Vogue‘s Love Letter To Syria’s First Lady Lives On At Pro-Assad Website

by Justin Fenner | 2:49 pm, January 3rd, 2012

When Vogue started taking flak for its fawning profile of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad, published during the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, they simply took it off the Internet and sort of said sorry. But it turns out that you can still find the story online if you’re willing to do a little digging.

Our friends at Fashionista report that even though the feature isn’t on the Vogue website anymore, you can still read it at PresidentAssad.net, a pro-Assad website that chronicles all of the dictator’s speeches and interviews and refers to him as “The President of Just & Comprehensive Peace.” We suppose Asma’s Vogue profile is there to help promote that image — in it, she’s described as a young, chic, glamorous mother who runs her household “on wildly democratic principles.” Meanwhile, Assad ruled the country with an iron fist until things on the ground got so bad that people started rebelling and fleeing the country.

In August, The Hill reported that the Syrian government hired a public relations firm to work with Vogue on the story, and now The Atlantic (which found the story on PresidentAssad.net) is calling for Vogue to put the article back online so that future generations and historians will have access to how Assad tried to present himself and his family at a time when people called for him to resign.

If you missed out on the Assad profile the first time around, take a look at it here.

[Fashionista]