Syria: Bashar al-Assad joked about religion of most of population, emails show

One e-mail from a female adviser depicts an image of a crying child in a
shopping mall who has lost his mother. Trying to reunite them the shop
assistant asks the boy for a description of his mother. The little boy
replies ‘I don’t know sir I have never seen her!!’ and the joke jumps to an
image of a woman fully shrouded in black pushing a shopping cart.

On January 22 the President’s father-in-law Fawaz Akhras allegedly forwarded a
‘British wedding photograph’ showing 24 newly wed Muslim couples, the women
all wearing white burkas, their faces covered. “I just hope, for their
sake, that each husband goes home with the right table cloth” the joke
reads. Another email entitled ‘Why God sends rain to Mexico and not to the
Middle East’ lists photographs of scantily clad weather women, and ends with
an image of a covered Muslim woman standing by a weather map holding an
umbrella.

The jokes, which might be viewed as humorous by a liberal Western audience,
will be deeply insulting to many in Syria’s
largely conservative society.

The messages apparently convey little respect by the President and his aides
for the population they lead. One message appears denigrate Arab men as
being unclean or untrained; the email opens with a picture of a kitten
peeing in a squat toilet, and leads on to an image of a man donning a red
Kuffiyeh, the traditional Arab headers, urinating against a wall.

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