Frederick Deknatel
LightNews LightNews
banner
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Frederick Deknatel
@freddydeknatel.bsky.social
2.4K followers 3.2K following 2.4K posts
Journalist, fellow at Century International, editor of Hidden Cities: https://www.hidden-cities.com/

Previously: Founding executive editor, Democracy in Exile @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social; managing editor @wpr.bsky.social; staff editor @foreignaffairs.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Frederick Deknatel @freddydeknatel.bsky.social · Sep 24
I'm thrilled to join the Century Foundation as a fellow at Century International, where I'll be writing on Syria's future, from the huge challenges of reconstruction to the prospects for U.S.-Syria ties after Assad. @centuryintl.bsky.social @tcfdotorg.bsky.social
tcf.org/experts/fred...
Frederick Deknatel - The Century Foundation
Frederick Deknatel is a journalist, editor and fellow at Century International, where he writes about Middle Eastern affairs. From 2021 to 2025, he was
tcf.org
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Can’t believe the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would launch a war like this.
January 3, 2026 at 1:28 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Just wait, Maduro will pass a flattering letter to Trump through Witkoff or Kushner, and then Trump will pardon him.
January 3, 2026 at 12:32 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Trump’s “cowboy diplomacy,” huh!
January 3, 2026 at 12:31 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Donald “George W. Bush” Trump, more and more people are saying.
January 3, 2026 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
joshtpm.bsky.social
Im seeing discussions about consultations with congress, authorizations of force etc. I have to say this transcends any of what I would call sub constitutional technicalities. The president has gone to war with a foreign power and, it seems, kidnapped a foreign head of state on the basis of nothing.
January 3, 2026 at 9:43 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“Once you factor in New York’s relatively low number of auto accidents per capita — because so many people take public transit, which is much safer — it becomes clear that New York has a lower rate of violent death than almost anywhere else in America.” open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...
Notes on New York
The Big Apple had a pretty good 2025, but …
open.substack.com
January 2, 2026 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
jamellebouie.net
sliwa correctly understanding that mamdani ran a very traditional campaign and thus surpassing the analytical ability of 80% if people who comment on politics for a living
clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. @clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · 1d
this is the most incredible interview i’ve ever read. the aei guy tries so hard to get sliwa to trash mamdani and he simply won’t. he also brings up flaco (rip) unprompted.

www.wsj.com/opinion/free...
Tunku Varadarajan: Will you ask New Yorkers who voted for you to give Zohran Mamdani a chance? Curtis Sliwa: Absolutely. He won a majority. He has a mandate. The Masters of the Universe, the billionaires, did everything they could to make sure he wasn't the mayor. It didn't work. He's a great organizer. I'll give you an example: Melinda Katz, the current District Attorney for Queens County, New York. She's the mother of my two youngest sons. She was running for DA in 2019. She had the institutional support. Moderate Jewish mother. Loyal Democrat. Queens borough president. Perfect résumé. She's running against Tiffany Caban, who wasn't even in elective office at that time. Very radical. You know, "do away with jails, don't arrest anyone." Tiffany Caban won on election night. But she lost the race on the absentee ballots, but only by about 20 votes. You know who the street organizer was for Tiffany Caban? Zohran Mamdani. So, when they talk about him as a trust fund baby, I say no, no, no, no, no. You don't like it when people call him a "nepo baby." He's earned his stripes. He had 100,000 volunteers going door-to-door, and I experienced that in some of the neighborhoods where you would never have seen anybody liberal or progressive go. Howard Beach! In conservative Howard Beach, they're going block to block. They were everywhere. 100,000. I call them Zohranistas. This was the secret to his election, not TikTok. It was good, old-fashioned retail politics. Frankly, Cuomo and not Mamdani was the nepo baby in this race. Born on third base. Felt entitled. Knew the political process, but mailed it in. He didn't have the stomach to actually go out and do retail politics. And shame on him. Do you think Mamdani will make a better mayor than Andrew Cuomo might have done? How would you describe Mamdani's politics? He's not a communist. People call him that. That's ridiculous. He is a democratic socialist. David Dinkins [New York mayor from 1990-93] was a democratic socialist. We've had a long history in New York City of socialism. What's the biggest challenge Mamdani faces as mayor! I don't think the Zohranistas totally understand the fiscal irresponsibility we just went through with the Adams years and how little money there's left. There's not enough money to do all the things that Zohran wants to do. A last question. All through our interview you pronounced Mamdani as "Mandami," transposing the "m" and the "n" in his name. Are you aware of the mispronunciation? Many people, Cuomo included, mangle his name. In the debate, Zohran brought that to my attention, my mispronunciation. I didn't do it on purpose. There's no disrespect. I have a hard time with it. It took people about 10 years to pronounce my last name correctly: "Sleewah.'" They pronounced it Silva, Saliva, Slywah. In the streets, we would have given Zohran a nickname, like I did for all the Guardian Angels. "Z Man" would have been perfect for him. That would have been his handle. Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
January 2, 2026 at 12:27 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Under its new billionaire Trumpist owners and the EIC installed to serve them, CBS News will be “anti-elite.”
The point is that on too many stories the press missed the story. Because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.
January 1, 2026 at 7:53 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“triangles, claddings, unexplained diagonals, shapes and forms, misaligned volumes, climate-control boxes, and celebration spaces stitched together…into an incoherent building grand in scale but otherwise fragmented.”

