When El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (who had previously identified as Malcolm X) traveled to Egypt and Lebanon in the spring and summer of 1964, he attracted regional press coverage whose tone speaks to areas of both overlap and incongruity between his project of Islamic Black nationalism, on the one hand, and the populist-authoritarian movements that were rising to prominence across the decolonized world, on the other. In particular, coverage of his visits in the Syrian press, free from specific logistical items related to his itinerary, serves as a unique case study of the ways that a nascent Ba’athist state discussed el-Shabazz’s work within a confrontational “Third Worldist” frame. References to his visit in "al-Thawra", a newspaper affiliated with the Syrian Ba’ath Party, as well as that publication’s coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement, described the question of anti-Black racism as solely a reflection of flaws in the American nation-state. The religious nature of el-Shabazz’s attempts to internationalize his movement went unmentioned and, though "al-Thawra" framed most other Syrian domestic issues through a putative commitment to socialist worker mobilization, coverage of these issues contained few mentions of Black Americans as workers per se. The specifics of el-Shabazz’s efforts to court support from organizations affiliated with the Egyptian and Saudi governments, both of which attracted differing degrees of wariness from the Syrian Ba’ath Party during this period, also went unnoticed. While el-Shabazz spent this period grappling with a perceived blindness toward anti-Black racism within pan-Islamist and pan-Arabist communities, these examinations go unnoted as well in Syrian press coverage of his travels in the region. The specificities of el-Shabazz’s pleas for support to American Black liberation movements were lost, as the man and his movement became stand-ins for the failings of the state undergirding the global political-economic structures against which the writers of "al-Thawra" cast themselves.