Psst: wear this hat, it will help you blend in.

Well, well, well. We won’t believe it until we see the Vogue write-up on what she wore on the private jet out of Damascus, but according to The Telegraph, Syria’s First Lady Asma al-Assad is in London (she is a dual citizen of Britain, where she was born, and Syria) with her children. Arab news organizations claim that she may have been there for 3 weeks. {via Gawker}

Perhaps she caught royal wedding fever, but the Telegraph suggests that due to the increasing violence against protesters by her husband, President Bashar al-Assad, she was warned “to get out as soon as you can.” Since the Syrian ambassador was uninvited to the wedding, that seems more plausible.

Profiled in a puff-piece in American Vogue as a “rose in the desert,” the Syrian First Lady was introduced to readers just after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, not long before unrest in Libya began. At the time, we pointed out the sheer stupidity of running a piece highlighting the “wildly democratic” life of the first family, while people who complained about human rights faced the risk of arrests without cause and torture. Particularly given that similar complaints were part of what sparked the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and that spirit of protest seemed to be spreading.

Print is a bit different, given that magazine content is often closed 3-4 months ahead of time, but online? Looks like Vogue has scrubbed the profile from it’s site – better late than never, perhaps – but thanks to the internet where nothing ever really dies, we’ll always have those quotes for posterity.

“The household is run on wildly democratic principles. ‘We all vote on what we want, and where,’ [Asma] says.”

While his wife and children are safely in London, Basha al-Assad has reportedly sent tanks into multiple Syrian towns to crush mostly peaceful protests. So far, it’s estimated 750 Syrians have been killed. {AP} Eyewitness accounts are difficult to verify since journalists have largely been banned from entering the country.

Not that they’d really want to be there: when the tanks roll in, electricity and telecommunications are cut, and those trapped report being too scared to go outside for food or water for fear of being mistaken for a protester and shot.

Odd from “a precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer,” but maybe we’ll get to those little discrepancies and a review of the best Syrian restaurants in London when President al Assad’s GQ profile comes around.

There have been concerns about stability in the region, how it will affect oil prices, and oh, yeah, all of the Libyan people being killed by mercenaries. Forget all that though, let’s ask the important questions: what does Gaddafi’s wife wear? How does she travel around Tripoli? How chic is life in the Gaddafi family home?

Forget the repression, where did she get that beautiful scarf? Screenshot via Gawker

In what has to be one of the most tone-deaf pieces to come out since Kenneth Cole’s Egyptian fire sale tweets, Vogue posed these questions in a hard-hitting piece that profiled Asma al-Assad, the “glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic” first lady of Syria.

It glosses over Syria’s “deep and dark” shadow zones to tout its reputation as the safest country in the Middle East. Which ignores the question, safe for who?

According to Human Rights Watch {via Gawker}, President Bashar al-Asad’s decade in power (he inherited the position from his father) hasn’t produced many reforms. Prisons are “filled again with political prisoners, journalists, and human rights activists. In the most recent examples, Syrian criminal courts in the last three weeks separately sentenced two of Syria’s leading human rights lawyers, Haytham al-Maleh, 78, and Muhanad al-Hasani, 42, to three years in jail each for their criticisms of Syria’s human rights record.”

Among other things, let’s put together a few handy bullet points of freedoms that most Syrians don’t enjoy:

• Open access to the internet: Facebook, YouTube and Blogger are banned
• Freedom of assembly: According to Human Rights Watch “Official repression of Kurds increased further after Syrian Kurds held large-scale demonstrations, some of which turned violent, throughout northern Syria in March 2004 to voice long-simmering grievances.”
• An open legal system: “Syria’s security agencies, the feared mukhabarat, detain people without arrest warrants and torture with complete impunity.”

If you’ve been following along with recent events, many of these things were on the list of grievances that inspired popular uprisings and protests in many other countries.

It’s not that we believe the first lady isn’t capable of doing good things through her NGO work – Suzanne Mubarak, former first lady of Egypt campaigned against human trafficking; but if recent history has shown anything it’s that wide scale grievances, particularly those related to human rights, aren’t placated by small balancing acts. Mrs. Mubarak’s campaign against human trafficking is an important one, and probably made a difference in the lives of some people. Unfortunately the Egyptians who forced her husband to step down had more pressing issues of government corruption, repression of humans rights and violence from police.

We haven’t heard about any uprisings in Syria – yet, but somehow, a lifestyle piece highlighting how the other half live in a country where residents face kidnappings, jail and torture under a repressive regime seems so deeply careless given recent events. What’s next? Beauty tips on how to cover up facial bruising from Hannibal Gaddafi’s wife? Luxury living tips from Mrs. Robert Mugabe? The fashion personalities of Kim Jong-Il’s various wives? Cooking tips and recipes from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s wife? We could excuse a print article as a matter of poor timing, given that most magazine content is produced 3 months in advance, but the reason people read websites is because they can catch up to current events a bit quicker. Just an FYI for the Voguettes who may still not “get” the interwebs, and why copying print content over doesn’t always work.

If Vogue wants to be known as the thinking woman’s journal on fashion, let us offer a reminder to give a tad more consideration to the “thinking” part.