Mohamed Elshahed on the Grand Egyptian Museum: www.archpaper.com/2025/12/gran...
December 31, 2025 at 3:13 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
"some of the patrons who don't show up now will get out of the habit of going to the theater and will be less like to attend future performances" is the kind of vacuous thinking (ultimately sucking up to Trump) that has a home in Jeff Bezos's "revamped" WaPost Opinion.
exum.bsky.social Andrew Exum @exum.bsky.social · 3d
This is not hard. Artists are not responsible for ensuring the Kennedy Center remains relevant and successful. The center’s board is responsible for that, in a fiduciary way. All of this energy being directed at artists should be re-directed at the board.
December 30, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
exum.bsky.social
This is not hard. Artists are not responsible for ensuring the Kennedy Center remains relevant and successful. The center’s board is responsible for that, in a fiduciary way. All of this energy being directed at artists should be re-directed at the board.
December 30, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
daveweigel.bsky.social
Reading the lede of Taibbi's famous financial crisis take; it's full of memorable hyperbole that you could prove is not 100% true. That's legal, actually
December 29, 2025 at 2:21 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
To round out the year, Roger Cohen and the NYT channel every cliche of Middle East coverage you can think of and assign four different photographers to it.
December 28, 2025 at 7:41 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives. Instead, the opposite.” www.equator.org/articles/how...
How Gaza Broke the Art World • EQUATOR
The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence
www.equator.org
December 27, 2025 at 8:14 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles.” @radleybalko.bsky.social
Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here
With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse.
newrepublic.com
December 24, 2025 at 5:59 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“Several diplomats in Syria said they were more disturbed by lobbying efforts in Washington than the insurgency plots. Such campaigns, they said, could gradually lay the groundwork for calls for a semiautonomous region in Syria.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/w...
Ousted and in Exile, Generals Secretly Plot Insurgency in Syria
www.nytimes.com
December 24, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
bendwalsh.bsky.social
stay woke, read the British financial newspaper owned by a Japanese stock market index and media conglomerate
conorsen.bsky.social Conor Sen @conorsen.bsky.social · 11d
Even 5 years ago if you had told me CBS News would go this way whereas the WSJ wouldn’t it would have surprised me — ultimately I think purveyors of business news are the only ones insulated from these dynamics because when rich people are paying you for market-moving news you can’t mess around.
December 23, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
bubbaprog.xyz
The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5
December 23, 2025 at 1:28 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Bashar al-Assad's daughter has been living and studying in the UAE since the regime fell, at the Sorbonne in Abu Dhabi, where it looks like Emirati authorities are her enforcers, kicking out another Syrian student who dared to criticize her in a group chat. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/w...
Just weeks after the fall of the regime, Zein al-Assad returned to her studies at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne, a renowned French university, according to family friends and a classmate. She was accompanied on campus, the classmate said, by large and imposing bodyguards. Not all Syrian students embraced her return. In a group chat, one student told Ms. al-Assad she was “not welcome,” according to two people who said they had seen the exchange. Shortly afterward, they said, the entire chat was shut down, and the student was no longer seen on campus. A relative of the student said he had been questioned by the Emirati authorities and later left the university in part because of this incident. The Sorbonne Abu Dhabi said the student’s dismissal was a “purely academic matter” and cited three infractions, including cheating. The acrimony in the chat group with Zein al-Assad had “no connection” to the dismissal, the university said. The classmate said that Ms. al-Assad had not attended classes for part of her last term. But she did pick up a diploma in June at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where she was also enrolled. Photographs of the graduation showed her brothers and mother in attendance.
December 22, 2025 at 7:23 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
The world has moved toward renewable energy, that future is already here. Except in the United States, where the Trump administration is an agent of the oil and gas industry, desperate to take the country's energy infrastructure back a few decades. www.bbc.com/news/article...
December 22, 2025 at 5:16 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
"Vineyard Wind is almost done with construction, with only one turbine tower left to send out, and then some blade sets to install. It has been sending power to the grid all through the year. It is unclear if the project must now cease sending power."

Trump's energy revolution!
Trump administration suspends leases of Vineyard Wind and 4 other offshore projects - The New Bedford Light
The Interior Department asserts radar interference and a national security threat to pause offshore wind projects.
newbedfordlight.org
December 22, 2025 at 4:57 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Trump continuing to hike electric bills for everyone on the East Coast. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/c...
Trump Halts Five Wind Farms Off the East Coast
www.nytimes.com
December 22, 2025 at 4:55 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
So is Bari Weiss going to performatively resign from CBS now too and blame a hostile culture of journalists who actually report the news?
December 22, 2025 at 4:10 AM
Reposted by Frederick Deknatel
pbump.com
No one is going to tune in to CBS because they know it won’t be critical of Trump but lots of people will tune out for that reason. Spiking the CECOT story to curry favor is a terrible moral and journalistic decision — but it’s also a terrible business decision.
dandrezner.bsky.social Daniel Drezner @dandrezner.bsky.social · 12d
“We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
www.nytimes.com
December 22, 2025 at 3:57 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
By turning CBS into state media for Trump, Bari Weiss is also whitewashing the brutality of the Bukele regime in El Salvador. This 60 Minutes report would have shown viewers the horrors of CECOT — which Weiss wants to cover up.

I wonder why 🤔 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term "migrants" to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.
December 22, 2025 at 4:02 AM