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‘Lost faith’: Michigan Muslims shun Harris over Mideast turmoil

Farah Khan, left, co-chair of the Abandon Harris Michigan campaign, tries to convince Caitlyn Brown to vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP)
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Updated 05 November 2024
AFP
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‘Lost faith’: Michigan Muslims shun Harris over Mideast turmoil

  • Dearborn, a Detroit suburb famous as the birthplace of Henry Ford and the home of Ford Motor Company's headquarters, has a population of around 110,000, with 55 percent of residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African heritage
Updated 05 November 2024
AFP

DEARBORN, United States: Haunted by the daily violence ravaging the Middle East, Soujoud Hamade, a registered Democrat, felt compelled to back Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the US presidential election.
"It is very emotional," the 32-year-old real estate lawyer told AFP after casting her ballot Tuesday at a school in Dearborn, the nation's largest Arab-majority city, where voters could prove decisive in the key battleground of Michigan.
"Every time I watch the news or get on social media, I see my people being decimated, I see my home country being destroyed," added the Lebanese-American, disillusioned by the Biden-Harris administration's unwavering support for Israel.
Hamade says she's clear-eyed about the two-way nature of the race between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump.
Still, she insists her vote is far more than just a protest.
She's banking on helping Stein crack five percent of the national popular vote, a threshold that would unlock future federal funding for the Green Party and "move the needle forward" toward breaking the two-party hold on US politics.
Dearborn, a Detroit suburb famous as the birthplace of Henry Ford and the home of Ford Motor Company's headquarters, has a population of around 110,000, with 55 percent of residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African heritage.
The city overwhelmingly backed President Joe Biden in 2020, helping him narrowly flip Michigan blue.
But recent polling shows a shift away from the Democratic Party among Muslim and Arab-Americans.
That trend was evident in conversations with voters around the city on Election Day.

Stein, a Jewish physician and the Green Party's perennial left-wing candidate is predicted to do well among Muslims, as well as progressives and youth voters nationwide -- potentially acting as a spoiler for Harris.
"She's the only one who's anti-genocide," said Muhammad Hijazi, a 28-year-old engineer who described himself as a "single-issue voter" who had previously voted Democrat but had now "lost faith."
The Democrats, he argued, don't have a plan to bring peace to the Middle East, and he doesn't trust Trump to do any better.
Yet signs suggest Trump, too, may fare better than in past cycles. Unlike Harris, he visited Dearborn, addressing a modest-sized audience last week.
His outreach to Michigan's Muslim community secured endorsements from the Muslim mayors of Hamtramck and Dearborn Heights, while his newfound connection to the community -- through Lebanese-American son-in-law Michael Boulos, husband of Tiffany Trump -- has further endeared him.
Harris' decision to campaign with former Republican Liz Cheney, a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, was the final straw for Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi, he told Trump supporters at the former president's final Michigan rally.
Charles Fawaz, a 29-year-old first-grade teacher of Lebanese descent who voted for Trump, told AFP he was impressed that the former president "showed up."
"When Trump was president, everything was fine with our foreign policy because other leaders respected our country," Fawaz said.
Even if Trump doesn't deliver on Middle Eastern peace, he hopes Republicans will manage the economy better.
Former Democrats here say they know some liberals will blame them if Harris loses, but they reject the accusation.
"To put the onus on Arab Americans to vote for someone who's directly contributing to the genocide of other people is outrageous," Hamade said.
 

 

Topics: Trump Returns US Vice President Kamala Harris former President Donald Trump

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India’s Modi arrives in Kashmir to open strategic railway

Updated 9 sec ago
AFP
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India’s Modi arrives in Kashmir to open strategic railway

