JNS.org — Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday suspended an official account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, one day after it was created.

The suspension of the @Khamenei_Heb account came shortly after it featured the tweet: “The Zionist regime made a mistake. It erred in its calculations on Iran. We will cause it to understand what kind of strength, ability, initiative, and will the Iranian nation has.”

The tweet appeared to be a reference to Israel’s Oct. 26 retaliation for the Islamic Republic’s Oct. 1 ballistic missile attack.

X is owned by Elon Musk, who has expressed support of Israel. He visited Israel in November and attended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in Congress in July. He is also on record as advocating free speech on X and in general.

X did not immediately say why it suspended Khamenei’s account. The notice about the suspension referred readers to a text on X’s website that explains that suspended accounts were “found to be in violation of our rules,” which prohibit “violent and hateful entities.”

The post X Suspends Iranian Supreme Leader’s New Hebrew-Language Account first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Republican Donald Trump appealed to Muslim voters in Michigan on Saturday as Michelle Obama made an impassioned plea on behalf of Kamala Harris at the Democrat’s own rally in the battleground state.

In Michigan, Harris and Trump are battling for voters that include an Arab American and Muslim population concerned about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and union workers worried about how electric vehicles could reshape the US auto industry, which is headquartered in Detroit, the state’s largest city.

Election Day is Nov. 5 but early voting was under way in Michigan, as it is many states.

Speaking at a rally outside Detroit, Trump said he had just met with a group of local imams, arguing that he deserved the support of Muslim voters because he would end conflicts and bring peace to the Middle East.

“That’s all they want,” Trump said in the Detroit suburb of Novi, also pledging to auto workers at the rally that he would reverse economic decline in the Detroit area and nationwide.

Trump fully backs Israel but has not said how he would end the conflict there.

Even so, Trump appears to be gaining support from some Muslim Americans upset with President Joe Biden’s and Harris’ support of Israel, and despite Trump banning immigration from some Muslim majority countries in his first term as president.

Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit joined Trump on stage, saying, “we ask Muslims to stand with President Trump because he promises peace.”

With some 8.4 million registered voters and 15 electoral college votes of the 270 needed to win, Michigan is one of seven competitive US states that will decide the election. It is part of the “Blue Wall” that is considered Democrats’ best chance of electing Harris, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

OBAMA TAKES THE STAGE

In the southern Michigan city of Kalamazoo, about 130 miles (210 km) away, Harris drew contrasts between her and Trump on issues such as abortion rights, taxes and healthcare.

But first Obama, the popular wife of former President Barack Obama, fired up the crowd by drawing distinctions between the two candidates on personal character and qualifications, saying there was a double standard in how Trump and Harris were being treated.

“I hope you’ll forgive me that I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” the former first lady said, urging any undecided voters to “snap out of whatever fog they’re in.”

Obama also addressed women’s health at length, saying Trump has failed to demonstrate understanding of its complexity and that his vows to rescind the Affordable Care Act passed during her husband’s presidency would affect the “entirety of women’s health, all of it.”

“We as women will become collateral damage to your rage,” she said, later introducing Harris to an animated crowd.

Harris was several minutes into an upbeat address when she was interrupted by a demonstrator who repeatedly yelled, “No more Gaza war.”

After Harris supporters shouted down the interruption, Harris responded, “On the topic of Gaza, we must end that war,” then picked up where she left off, asking voters to “turn the page on the fear and the divisiveness.”

“Over the last eight years, Donald Trump has become more confused, more unstable and more angry, and it is clear he has become increasingly unhinged. But the last time, at least there were people who could control him, but notice they’re not with him this time,” Harris said.

Ahead of the rally, Harris met with women medical providers in Portage, Michigan, where she said the country was in a healthcare crisis following the 2022 ruling by the US Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a women’s right to abortion nationwide.

Harris heard from six women medical providers who described being inundated by patients from other regions due to a lack of reproductive healthcare in their areas since Roe was overturned.

After leaving Michigan, Trump traveled to Pennsylvania, where he tried to reel in young voters with a rally on the campus of Penn State University, at one point bringing the school’s wrestling team on stage with him.

“We have to finish it off with a big victory on Nov. 5,” he said.

POLLS SHOW TIGHT RACE

Harris is leading Trump nationally by a marginal 46% to 43%, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed. In Michigan, Harris leads by even less – 47.6% to 47.1%, according to opinion poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight.

Since the 2020 election, Michigan has instituted early in-person voting for the first time and begun permitting jurisdictions with more than 5,000 people to begin processing and tabulating mail ballots eight days before the Nov. 5 Election Day.

So far, 19.5% of registered voters in Michigan, or nearly 1.42 million people, have voted, Michigan’s State Department said on Friday. Only 10,900 were in-person early votes, while the rest were returned absentee ballots.

The post Michelle Obama Backs Harris in Michigan, Where Trump Courts Muslim Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

JNS.org – It’s often said about antisemitism that Jews are the canary in the coal mine: What starts with them won’t end with them, and sooner or later, the rest of society will suffer the consequences of this thoroughly anti-democratic ideology. I’m not going to delve into that proposition here, save to say that while I don’t entirely agree with it, there are times when its core observation can prove useful.

