Dec. 9: The End of Assad

Trump urges Israeli victory; Dos and Don'ts in Syria; Manhattan murderer nabbed in PA

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The Big Story

The reign of Bashar al-Assad, the murderous dictator whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, is finished. After a 13-year civil war that became the bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, killing perhaps 600,000 people and displacing millions more in Assad’s desperate battle to cling to power, the collapse of his regime, in the end, came suddenly. Eleven days ago, Turkish-backed rebels launched what most observers (including us) expected to be a limited offensive in northern Syria. But no one—not the Turks, not the Iranians or Russians, and not the Americans—fully understood how fragile the regime had become. The rebels took Aleppo, then Hama, then Homs. Damascus fell on Saturday, almost without a fight. “Syrian Arab Army troops deserted their positions, the police deserted their positions, and Bashar Al Assad just fled,” one Syrian opposition figure told The Wall Street Journal. Assad has reportedly received “political asylum” in Moscow.

What comes next for Syria is unknown, and it is worth tempering any optimism one might feel. The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel group behind the offensive, is a man known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani; he was a fighter with the Islamic State of Iraq during the Iraq insurgency and later the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda during the Syrian Civil War. For years now, Jolani has been seeking to soften his image, granting interviews to Western media outlets and attempting to portray himself as a reformed jihadist, albeit one who still supports the implementation of Sharia law. As HTS and its allies have swept across Syria, he has repeatedly sought to reassure the country’s Alawite, Christian, Druze, and Shiite minorities that they will come to no harm in the newly liberated Syria; a Sunday article in The New York Times, for instance, reported that HTS had quietly cut a deal with the Iranians during its lightning advance last week. In exchange for Iranian forces withdrawing without a fight, HTS promised to protect Syrian Shiites and Shiite religious shrines, according to unnamed Iranian officials.

The rebels’ intentions toward the West and Israel are less clear, although an officer with the Free Syrian Army, one of the many other factions active in the uprising, sought to reassure the Israelis in a Friday interview with The Times of Israel. “HTS has about 10,000-15,000 fighters, but in total there are hundreds of thousands of fighters [from other groups],” the officer said, arguing that HTS will be unable to consolidate Salafist rule over the whole of the country. “We are open to friendship with everyone in the region—including Israel,” the officer went on to say. “We don’t have enemies other than the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran. What Israel did against Hezbollah in Lebanon helped us a great deal.” Prudently, however, Israel is not leaving anything to chance. Over the weekend, the IDF advanced to create a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, and the Israeli Air Force has struck suspected chemical-weapons stores, ballistic-missile factories, military infrastructure, and intelligence facilities. In a video statement released Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “If we can establish neighborly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that is our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the state of Israel.”

Uncertainty about the future, however, should not distract from the point that the collapse of the Assad regime is an unambiguous win for the United States and its allies, Israel and Turkey, and a defeat for Russia, Iran, and the Obama-Biden faction, which facilitated Assad’s survival throughout the Syrian Civil War and has attempted to prop up the Iranian alliance system ever since. More specifically, as Tablet’s Tony Badran noted on X on Sunday, the fall of Assad represents a stunning victory for Netanyahu, who resisted Washington’s pressure to fold against the Iranian Axis and ultimately decimated Hezbollah as a fighting force—again against the strenuous objections of the White House. As we learned over the past week, Assad and Iran were nothing without the Lebanese terror group.

In the United States, the reaction to Assad’s fall has been puzzling. Obama protected the Syrian strongman to avoid scuttling nuclear talks with Iran, and the Obama veterans running Joe Biden’s foreign policy have reliably bent over backwards to protect Iranian proxies throughout the region. Just last week, Reuters reported that the White House was considering lifting sanctions on Assad, and State Department spokesman Matthew Miller floated a “de-escalatory path” and a “political process” along the lines of the one the White House sponsored in Lebanon, the purpose of which was to extend an American protective umbrella to Hezbollah. Still, legions of MAGA influencers have floated inane conspiracy theories about the Biden CIA sponsoring “regime change” or a “jihadist coup” on its way out the door. Others have fretted that the fall of Assad portends an impending “massacre of Christians” and a refugee crisis in Europe, even as Syrian and Lebanese Christians celebrate the fall of the tyrant and thousands of exiled Syrians have begun returning to their homes.

