A Syrian court convicted former President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death. Assad came to power in 2000 but fled Syria tosettle in Russiain December 2024, when his regime collapsed in a rebel uprising.
Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan also convicted Assad of premeditated murder, torture and arbitrary detention. His brother Maher al-Assad and cousin Najib Atif were also sentenced to death.
United States President Donald Trump said that if the Democrats win the mid-term election in November, the country will be run by "jihadists."
"They will immediately open the borders, they'll allow men into women's sports ... All of these things will come back, and they'll come roaring back. Plus, you'll have a jihadist-run country," Trump told Wayne Allyn Root in an interview after being asked about what would happen in Democrats win. "Look at what's happening in Michigan, look at what's happening at so many places," he added, referring to Democrat Abdul El-Sayed who recently won the nomination for the US Senate in Michigan primary.
The US president reiterated that the most important thing that would help the Republicans win the midterms is "good politics" and the US Senate passing the SAVE America Act.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday that Europe's largest service center for AH-64E Apache helicopters will be built in Poland following the signing of executive agreements.
"Executive agreements signed - Europe's largest Apache AH-64E helicopter service center to be built in Poland! Modern weaponry, Polish technologies. This is how security is built!" Tusk wrote on X.
The agreements were signed by Boeing, Military Aviation Works No. 1, and the Military Central Design and Technology Bureau. The center will be able to service at least 96 helicopters, matching the number of Apaches Poland agreed to purchase from the United States in 2024 for around $10 billion.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’swife Rama Duwaji is heading to Syria and Lebanon next month – and she’s bringing along cops assigned to the First Couple’s taxpayer-funded NYPD detail, The Post has learned.
Duwaji will be jetting to the Middle East for a trip beginning Sept. 20 to the countries on the State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list for Americans because of dangerous conditions, a source said.
The source familiar with the security detail said the first lady, who’s been described by the mayor as a “private person,” requested NYPD security – after traveling overseas last month without police protection.
Duwaji, a 29-year-old Syrian-American artist, has ties to the region and refers to herself as a “Syrian Illustrator” on her website. Her parents are Syrian Muslims originally from Damascus.
Mamdani’s office confirmed the trip and that an NYPD security detail will accompany the mayor’s wife.
“Upon the strong recommendation of the NYPD, the First Lady’s security detail will be joining her when she travels to visit family in Syria and Lebanon,” said mayoral spokesperson Dora Pekec.
The mayor’s office offered no further comment on the trip’s details or whether the purpose was solely to visit family.
The source with knowledge of the trip told The Post, “It’s not official business. It’s not doing anything for the city.”
One pro-Israel Jewish advocate opposed sending members of the NYPD to Syria and Lebanon, arguing the officers, not the Israel-bashing Duwaji, will be targets.
“We’re putting the police officers in danger. They will be viewed as the bad guys. These are war zones,” said Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism and a former Brooklyn Assemblyman.
“Duwaji doesn’t need security. She will get a hero’s welcome and be protected by Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis,” Hikind said, referring to Islamic terrorists and militants.
“Duwaji will be fine.”
The first lady in 2019 had attended a residency at the Haven for Artists in Beirut, Lebanon, which describes itself as a cultural feminist organization at “the intersection of art and activism.”
Last month,Duwaji co-hosteda pro-Palestinian all-female spiritual retreat on the French island of Corsica.The event was organized by Women Sanctuary, a Muslim-and-women-focused travel group run by Parisian designer Rym Nur.
Duwaji also ditched America’s 250th anniversary celebrations to jet off to the Women Sanctuary’s earlier retreat on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where she was the “artist-in-residence” at a sold-out “Plants Of The Quran” workshop.
The mayor’s office said at the time that Duwaji was not accompanied on that trip by NYPD cops.
Like her husband, Duwaji is known for her pro-Palestnian, anti-Israel views.
She reportedly curated Spotify playlists with songs that have foulmouthed anti-Israel lyrics, following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks against the Jewish state.
Duwaji was also caught liking celebratory Instagram posts in the aftermath of Hamas’s sneak assault on Israel, and a post claiming the rapes carried out by the terror group against Israeli hostages and victims were a “mass hoax.”
