Syria's Assad Caught Joking About Islam

I guess we get to see just how outraged the Muslims of the world will get over this as it has been leaked that Syria's Bashar Assad and his wife have been joking about conservative Islam in many of his emails and social networking....hmm....are the Afghans gonna burn half their country over this?

The story is from The Telegraph.

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


Above: The leaked emails from Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma, seen by the Daily Telegraph, are mapped out here using social network analyis tool Gephi. Click on the red markers to see more information.

The ream of messages and derogatory cartoons allegedly sent among his 'inner circle' of female aides and family members poke fun at conservative Muslims.

Most of the messages ridicule the burka, the full body cloak worn by some Muslim women.

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.