gets serious. Hold on to your seat:

“The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement–a determined swath cut through

“Energetic grace!”

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. . . .”

You can’t help but love a woman who is able to keep the plumminess out her accent!

Despite Mrs. Assad’s liberal loveliness, she is an accomplice to the routine torture and murder of Syrian citizens. Vogue Magazine, in their slavish devotion to all things progressive, tried to mainstream this Mideast tyrant just a few short years ago.

They have humiliated themselves and have worked overtime to expunge the internet of all evidence of the piece.

The few excerpts above suffice as another piece of evidence of the moral collapse of modern day liberalism.