  • Modi is launching a string of projects worth billions of dollars for the divided Muslim-majority territory
  • His office broadcast images of Modi at a viewing point for the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long steel and concrete span
Updated 9 sec ago
AFP
SRINAGAR, India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Kashmir on Friday, his first visit to the contested Himalayan region since a conflict with arch-rival Pakistan last month, and opened a strategic railway line.
Modi is launching a string of projects worth billions of dollars for the divided Muslim-majority territory, the center of bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947.
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day conflict last month, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10.
His office broadcast images of Modi at a viewing point for the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long (4,314-foot-long) steel and concrete span that connects two mountains with an arch 359 meters above the river below.
“In addition to being an extraordinary feat of architecture, the Chenab Rail Bridge will improve connectivity,” the Hindu nationalist leader said in a social media post ahead of his visit.
Modi strode across the bridge waving a giant Indian flag to formally declare it open for rail traffic soon after his arrival.
New Delhi calls the Chenab span the “world’s highest railway arch bridge.” While several road and pipeline bridges are higher, Guinness World Records confirmed that Chenab trumps the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe in China.
The new 272-kilometer Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway, with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges, has been constructed “aiming to transform regional mobility and driving socio-economic integration,” Modi’s office says.
The bridge will facilitate the movement of people and goods, as well as troops, that was previously possible only via treacherous mountain roads and by air.
The railway “ensures all weather connectivity” and will “boost spiritual tourism and create livelihood opportunities,” Modi said.
The railway line is expected to halve the travel time between the town of Katra in the Hindu-majority Jammu region and Srinagar, the main city in Muslim-majority Kashmir, to around three hours.
More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire during last month’s conflict.
The fighting was triggered by an April 22 attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi accused Pakistan of backing – a charge Islamabad denies.
Rebel groups in Indian-run Kashmir have waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan.

Six-year-old girl among Myanmar group arrested for killing retired general

Updated 3 min 7 sec ago
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Six-year-old girl among Myanmar group arrested for killing retired general

Updated 3 min 7 sec ago
Myanmar’s military has arrested a six-year-old child as part of a group it labelled “terrorists” for the daytime killing of a retired military officer and diplomat last month, a junta-run newspaper reported on Friday.
Cho Htun Aung, 68, a retired brigadier general who also served as an ambassador, was shot dead in Myanmar’s commercial capital of Yangon on May 22, in one of the highest profile assassinations in a country in the throes of a widening civil war.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, overthrowing an elected government led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and triggering widespread protests.
The junta’s violent crackdown on dissent sparked an unprecedented nationwide uprising. A collection of established ethnic armies and new armed groups have wrested away swathes of territory from the well-armed military, and guerrilla-style fighting has erupted even in urban areas like Yangon.
“A total of 16 offenders — 13 males and three females — were arrested,” the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.
In an accompanying graphic, the newspaper carried the image of the six-year-old child, identified as the daughter of the alleged assassin.
Her face was blurred in an online version of the newspaper seen by Reuters, but visible in other social media posts made by junta authorities.
A junta spokesman did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Golden Valley Warriors, an anti-junta insurgent group, said they killed the retired general because of his continued support for military operations, including attacks on civilians, according to a May 22 statement.
The junta claims the group is backed by the National Unity Government — a shadow government comprising of remnants of Suu Kyu’s ousted administration that is battling the military — and paid an assassin some 200,000 Myanmar Kyat ($95.52) for a killing, the state newspaper reported.
NUG spokesperson Nay Phone Latt denied the shadow government had made any such payments. “It is not true that we are paying people to kill other people,” he told Reuters. Since the coup, Myanmar’s junta has arrested over 29,000 people, including more than 6,000 women and 600 children, according to the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, an activist group.
Fatalities among civilians and pro-democracy activists verified by AAPP during this period amount to more than 6,700, including 1,646 women and 825 children.

Russia sees bleak prospects for expiring nuclear arms pact given ‘ruined’ ties with US

Updated 16 min 4 sec ago
Reuters
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Russia sees bleak prospects for expiring nuclear arms pact given ‘ruined’ ties with US

  • President Vladimir Putin in 2023 suspended Russian participation in New START, blaming US support for Ukraine
  • But Russia would remain within the treaty’s limits on warheads, missiles and heavy bomber planes
Updated 16 min 4 sec ago
Reuters

Russia sees little chance of saving its last nuclear accord with the United States, due to expire in eight months, given the “ruined” state of relations with Washington, its top arms control official said in an interview published on Friday.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also told TASS news agency that President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense project was a “deeply destabilizing” factor creating formidable new obstacles to arms control.

His comments were among Moscow’s bleakest yet about the prospects for the New START agreement, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries, which caps the number of strategic warheads that each side can deploy.

President Vladimir Putin in 2023 suspended Russian participation in New START, blaming US support for Ukraine, although he said that Russia would remain within the treaty’s limits on warheads, missiles and heavy bomber planes.

But if the treaty is not extended or replaced after it expires on February 5 next year, security experts fear it could fuel a new arms race at a time of acute international tension over the conflict in Ukraine, which both Putin and Trump have said could lead to World War Three.

