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Pro Wrestler Competing in WrestleMania 40 Promotes False Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionist Narratives Online
Sami Zayn. Photo: BANG Showbiz via Reuters Connect
Canadian professional wrestler Rami Sebei, one of the biggest stars in the WWE who performs under the ring name Sami Zayn, has regularly been “liking” antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist posts on social media while following accounts that promote false narratives about the Jewish state, The Algemeiner has learned.
The pro-Palestinian athlete, who is of Syrian descent, will challenge fellow wrestler Gunther for the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania XL on Saturday. Ahead of his appearance in the professional wrestling event, The Algemeiner discovered that Zayn follows an account on X/Twitter that shares daily antisemitic and anti-Zionist content, including comparisons between Zionists and Nazis and false accusations about Israel. The account is run by an “Anti Zionist Hebrew,” according to its bio.
Throughout several posts this week, Israel has been described as a terrorist country and liberal Zionism equated with the murdering of Palestinians. On Monday, the account shared a video of soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) kicking around a ball and wrote in the caption, “Israeli soldiers have some genocide fun time in Gaza playing with a football, most likely looted from displaced/murdered Palestinians.” On Tuesday, the account re-posted a message that said Israel is “like a mafia, launching hits on Palestinians like organized criminals.”
On March 15, another post on the X account said: “Am Yisrael Chai [a Jewish slogan that means ‘the people of Israel live’] will never again be a legitimate phrase, it has become merely an expression of genocidal ideology. Zionists have turned it into their own ‘Seig Hei,’” which is a reference to the Nazi salute.
Photo: Screenshot
On March 11, the account shared messages about Zionists having “a lust for blood and destruction.” The account was recently flagged by X as harmful but has not been shut down.
Zayn also liked a video on X that showed comedian and actor Rami Youssef saying on March 30 during his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live: “God, please stop the suffering. Stop the violence. Please free the people of Palestine, please.”
On Instagram, Zayn has “liked” several posts from an account that regularly accuses “Israeli occupation forces” of genocide, and of executing, murdering, and deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. On Wednesday, Zayn “liked” a post on the Instagram account that referred to the six months that have passed since the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, during which hundreds of civilians were killed and hundreds more were taken by Hamas as hostages back to Gaza. However, rather than reference the Hamas attacks in Israel that sparked the current war, the post instead focused on Gaza and said, “6 months; 180 Day of GENOCIDE #SaveGaza.”
On Monday, Zayn “liked” a post on the same Instagram account that claimed Israel has “destroyed most of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip,” without mentioning that Hamas uses Gaza’s hospitals for its terrorist operations.
On Sunday, the wrestler “liked” a post that stated a false accusation about how “Israeli occupation forces murdered” civilians “in cold blood” and also “destroyed a [sic] residential blocks in the vicinity of Shifa hospital and executed hundreds of Palestinians civilians.” The Israeli military said on Monday that over the last two weeks it had killed more than 200 gunmen at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital — which according to the US and Israel was used by terrorists to run military operations and even hold hostages seized by Hamas — and captured about 900 suspects, of whom more than 500 were confirmed to be terrorist operatives.
Photo: Instagram screenshot
Photo: Screenshot
Zayn has an extensive history of expressing anti-Israel sentiments on social media. Last year, he shared on X an article titled “Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians.” The article compared Israel to Nazis for launching a military campaign in the Gaza Strip targeting Hamas terrorists. The article also claimed that Israel killed some of its own citizens during the terrorist strike on Oct. 7 and concluded by saying that “Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.”
Zayn joined many celebrities in signing an open letter addressed to US President Joe Biden that called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
After many supporters of Israel contacted the WWE and its parent company, TKO, about Zayn’s social media activity, he deleted his antisemitic posts without releasing a public statement or apology. He was also not sanctioned by the WWE.
In one now-deleted post from 2021, the wrestler talked about “Israeli military aggression” being wrapped “in a cloak of victimhood” by politicians and commentators who he claimed were “omitting [Israel’s] crimes towards the Palestinians.”
Also in 2021, in response to a post on X by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang expressing his solidarity with Israel and condemning Hamas terrorists, Zayn said, in a now-deleted tweet: “There is no viable moral defense for stealing people’s homes based on their ethnicity. Maybe not the most tasteful statement to make within hours of Israel bombing Gaza and killing 20 Palestinians, 9 of whom were children. But then again I’m not a soulless piece of s**t politician so what do I know?” Pro-Israel groups reportedly contacted the WWE following Zayn’s offensive tweets in 2021.
TKO has a Jewish majority on its board of directors — including Jonathan Kraft, the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — and the WWE has a global partnership with Mattel, which is led by Israeli Chairman and CEO Ynon Kreiz.
Neither TKO nor the WWE responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment about Zayn’s recent social media activity. The WWE also ignored a request to speak with Zayn directly.
WrestleMania 40 will take place on April 6-7 at the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
The post Pro Wrestler Competing in WrestleMania 40 Promotes False Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionist Narratives Online first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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