Donald Trump, however, immediately grasped the fortuitous implications of events in Syria:

To restate the important part: “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success.” While one can legitimately worry about the intentions of Syria’s new rulers, we live in a world of states. In Syria, two allied states, Israel and Turkey, have decisively weakened two rival states, Russia and Iran, despite the best efforts of the outgoing administration. Trump, who wisely prefers geopolitical winners over losers, is likely to appreciate the help.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Paul de Quenoy on the increasing tensions between free speech advocates and the European Union bureaucracy

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The Rest

→In a Sunday interview with Meet the Press, Trump delivered another rebuke to the Obama foreign-policy clique and those on the right who have inexplicably adopted its premises. Asked whether he would “pressure” Netanyahu to “end the war in Gaza,” Trump replied, “Sure,” but then went on to explain:

I want him to end it, but you have to have a victory. People forget about October 7. That was as violent—and you know what’s happening? I noticed that a lot of people are saying, “Oh, it never really happened.” That’s like the Holocaust. You know, you have Holocaust deniers. Now you have October 7 deniers, and it just happened.

→To borrow an old feature from Vice, here’s a brief list of “Dos” and “Don’ts” to start off the week:

Do:

Turkey is certainly not our favorite NATO ally, but it is among the most geopolitically important. It also just delivered the incoming Trump administration a strong hand vis-a-vis Russia and Iran and, in the process, greatly increased its own influence and leverage in the region. Now might be a good time to dial back our sponsorship of an anti-Turkish Kurdish terrorist group (the PKK) on Turkey’s southern border, which has antagonized Ankara for very little in the way of strategic benefit to the United States.

Don’t:

First, there is no such thing as “the Kurds,” only various Kurdish factions aligned with other regional powers. Second, as Michael Doran notes on X, the Kurds in Manbij are part of the aforementioned PKK, regarded by the Turks as an existential threat, and installed on Turkey’s border by Obama and maintained there by Biden, despite promises that his administration would urge them to withdraw. Third, those Kurds are also regarded as enemies by the Syrian rebels. So what the Israeli foreign minister is doing here is, in Doran’s words, “needlessly courting the enmity of both Turkey and the new Syrian government” by picking a fight it has no chance of winning and that is unconnected to its vital interests.

→Police have apprehended a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week: 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate Luigi Mangione. Mangione was taken into custody Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he presented officers with a fake New Jersey ID believed to be the same one used by the shooter to check into a New York City hostel last week. Mangione also had a gun, a silencer, three other fake IDs., and a “manifesto” railing against the U.S. health-care industry, according to the New York Post. A high-school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate who worked as a data engineer prior to the shooting, Mangione does not appear to be an anticapitalist or left-winger, judging by his X profile. In infrequent posts over the past year, Mangione approvingly shared quotes and posts from Peter Thiel, the health influencer Andrew Huberman, and the tech writer Tim Urban. Replies to his X account over the past several months, however, include several posts from friends indicating that he had recently cut off contact and perhaps suffered some sort of mental breakdown.

→On Monday, a Manhattan jury cleared Daniel Penny of the only remaining criminal charge in the May 2023 death of homeless man Jordan Neely on a New York City subway. Penny, a former Marine who placed Neely in a chokehold after the drug-addled vagrant made violent threats on a crowded F train, had been charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, but the prosecution dismissed the manslaughter charge on Friday due to a deadlocked jury. The same jury unanimously acquitted Penny of the less-serious negligent homicide charge, meaning that Penny is no longer at risk of serving jail time, though Neely’s father has sued Penny in civil court. New York Mayor Eric Adams praised Penny last week for “doing what we should have done as a city,” though the leader of New York’s Black Lives Matter chapter, Hawk Newsome, told reporters last Friday, following the dismissal of the manslaughter charge, that “the KKK got another victory” and that anyone supporting Penny had “racism in their heart.”