The Federation of American Scientists, an authoritative source on arms control, says that if Russia decided to abandon the treaty limits, it could theoretically increase its deployed nuclear arsenal by up to 60 percent by uploading hundreds of additional warheads.

Ryabkov described Russia-US ties as “simply in ruins.”

“There are no grounds for a full-scale resumption of New START in the current circumstances. And given that the treaty ends its life cycle in about eight months, talking about the realism of such a scenario is increasingly losing its meaning,” Ryabkov told TASS.

“Of course, deeply destabilizing programs like the Golden Dome – and the US is implementing a number of them – create additional, hard-to-overcome obstacles to the constructive consideration of any potential initiatives in the field of nuclear missile arms control, when and if it comes to that.”

Trump said last month he had selected a design for the $175-billion Golden Dome project, which aims to block threats from China and Russia by creating a network of satellites, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, to detect, track and potentially intercept incoming missiles.

Analysts say the initiative could sharply escalate the militarization of space , prompting other countries to place similar systems there or to develop more advanced weapons to evade the missile shield.

Ryabkov’s comments came in the same week that Ukraine stunned Moscow by launching drone strikes on air bases deep inside Russia that house the heavy bomber planes that form part of its nuclear deterrent.

Russia has said it will retaliate as and when its military sees fit.

Topics: Russia US

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Bolivia justice minister accuses Morales of ‘terrorism’ over road blockades

Updated 25 min 11 sec ago
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Bolivia justice minister accuses Morales of ‘terrorism’ over road blockades

  • Supporters of the former president have began blocking roads leading to La Paz, the seat of government
  • Protests have snowballed into a wider revolt over President Luis Arce’s handling of a deep economic crisis
Updated 25 min 11 sec ago
AFP
LA PAZ: Bolivian Justice Minister Cesar Siles accused ex-president Evo Morales of “terrorism” on Thursday for allegedly ordering his supporters to cut off supplies to La Paz after he was banned from contesting August elections.
Siles said the government had filed a complaint against Morales for “terrorism, public incitement to crime and attacks on the security of public services,” among other crimes, over the campaign of road blockades that has paralyzed central Bolivia since Monday.
Supporters of the former president – who served from 2006 to 2019 – began blocking roads leading to La Paz, the seat of government, over the electoral authorities’ refusal to allow Morales to run for a fourth term in August 17 elections.
The protests have since snowballed into a wider revolt over President Luis Arce’s handling of a deep economic crisis, marked by severe shortages of hard currency and fuel.
Many of the protesters have called on Arce, an ally-turned-foe of Morales, to resign.
A leaked audio message on Thursday appeared to capture Morales calling on his supporters in the country’s agricultural heartland to shut down two key roads leading to La Paz.
The government reported more than 40 blockades nationwide on Thursday, which the minister of economy said were causing daily losses of $100 to $150 million.
Around 30 police officers have been injured in clashes with protesters since the beginning of the week, according to Gabriela Alcon, deputy minister of communication.
Morales, 65, was barred by the Constitutional Court from seeking re-election but attempted in vain to register as a candidate last month.
He faced a similar situation in November 2019 when the government of right-wing president Jeanine Anez accused him of “sedition and terrorism.”
Morales had allegedly called on supporters to maintain blockades which caused food and fuel shortages in La Paz.
Morales is also wanted on charges of human trafficking over his alleged sexual relationship with a minor while in office.
He has firmly rejected the charges as a case of “judicial persecution.”

Polish foreign minister takes aim at Musk after Trump clash

Updated 26 min 39 sec ago
Reuters
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Polish foreign minister takes aim at Musk after Trump clash

Updated 26 min 39 sec ago
Reuters

WARSAW: Poland’s foreign minister poked fun at Elon Musk late on Thursday, returning to a social media spat from March after the Tesla and SpaceX boss spectacularly fell out with US President Donald Trump.
Warsaw’s top diplomat Radoslaw Sikorski found himself embroiled in an extraordinarily public clash with Musk and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March after he said Ukraine may need an alternative to the Starlink satellite service.
Amid a flurry of posts on his social media platform X, Musk had told Sikorski to “Be quiet, small man.”
On Thursday simmering tensions between Musk and Trump exploded into a public feud, as the president threatened to cut off government contracts to companies run by the world’s richest man. Musk suggested Trump should be impeached.
Sikorski took aim at Musk in a post on X, saying “See, big man, politics is harder than you thought.”
There was no immediate response to the post from Musk.

Topics: Elon Musk Poland Trump

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