{"id":18704,"date":"2011-02-25T19:26:18","date_gmt":"2011-02-26T03:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/?p=18704"},"modified":"2011-02-25T20:45:29","modified_gmt":"2011-02-26T04:45:29","slug":"nevermind-the-civil-unrest-what-is-gaddafis-wife-wearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/living\/nevermind-the-civil-unrest-what-is-gaddafis-wife-wearing","title":{"rendered":"Nevermind the Civil Unrest, What Is Gaddafi’s Wife Wearing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now you may have heard about a little popular uprising in Egypt that forced Hosni Mubarak to resign from his decades long post as president. That was sparked by a successful uprising in Tunisia, where protesters frustrated with social and economic conditions that hadn’t changed under their decades old leader, forced him to flee the country. Those two things have kicked off protests and uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, most recently in Libya. There, protesters have reportedly met with violence when trying to protest against the 42-year-old rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Forget the repression, where did she get that beautiful scarf? Screenshot via Gawker<\/p><\/div>\n

In what has to be one of the most tone-deaf pieces to come out since Kenneth Cole’s Egyptian fire sale tweets<\/a>, Vogue posed<\/a> these questions in a hard-hitting piece that profiled Asma al-Assad, the “glamorous, young, and very chic\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe freshest and most magnetic” first lady of Syria.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

According to Human Rights Watch<\/a> {via Gawker<\/a>}, 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.”<\/p>\n

Among other things, let’s put together a few handy bullet points of freedoms that most Syrians don’t enjoy:<\/p>\n