→In our Jan. 18 Big Story, we reported that under the Biden administration, theTreasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had asked U.S. banks to search customer transaction records on payment apps for terms such as MAGA and Trump to help identify potential “domestic terrorists” and “homegrown violent extremists” (other red flags included buying “religious texts” such as the Bible or buying sporting goods at Bass Pro Shops). A Friday report from the House Committee on the Judiciary revealed that this was merely one aspect of a much wider effort to weaponize financial surveillance against U.S. citizens. For instance, according to the report, the FBI regularly manipulated the Suspicious Activity Report filing process to “treat financial institutions as de facto arms of law enforcement.” How? Normally, a bank is required to file an SAR, which does not require any due process, when it identifies a suspicious transaction—for instance, one that it believes may be related to fraud, money laundering, or terrorist financing. The FBI, however, abused this process by flagging certain individuals as suspicious and then requiring banks to file SARs for all transactions by those individuals, thus achieving de facto warrantless surveillance.

→On Sunday, Donald Trump announced Michael Anton as his director of policy planning at the State Department and Christopher Landau as his deputy secretary of state. Anton, a Leo Strauss disciple affiliated with the Claremont Institute, is most famous as the author of the 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” but he has also held several positions in government, including on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. Landau, meanwhile, is Trump’s former ambassador to Mexico, where he was instrumental in devising the “Remain in Mexico” policy to limit illegal immigration to the United States; among other things, his appointment as Marco Rubio’s deputy suggests a State Department heavily focused on Latin America. Landau is also, apparently, a prolific poster. According to a 2020 article in Vice, the Harvard-educated, Spanish-speaking lawyer “bullied” a Mexican college student on Twitter, writing in response to a sarcastic message, “Apologies if I’m not sufficiently sophisticated for you, with your degree in international relations. Obviously, your great education and knowledge of the world would allow you to do diplomatic work much better than the ‘rudimentary’ communications of this ‘white foreigner.’”

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Best Jewish Children’s Books of 2024, by Rachel J. Fremmer

This year’s top picks focus on some familiar themes—holidays, antisemitism, the Holocaust—but also delve into Sephardic and Mizrahi culture, diverse families, and illuminating stories about everyone from Santa Claus to Bella Abzug

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The EU Is Beset by Pesky Notions of Free Speech

Commoners rebelling against taxation without representation may be next on the agenda

By Paul de Quenoy

On a sunny day this past summer, I was strolling through Karlsruhe, a provincial German town where Germany’s Constitutional Court sits, when I happened upon a peaceful demonstration demanding freedom of the press. A casually dressed youth with a megaphone was exhorting spectators to resist threats to freedom and democracy. A hippie in a white blouse and flowing floral trousers held a sign caricaturing Germany’s legacy media as “the real fake news.” A 20-something lass with pink hair and black-strapped shoes raised a placard declaring “Without freedom of the press, democracy is bankrupt.” Another banner proclaimed “Freedom of the Press” above dates noting that noble concept’s birth in modern Germany—May 23, 1949, the day the Federal Republic, or West Germany, was founded—and its putative death—July 16, 2024, the recent day when Germany’s interior minister banned a political magazine.

Thus did I come into contact with what the German government now considers the “far right.” Despite the activists’ styles and slogans, they were not liberal idealists protesting conservative censorship, but right-wing dissidents protesting their leftist government’s decision to shutter Compact, a magazine that supports the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) party. In June, AfD placed second in Germany’s elections to the European Union Parliament after running on an anti-illegal migration platform. According to Nancy Faeser, the socialist interior minister responsible for the ban, Compact, which boasts 40,000 subscribers and reaches many more through online media engagement, is a publication of “intellectual arsonists who incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and seek to overthrow our democratic state.”

Faeser’s ban on Compact was no mere administrative sanction. Rooting her decision in a German law that broadly forbids political activism opposing the country’s constitutional order, she dispatched 339 police officers to raid 14 locations, including Compact’s offices, the offices of its parent company, and the homes of its staff and shareholders. The police seized technical equipment, office furniture, vehicles, merchandise, liquid assets, and just about anything else they could physically take, as well as bank accounts. Compact’s video production subsidiary was also closed. The magazine’s websites were blocked, and its social media accounts were contacted with an eye toward forcing them to shut down. Germany’s Federal Administrative Court later suspended the ban pending the results of a full investigation, but Compact’s ultimate fate remains unknown and will be decided in a legal battle between a relatively small publication and a national government with practically unlimited resources.