Duwaji, who was profiled in a New York magazine piece weeks before Mamdani took office, was also exposed for old inflammatory social media posts. For example, in 2015, she claimed Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist in the first place” while calling its residents “occupiers,” and two years earlier, as a teen, she used the n-word in another post.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, is jetting to Syria and Lebanon with taxpayer-funded NYPD security.
She apologized in April for the “hurt” caused by alarming social media posts – though she did not directly express regret for the Israel-bashing content.
Mamdani has stood up for his wife, claiming she is a “private person” who should not face a glaring spotlight over her social media activity.
She was also deeply involved in a Democratic socialist activist campaign pushing political candidates critical of Israel and backing a controversial bill targeting pro-Israel charities.
Duwaji created artwork for the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America as the lefty group unleashed a public campaign called “PalestineOnTheBallot.com.”
The effort promoted candidates running in Democratic Party primaries who snubbed funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and vowed to support the Not on Our Dime Act — a bill that would punish or dissolve registered charities found to support “Israeli settler violence.”
Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the "peak wokeness" that emerged in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.
Most of these successful candidates are quite young for elected officials: they are now in their 30s or even late 20s. That means that most of them were indoctrinated and - since they were on the left - essentially forced to spout all the new "woke" jargon and convictions that were manufactured overnight by frenzied mobs.
One such candidate is Francesca Hong, a Democrat with a significant polling lead in Wisconsin's gubernatorial race. It is hard to overstate how much of a woke fanatic she was. Not even the most cringe and manifestly deranged views from that era evaded her advocacy. They are all there.
The one the national media has latched onto was various tweets and Zoom meetings where she seems to have expressed opposition to the beloved American holiday Thanksgiving, because it "makes some folks very uncomfortable." (Just as a side note, one of the most abominable linguistic aberrations imposed by woke warriors is the seemingly amiable but in fact grating and aggressively ideological use of the word "folks" or "folx" to replace "people.") That most of these movements were driven by legitimate or at least reasonable policy concerns does not excuse the resulting fanaticism, excesses, and authoritarian posture used to punish those who questioned them.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one of this populist-left movement's senior leaders, and she was also a driving force behind some of the worst woke excesses. She's the one whom most of that movement wants to see run for president, and Kalshi's predictive market consistently ranks her as a leading candidate:
AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC's morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong's statements, including her call for "abolishing prisons" and "[defunding] the police," policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of "craziness" that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond:
It is, I suppose, a net positive that those who imposed extremist woke dogma are now too embarrassed to defend it. When they hear what they were saying and demanding at the time, it now sounds to them as unhinged and insane as it did to many of us back when they were earnestly and angrily spouting it.
But when AOC tries to giggle her way out of her behavior and the behavior of her allies, it actually is more offensive and cowardly than anything else. By invoking the lighthearted and playful terminology of the New York City Councilman whom she quotes - "Woke 1 was crazy!" - she seeks to depict this dark period as just a few oddball, zany moments that never really hurt anyone and thus need not be dwelled on or taken seriously.
But the woke extremism that AOC and her friends imposed on everyone else was anything but playful or frivolous. It was deeply authoritarian, mob-driven, sinister, coercive, and bloodthirsty. It sought to destroy anyone and everyone who did not immediately submit to and recite all of its new jargon and dictates. As was true for the similar hive-mind excesses of the #MeToo movement, the woke warriors - without batting an eye - destroyed careers, reputations, and institutions upon even the slightest transgression of their new dictates.
There are far too many examples of this to chronicle comprehensively. I will thus ask you to recall one particularly ugly and venomous event, which I am selecting in part because I had a front-row seat to witness it and thus recall it as if it were yesterday, and also because it so compellingly illustrates why this historical revisionism - dismissing "Woke 1" as if it were some trivial, harmless fun that went a bit awry - is so repellent.
When nationwide protests broke out over the killing of George Floyd, my long-time colleague at The Intercept, Lee Fang, did what journalists are supposed to do: he went to cover his local protests and interview multiple protesters about what motivated them. He then uploaded the interviews he conducted online.
Most of the ones he uploaded were ignored. But one was most definitely not ignored. The interviewee was a young, black protester. He told Lee that while he broadly supported the Black Lives Matter movement and believed that race-based police brutality was real and widespread, he did not understand why there was so little anger or concern when black lives were taken - murdered - by other black people. If, he asked, "black lives matter," then why are there protests against only one type of killing while there is steadfast silence about the far more common way that black people in the U.S. die: at the hands of other black people?