A case in point concerns the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres. Back in June, I gave voice to the disappointment I know is shared by many other Jews over the evolution of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After initially appearing quite promising and making all the right noises on why antisemitism is a global threat that needs to be dealt with, Guterres transformed for the worse after the Hamas pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the chorus chiding the Jewish state on the international stage—from Ireland to South Africa, from Spain to Chile, and all points in between. Particularly disgraceful was his decision to place Israel on a blacklist of countries whose militaries abuse children, alongside such paragons of virtue as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen. Other democracies, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, could easily end up on a list like this given the actions of their militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don’t because the United Nations understands that the political costs of such an action are minimal only when it comes to Israel.

Now Guterres is burrowing deeper into the authoritarian, conspiracy-addled universe from which antisemitism springs. Last week, the U.N. chief arrived in the Russian city of Kazan for a three-day summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc of states, which bills themselves as an alternative to the economic institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that have dominated the post-World War II global order.

The summit was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delightedly used the occasion to demonstrate that his illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine hasn’t exactly robbed him of allies. More than 20 world leaders joined him in Kazan, among them Chinese President Xi Jinping, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Other states eager to enter the BRICS fold, including Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, also sent senior representatives to sit at Putin’s feet.

By attending the summit in Russia, Guterres was effectively spitting in the faces of both Ukraine and Israel. In doing so, he proved that when you flirt with antisemitism and legitimize its tropes, you open yourself up to embracing all of its associated baggage—fake news, outlandish theories and the recasting of terrorism as a form of “resistance.”

BRICS isn’t an exact copy of the Warsaw Pact—the treaty organization that bound the Soviet Union to its Communist satellite states during the Cold War—but it is certainly making moves in that direction. Among its five founders, only Brazil and India have an interest in keeping relations cordial with Western democracies, but they are no match for Chinese or Russian imperatives in this regard. Meanwhile, South Africa and those states that have knocked on the BRICS door more recently—like Turkey, despite its status as a NATO ally—regard the bloc as much more than an economic association. Critically, BRICS will provide rogue states like Iran and even North Korea with a veneer of legitimacy denied to them in Western circles.

Indeed, none of the subjects that the Russian news agency Tass, quoting a Kremlin statement, reported as being on the agenda at a private meeting between Putin and Guterres concerned trade or economic development.  Their “discussion will be given to pressing issues on the international agenda, including the Middle East crisis and the situation around Ukraine,” the Kremlin said. What Guterres will hear from Putin is the standard Russian line, defaming Ukraine’s democratic government as a collection of “neo-Nazis” and richly complaining, nearly three years into the invasion of Ukraine, that it is Israel’s multi-front defensive war against an axis of Iranian proxies that is causing instability! Meanwhile, Iran continues to supply Russia with missiles and drones, while North Korea has—according to South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence reports—sent thousands of its troops to fight alongside the Russians.

By feting a group of states who represent, in the words of Kyiv Post commentator Orhan Dragas, “a worrying mix of authoritarianism, anti-democratic governance, and war crimes,” Guterres is compromising the basic values of the world body’s founding charter. His presence amounts to an approval of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the deepening alliance between Moscow and Tehran. The only way to avoid that impression would be for Guterres to state clearly that Russia must withdraw entirely from Ukraine and that Israel, as a sovereign U.N. member state, has an unquestioned right to defend itself against an association of states and client paramilitaries seeking its destruction. He won’t, of course, say anything that comes even close to that.

The elephant in the room here is the US-led alliance of democratic states around the world. Over the last 80 years, there has been any number of reasons for them to ditch the United Nations in favor of a new world organization that doesn’t allow its members to repress their own populations or sew regional havoc in the name of “national sovereignty.” Yet they have not done so, mainly because they fear an outcome in which they are unable to influence or check the behavior of authoritarian states. And with the future of US foreign policy up for grabs ahead of the US presidential election on Nov. 5, Putin correctly calculates that now is the perfect time for him to strut the world stage, presenting a vision of international relations that will strengthen the positions of Russia and its allies while weakening ours.

The practical effects of this weakness are already painfully visible. To take a few examples: Qatar—an Iranian ally that practices a form of apartheid by disenfranchising nearly 90% of its population—has been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council; UNRWA—the U.N. agency solely dedicated to the descendants of Palestinian refugees—continues to function despite copious evidence of the overlap between members of its staff and Hamas; and the U.N.’s top official is breaking bread with a Russian leader eager to revive the threat posed by his country during the Cold War.

I could go on, but it will suffice to say that the head-in-the-sand approach of Western leaders to our fracturing international institutions is in large part responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. The only real pushback that Guterres has received so far has come from Israel, which has declared him persona non grata. As welcome as that decision is, it is an isolated one that will have little impact until other countries pluck up the courage to follow suit.

The post Guterres Embraces the Authoritarians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.