Tension between free speech rights and the European administrative state has exploded in recent years, particularly with the expansion of social media, nontraditional news sources, and transnational conduits of information. While neither the EU nor any of its 27 member states recognizes freedom of speech and expression with the same breadth that U.S. courts have found in the First Amendment, both the supranational body and its constituent parts nominally accord the concept protection as a fundamental human right. Without a robust, precedent-based legal system, however, Europe is struggling to decide where to draw the line. Naturally, those in power—generally statist bureaucrats relying on the center left’s entrenched hegemony in EU institutions and many national governments—are increasingly setting limits to protect themselves and their values at the expense of those who disagree or merely assert the freedom to express themselves. As the Compact case shows, it was the state’s prerogative to decide when “purposes of state” superseded the right of free expression.

Germany is at the forefront of European nations restricting free speech. While Article 5 of its constitution guarantees that “every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and images,” the foundational law prohibits speech that is racist, pro-Nazi, or, as Compact was accused of doing, advocates against the constitutional order of the country. In recent years German law has superseded constitutional limitations on speech. Late in Angela Merkel’s chancellorship (2005-21), the scope of German defamation statute was expanded to prohibit criticism of politicians who believe such expression interferes with their official duties. The definition of “official duties” and how criticism might unlawfully “interfere” with them was left vague. Perhaps predictably for such an ill-defined offense, since 2021 there have been more than 1,300 criminal complaints against German citizens for comments, memes, or social media posts critical of those in power, including clear cases of satire and even simple social media posts calling elected officials “idiots.”

In 2018, Germany adopted a comprehensive law, the Network Enforcement Act, or NetzDG, which requires social media platforms with 2 million or more users to remove “illegal content,” as defined in 22 articles of the national criminal code, within 24 hours of posting or face fines as high as 50 million euros. Since 2021, Germany has also enforced a broad “anti-hate speech” law that has resulted in over 1,000 criminal prosecutions for expressions of “hate”—again sparingly defined—with punishments ranging from fines to up to two years in prison, all in the name of protecting what a Justice Ministry spokesman called “every single person in our society from hostility and exclusion.” In June 2024, such protections extended to a convicted rapist who had received a suspended sentence but saw an ill-wisher sentenced to a brief jail term for calling him “a disgusting pig” in a personal WhatsApp message.

Some EU countries have been trying their best to follow Germany’s example. Using Germany’s NetzDG law as a model, the then-center-left majority of France’s National Assembly passed legislation intended to remove various forms of objectionable speech—including terrorist material, pornography, and “hateful content” (contenus haineux)—from major social networks, search engines, and similar platforms. Named after its sponsor, Laetitia Avia, a deputy of President Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! (now “Renaissance”) movement, the “Avia Law” was quickly stymied by France’s Constitutional Council, which ruled almost all of its provisions unconstitutional. One of the chief objections was that “hate” has no definition under French law apart from very limited contextual applications to “hate crimes.” It did not help that Avia herself was accused at the time of harassing multiple members of her staff with racist, sexist, and homophobic language that might have risen to her bill’s definition of “hateful content.”

Among the few Avia Law provisions that remained, however, were articles allowing for a specialized prosecution service for hate crimes and an “Online Hate Observatory,” attached to France’s Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom), which has discretionary power to sanction media outlets for “hateful content” and “fake news” (manipulation d’information, widely known as “la loi fake news”). In November 2024, Arcom fined a conservative news channel 100,000 euros after a program host stated that abortion is the world’s leading cause of death—a controversial statement, perhaps, but certainly an opinion that would be recognized as legitimate by familiar social institutions and stakeholders, like the Catholic Church.

