In last night’s Democratic debate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was strongly criticized for her trip to Syria when she met with the country’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I’m talking about building up — I’m talking about building up alliances. And if your question is about experience, let’s also talk about judgment. One of the foreign leaders you mentioned meeting was Bashar al-Assad. I have in my experience, such as it is, whether you think it counts or not since it wasn’t accumulated in Washington, enough judgment that I would not have sat down with a murderous dictator like that.

Buttigieg could also have mentioned Gabbard’s bizarre claims that chemical weapons attacks in Syria “may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.” According to Bellingcat, Gabbard’s “evidence” rests on “fake intelligence, dodgy dossiers, and lies.”

Gabbard visited Syria in January 2017. She initially declined to say who paid for the trip, citing “security reasons.” She then said the trip had been paid for a little-known group called the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS) – Ohio.

The nearly $9,000 cost of bringing Gabbard and her husband, Abraham Williams, to Syria and Lebanon was paid for by two Lebansese-American brothers, Bassam (Sam) and Elias (Elie) Khawam. (Gabbard later announced that she was personally reimbursing AACCESS for the cost of her trip to Syria.)

On Gabbard’s House disclosure form, (here) they are listed as board members of AACCESS; in a story first published by The Daily Beast, the Khawams are officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The Khawams were part of the “Syrian National Socialists of North America,” according to this archived post from SSNP.net.

Critics of the SSNP have long labeled it fascist. The group rejects that characterization, but it’s true the SSNP drew inspiration from European fascism upon its founding in 1932. Members of the SSNP assassinated of Lebanon’s president-elect in 1982 and bombed a TWA jetliner in 1986. According to this U.S. government fact sheet, the first female suicide bomber may have been a member of the SSNP who detonated a car bomb in 1985 in Lebanon, killing two Israeli soldiers and injuring two others.

The late, great Christopher Hitchens recounted in Vanity Fair how was assaulted by SSNP thugs during a 2009 visit to Beirut. Hitchens begins his account saying he was strolling through a neigbhorhood when he recognized the party’s symbol, a modified Swastika.

I recognized it as the logo of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Fascist organization (it would be more honest if it called itself “National Socialist”) that yells for a “Greater Syria” comprising all of Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and swaths of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. It’s one of the suicide-bomber front organizations—the other one being Hezbollah, or “the party of god”—through which Syria’s Ba’thist dictatorship exerts overt and covert influence on Lebanese affairs.

Christopher Hitchens, “The Swastika and the Cedar,” Vanity Fair, May 2009

In a statement, Gabbard said that, at first, she had no intention of meeting Assad during her trip to Syria, “but when given the opportunity, I felt it was important to take it. I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there’s a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering.”

Indeed, the meeting with Assad was not on Gabbard’s proposed itinerary. However, the first thing Gabbard did in Syria was meet with Assad, her revised itinerary shows:

She met again with Assad and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem before leaving Syria.

It bears repeating: Gabbard said she met with Assad because she believed there was a “chance” it could help end a war. Even so, Gabbard said little about what she and Assad had discussed over the course of two hours of meetings. Interestingly, no photos of Gabbard’s visit with Assad have ever surfaced.

In April 2017, Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper with links to the Assad regime, reported that Tulsi Gabbard had delivered a message to Assad on behalf of President Trump.

The Al-Akhbar report quoted Gabbard as saying, “This is a question to you coming from President Trump which he asked me to convey to you. So let me repeat the question: If President Trump contacted you, would you answer the call?” Gabbard denied it.

The exchange described in this story never happened. Claims suggesting otherwise are false.

— Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiPress) April 3, 2017

What is certain is that Tulsi Gabbard met with president-elect Trump in November 2016 and the two discussed Syria:

President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.

The Gabbard/Trump meeting was arranged by Steve Bannon.

“He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” a source told The Hill. “Wants to work with her on everything.”

“She would fit perfectly too [inside the administration],” the source added. “She gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff.”

Gabbard’s meeting with Trump caught the eye of former KKK leader David Duke who lavished praise on her on his website:

I call your attention to a quote from the article on Duke’s website:

“In particular, she is unique in being a strong and principled opponent of any intervention in Syria. She wants the United States to stop supporting ISIS and other “rebel” groups and let the Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah help President Assad defeat the jihadists and end the Syrian Civil War (which is more an armed invasion than a real civil war). This is exactly the right approach.”

Gabbard (and David Duke) would have you believe that Assad, a bloodthirsty ruler who used chemical weapons against his own people, was not an enemy of the United States. Rather, she said Syria was being devastated by terrorists whom the Hawaii Democrat claimed were being armed by the United States.

In other words, she would keep dictators like Assad in power under the guise of counter- Islamic terrorism and peace activism.

Gabbard is playing a clever game here.

The question is: Whose game is she playing?