New York City’s first lady Rama Duwaji, whom we already know didn’t want this role in the first place, would like everyone to know that she is sorry.

For what? Well, that’s what she doesn’t really want to tell us. She just wants to issue a blanket apology while giving an interview about her art, her artistic sensibilities, and pass herself off as an international woman of the people. Here is what she told Hyperallergic, an arts magazine, when interviewed by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Hakim Bishara.

H: Your art has always been political. How does your new position as first lady of New York City impact your freedom to make more of this kind of work?

RD: Everything is political: what we choose to show, what we choose to omit, the stories we highlight and the ones we leave in the margins. It has and will continue to be important for me to reflect the times around me as an artist. If anything, having this position makes me more committed to being honest and attentive, to making work that is complex. It feels like it would be doing it a disservice to not be the artist that got me to this point.

H: Becoming a public figure over the last year has changed your life drastically. Did it also change you as a person?

RD: This experience has absolutely changed my life. I am still figuring out how it applies to me as an artist and as a person, both thinking of the future and the past. It has forced me to confront how much I’ve changed, even before this moment. When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it. I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry. My focus isn’t on being a public figure, but continuing my work with care and responsibility, and allowing my art to speak for itself.

Well, for not being the politician in the family, she has certainly mastered the word salad. We’re just supposed to know, without any explanation in this interview, what “language” she used at age 15 that got uncovered. That “tabloid” she’s referring to? That would be the Washington Free Beacon.

New York City’s first lady, Rama Duwaji, glorified terrorist violence in a wide range of posts made on social media when she was a teenager and in her early 20s, celebrating members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group and the First Intifada, a Washington Free Beacon review of her old X and Tumblr accounts found.

Duwaji, 28, posted a photo to her Tumblr account in September 2017, when she would have been 20 years old, of the infamous Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled. Under the username “diimashq,” she echoed one of Khaled’s most famous statements.

“If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death,” the caption read.

In the posts, Duwaji celebrated other members of the terrorist PFLP as well. In March 2015, when she was 17, New York City’s future first lady reposted a tweet on International Women’s Day praising the terrorist Shadia Abu Ghazaleh. It shows a photo of Ghazaleh, a leading PFLP figure who participated in the bombing of an Israeli bus and led several other terrorist attacks, posing with a rifle. She was killed in 1968 when a bomb she was building in her home—which she intended to use to blow up a building in Tel Aviv—exploded accidentally.

The Free Beacon has screenshots and receipts, but the one piece of “language” that Rama Duwaji is apparently referring to is something that she specifically said when she was 15 years old.

On Feb 2., 2013, Duwaji—who is not black—used the N-word in a post on X. She was 15 years old at the time.

“@_AlyaF Helllll yeah, nigga. Super duper genius* excuse you,” she posted.

Rama Duwaji is apparently referring to her use of the n-word, which is both screenshot in the Free Beacon article and saved in internet archives. Now, we are just assuming that she is offering up an apology for this post and word, and not for her obvious loathing, which she also retweeted about at the same time, for Israel.

In 2015, the social media app Snapchat added Tel Aviv to its “live story” feature, showing user-submitted photos and videos from a particular location. The decision sparked a backlash from anti-Israel users, including Duwaji, who retweeted a series of posts from an account called @butterbooter.

“But in all reality, @Snapchat has disappointed me. Fuck #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers. You celebrate them,” read a post retweeted by Duwaji.

“And finally. Hey @Snapchat, as you give Israelis an outlet to celebrate their atrocities, youre supporting a genocidal state. Bye. #TelAviv.”

Is Rama Duwaji apologizing for this as well? We don’t know. She only speaks in the most general terms about the “shame” about the “language” she used, and never says exactly WHAT she is apologizing for. After all, we know that she still holds very ugly anti-Semitic views to this day, and she’s not apologizing for those. She’s only bringing up what she said when she was 15, not what she said in her 20’s, or what she liked after October 7, 2023.

But if we’re going to believe what Rama Duwaji says now, then “everything is political,” including what she “chooses to omit.” She is deliberately omitting anything she said as an adult, and only putting out a general mea culpa for whatever she said at 15. So, even her apology is political, likely only focusing on a singular post.

A week before the posts were exposed, Duwaji drew backlash when it emerged she once liked Instagram posts celebrating Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that shared images of the murderous assault on Israel.

One post included claims that the rapes carried out by the terror group against Israeli hostages and victims were a “mass hoax.”

While Duwaji remained silent amid the uproar, her socialist husband, a vocal critic of Israel, jumped to her defense, claiming she is a “private person” who holds no formal role in his administration and shouldn’t face scrutiny over her social media activity.

The first lady’s half-hearted apology in the interview with Hyperallergic stopped short of mentioning the exact nature of the explosive posts — focusing only on the fallout.

Ah yes, we all remember Zohran Mamdani’s half-assed excuses for his wife’s social media.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. You don’t get to be first lady of New York City, with all the perks and exclusive interviews that come with it, and then claim “private person” when your past statements and “language” come back to haunt you.

Rama says she changed a lot and her tweets were from her teenage years. Guess every teen casually drops the N-word.

Yet just ONE DAY after October 7th, at age 26, she liked posts that called the attacks and the rapes of Jewish women a hoax.

Miss me with the fake bullshit and… https://t.co/t7cazj2wQS

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) April 16, 2026

Rama Duwaji wants to apologize, but not be specific about her apology. She wants to focus on her art, but says that “everything is political.” She wants all the perks of being first lady, but none of the critiques. And most of the media would let her get away with it, because of her husband’s leftist ideology. The only thing that has tripped them up is that use of the n-word, and she now gives the media the pass to say that she has apologized, and everyone should move on now. She doesn’t say that she understands why what she wrote was wrong, only that she understands that she “caused hurt” and “has listened” and now she is “truly sorry.” And as for her views on Israel, or October 7th? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a sincere apology there. She’s given no indication that her opinions there have undergone any kind of material change. We are expected to sweep it under the rug, just as her husband did, and willfully ignore it.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click