Note that it was not Lee who was saying any of this. These words came from one of about a dozen people he interviewed who were participating in the protest. Lee offered no editorial comment on them at all. He simply uploaded the interview alongside all the others he conducted.
Because the view expressed by this young man was so off-key to the compelled consensus that had emerged in the wake of Floyd's death, his mere posting of this interview sparked widespread and indescribably intense rage. And into that rage stepped a young Intercept reporter who - much to the surprise of many of her colleagues - apparently identified as black.
In response to Lee's crime of posting that interview, she took to Twitter to denounce Lee as the single worst thing someone could be, especially at that moment: "a racist." Within hours, tens of thousands of people had retweeted and liked her accusation, instantly branding Lee as a racist. Huge numbers of media cowards from the largest newspapers and TV outlets - ones who never knew anything about Lee or his work - quickly jumped on board, signaling to the mob demanding Lee's head on a spike that they were on their side. That is always how mob justice works.
Virtually nobody with any sizable media platform was brave enough to stand up and even question the merits of these accusations, let alone defend Lee. Perhaps there were others, but the only one I can recall vehemently doing so was Michael Tracey in his characteristically elegant and restrained manner, prompting all sorts of media personalities to line up and denounce Michael for having the gall to question Lee's black accuser. That included many of Lee's own journalistic colleagues, who actually joined in the public denunciations against him.
Along with a couple of Lee's allies, I spent countless hours inside The Intercept trying to save Lee's job, knowing that if he got fired for "racism," it would end not only his work there but possibly his career altogether. It is difficult to overstate what a climate of terror was ushered into every workplace, institution, and society in general.
Lee was ultimately forced to apologize. That gave The Intercept's always-cowardly editors an excuse not to fire him. To this day, I feel a great deal of doubt about the role I played: not publicly defending him so that I would have more weight defending him internally; counseling him that a fake and unjustified apology would, at the very least, prevent him from being fired with a gigantic black mark on his name; not waging a more aggressive war on his behalf, etc.
But the climate that was created and imposed as a result of what AOC and her allies now want to laughingly wave away as "crazy" was no joke. Jobs, reputations, and careers were at stake. Many people unjustly had all of those things taken away from them - destroyed - based solely on the whims of mob justice. People were genuinely terrified of thought crimes, no matter how trivial or well-intentioned. I watched countless 45- to 55-year-old journalists and editors adopt a completely new way of speaking and thinking overnight, out of fear that they would attract the woke mob and lose their jobs with even one false step. People watched their every word, knowing - correctly - that a bloodthirsty mob was on the hunt for even the most unintentional deviations from the newly imposed norm.
It should be noted that AOC was not some bystander during all of this. As she has done for every similar moral panic of the left - the incalculably deranged Russiagate conspiracy theories, the life-destroying and due-process-free #MeToo persecutions, COVID censorship - AOC supported and participated in the most extreme woke excesses because she does not have an iota of courage to resist social and political pressures.
In June 2020, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the growing demands of "Defund the Police" by slashing $1 billion, or about one-sixth of its overall resources, from the NYPD budget. AOC was having none of it. "Defunding the police means defunding the police," she insisted. That does not mean reducing budgets or shifting around resources, she argued. She wanted the NYPD defunded in full, and nothing short of that would be sufficient.
If AOC has now changed her mind about all of the brand-new woke dogma she vehemently defended and sought to impose, that would be welcome. But actual regret for past mistakes means taking responsibility for them and explaining what went wrong: whether it be support for the Iraq War, the policies that caused the 2008 financial crisis, Russiagate, COVID, etc. At the very least, it requires acknowledging the damage done to people and their lives, rather than minimizing it as just a benign and noble quest for justice that went a little too far.
If someone wants to stand up and say that they went along with and advocated a bunch of "crazy" ideas and demands because they simply got swept up in the hysteria of the moment - as AOC and her allies are now attempting to suggest - then that is a rather serious self-indictment. I can hardly think of a worse trait in a political leader, or a human being of any kind, than a lack of internal fortitude or personal courage to resist moral panics and accompanying demands for full submission by a gathered mob.
