Joan Juliet Buck: My Vogue Interview With Syria’s First Lady ›

resistance-episteme:

Arguably the most vile Orientalism I have read in a long time:
“Sheherazade took me through Damascus; in the dark early-evening streets, I felt uneasy. Mustached men stood in our path, wearing shoes from the 1980s and curiously ill-fitting leather jackets over thick sweaters.” 
My biggest fear is that the fashion writer’s aesthetic sensibilities were insulted by the poor people’s shoes. I mean how inhospitable of us Arabs to walk in a rich westerner’s presence looking poor. And they weren’t even vintage 80s! Vulgarians. 
The real gems though were these musings: “”Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe, or hiss….Syria gave off a toxic aura…I met the devil and his wife…”
So vile is the piece of incoherent racist rubbish that even mainstream journos like CNN’s Hala Gorani have criticized it. The piece has even spawned a new hashtag on Twitter— #countriesbyvoguewriters—which parodies the article with such priceless tweets as “#countriesbyVoguewriters “They tried to make me go to Riyadh, I said, no no no.” And this one “#countriesbyvoguewriters Norway. Neither do they have the will.”