Some countries without far-reaching free speech laws have used incremental legal measures to restrict speech. Spain’s new law code of 2015 contained the usual postwar pan-European prohibitions against racist speech. In the years since, however, successive Spanish legislation has criminalized “hate speech” directed toward individuals on the basis—whether real or presumed—of sexual orientation, disability, family status, illness, and other protected characteristics valorized by the progressive left, including the newer concept of “social exclusion.” Sanctions increased from the fines that were previously imposed to up to three years in jail. In 2019, a popular YouTube host was sentenced to 15 months in prison for humiliating a homeless person in an online video.

Often sanctioned by Spain’s courts, the concept of legislating against free speech has migrated to the political realm. In 2022, Pedro Sanchez’s leftist government passed the “Democratic Memory Law,” which outlaws any form of expression “favorable” to the regime of Francisco Franco, a historical period that lasted from 1936 to 1975. “Favorable” was undefined, however, nor are there any comparable prohibitions on expression “favorable” to past actions by Spanish communists or anarchists who opposed Franco while also committing a wide range of politically motivated crimes including mass murder.

Governments in countries with stronger judicial protections have been more creative, reviving long-abandoned laws against blasphemy and lèse-majesté to address violence and disorder arising from the Middle East conflict. Denmark, for example, introduced laws against racist speech as early as 1939, in response to rising antisemitism drifting across the border from neighboring Nazi Germany. Those laws, however, were only lightly enforced, with courts routinely finding that jokes, satire, insults, and so on were protected speech. With rising demonstrations against radical Islam in more recent times, however, Denmark’s left-wing government last year revived legislation against blasphemy which had not been enforced since 1946 and had been formally repealed in 2017. The new law, often called the “Quran Law,” prohibits the destruction of the religious symbols and texts of any established faith.

Neighboring Sweden also maintains a law broadly prohibiting hate speech, initially addressing race, religion, and ethnicity. In 2002, legislation added sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics, though enforcement has been relatively light. In 2024, in response to pro-Palestinian protests, the law was further amended to prohibit denial of genocide. Anti-Muslim protests, which included public burnings of the Quran, remain legal, which in 2022-23 created a temporary obstacle to Sweden’s prospective membership in NATO, due to Turkish objections.

While the free speech records of individual EU member states are mixed, the EU itself is getting in on the act by theoretically imposing speech laws over all member states, regardless of national-level constitutional protections and traditions. The innocuously named “Digital Services Act” (DSA) of 2022, championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, expands the most oppressive national laws—those of her native Germany—continentwide. As in the German case, large-scale media and digital marketplace companies—defined as having 45 million users or more—can face heavy fines for hosting content determined to be false or unlawful, with questionable legal or procedural oversight.

DSA’s full effect remains to be seen. As with any EU legislation, implementing DSA both generally and across 27 member-state bureaucracies will take years. It will also depend on the initiative and interpretative whims of national officials, not all of whom are efficient or sympathetic. DSA’s language itself is a challenge, since it requires its own mandate to be “interpreted and applied in accordance with … the freedom of expression and of information,” which the EU and all member states nominally protect. In these circumstances, freedom of speech and expression will be arbitrated by whoever holds the strongest combination of coercive power and ideological zeal among national and EU-level jurists, regulators, and bureaucrats.

At the supranational level, the bureaucrats already seem to have the upper hand. DSA’s only concrete test case so far has been the July 2024 criminal prosecution of Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) for allegedly publishing false information—specifically the blue check signs that purportedly authenticate high-profile accounts—on the theory that the symbols might have misled X users in the EU. Thierry Breton, a longtime French telecommunications executive who was in charge of DSA enforcement as the EU’s commissioner for internal markets at the time of the lawsuit against X, used the opportunity to admonish Musk to avoid “harmful” statements in an interview that the tech entrepreneur was scheduled to conduct on the platform with his fellow American and then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Breton framed the matter as an EU issue since EU users had the ability to access the event and potentially encounter opinions from the two Americans that they might find objectionable.

Musk, who will co-direct the new Trump administration’s government efficiency efforts, promptly posted a meme telling Breton what he could do with himself. But he might just as well have reminded the EU bureaucrat, who left office under an ethical cloud in September on an occasion that Musk promptly hailed as “a great day for free speech,” that the ability to regulate speech is hardly absolute, either.