分类： world

A widespread public and corporate backlash has swept across Chinese digital platforms after unverified clips of star French footballer Kylian Mbappé making remarks referencing a purported “Chinese dictator” during a French talk show appearance circulated widely online. The clips, pulled from the program *The Bridge* and no longer available on its official YouTube channel, feature the Real Madrid forward describing his favorite personal meme as one that superimposes his face on an image resembling late Chinese founding leader Mao Zedong, noting he regularly shares the joke with his friends. Mbappé never explicitly names Mao in the circulating snippets, but screen captures and translated clips spread rapidly across Chinese social media after prominent football community platform Dongqiudi highlighted the content Monday night, labeling the remarks inappropriate and a direct affront to Chinese public sentiment. The controversy has drawn formal comment from China’s Foreign Ministry, where spokesperson Lin Jian stated that any words or actions that harm the feelings of the Chinese people will naturally face pushback from all segments of domestic society. Mbappé, who has long held massive popularity among Chinese football fans and built a lucrative portfolio of local commercial endorsements, has seen major domestic partners sever ties in response. Leading national dairy producer Mengniu and beverage giant Dongpeng both issued statements affirming zero tolerance for any conduct that offends national sentiment, without explicitly naming the viral interview clip as the trigger for their contract terminations. Additional repercussions have emerged in Chinese media, with state broadcaster CCTV reportedly suspending its broadcast of La Liga matches, and official CCTV news mobile apps removing all previously published content related to the striker. The public outcry has been amplified by thousands of user posts on platforms like Weibo, with many critics accusing the athlete of profiting extensively from the Chinese consumer market while displaying a lack of basic respect for the country’s core national figures. Context surrounding the viral meme trend adds layers of nuance to the controversy: Mbappé has been widely nicknamed “the dictator” in global football circles for his outsized influence over club and national team operational decisions, a moniker that spawned a flood of internet memes across French-speaking communities. His France national teammate Ousmane Dembélé even referenced the trend during the 2026 World Cup, jokingly calling him “Mobut” in a reference to former long-time DRC authoritarian ruler Mobutu Sese Seko. Months prior to the viral *The Bridge* interview, Mbappé addressed the trend in a September 2024 conversation with *France Football*, noting that while many of the memes are intended as lighthearted jokes, they sometimes expose a lack of political and historical awareness, as comparisons to figures responsible for mass suffering and deaths carry unacknowledged weight. As of press time, neither Mbappé nor the production team behind *The Bridge* have issued any formal statement addressing the circulating clips or the ongoing backlash in China. A small subset of Chinese social media users have also raised questions about the exact full context of the remarks, noting that the unavailability of the original full interview has left some details unconfirmed.

In a scathing exclusive statement shared with Middle East Eye, Sudan’s top diplomatic delegation to the United Nations has formally called on all member states to block Lana Nusseibeh, the Emirati foreign minister and former long-serving UAE UN ambassador, from securing the organization’s top leadership post, framing her candidacy as an inappropriate reward for Abu Dhabi’s alleged actions that have fueled widespread atrocities in Sudan’s ongoing civil war.
Nusseibeh emerged as a surprise frontrunner for the secretary general role after a last-minute announcement of her candidacy on a Wednesday, arriving amid a months-long deadlock in the 15-member UN Security Council, which has failed to reach consensus on a successor to outgoing incumbent Antonio Guterres following six rounds of informal straw polls where no candidate earned the required backing from all five veto-wielding permanent members: the United Kingdom, United States, Russia, China and France. Multiple sources close to the British government have also previously indicated that London is leaning toward backing Nusseibeh’s bid, further stoking tensions around the race.
The Sudanese mission’s public rebuke centers on longstanding widespread allegations that the UAE has provided material and political support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary group whose documented mass killings, sexual violence and systematic attacks on civilian populations have been deemed to carry the “hallmarks of genocide” by independent UN investigators. The Sudanese diplomatic team emphasized that they hold “fundamental questions about Nusseibeh’s independence, impartiality and credibility” to uphold the neutral duties of the UN top job, noting that her decades of public service have been dedicated to “defending and whitewashing her country’s record of troubling the peace of Sudan by enabling genocide, the enslavement of our women and girls, sexual violence and other atrocities.” The mission stressed that “The UAE must face accountability, not be rewarded with the top global leadership role of the UN.”
The UAE has repeatedly denied all allegations of involvement in Sudan’s civil war, which erupted in April 2023 and has since killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than 8 million civilians across the region. Nusseibeh herself, who served as the UAE’s permanent representative to the UN from 2013 to 2024 before taking senior foreign ministry posts, has repeatedly dismissed such claims: in an April 2024 Security Council address, she labeled allegations of Emirati support for the RSF as “spurious, unfounded, and lacking any credible evidence,” and when questioned by CNN in July 2024 about UN investigators’ formal findings of credible proof of UAE ties to the paramilitary, she responded flatly “Absolutely” when asked if she rejected the conclusions, calling the accusations “categorically untrue.”
Documents and reporting also reveal that Nusseibeh traveled to Strasbourg in November 2025 to lobby European Parliament lawmakers to remove all references to the UAE’s role in Sudan’s conflict from a formal EU resolution condemning widespread atrocities in the war-torn nation. She did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Middle East Eye regarding the Sudanese mission’s latest statement.
While the UN Charter requires the secretary general to operate fully independently of their home government, Ammar Mahmoud, a senior Sudanese diplomat posted to the UN, argued that Nusseibeh’s explicit rejection of UN investigators’ formal findings already demonstrates she cannot approach the role with the required neutrality. “I highly doubt that she will ever form any investigative committees about the UAE’s role in Sudan,” Mahmoud told MEE. “Nor do I think that she will accurately reflect, in her engagements with world leaders as secretary general, the true nature of the conflict in Sudan and her country’s role in it.”
Earlier, in March 2025, Sudan brought a formal case against the UAE at the International Court of Justice accusing Abu Dhabi of complicity in genocide on Sudanese territory, but the case was dismissed two months later on procedural grounds, as the UAE had not completed full accession to the Genocide Convention, stripping the court of formal jurisdiction to rule on the matter.
Beyond concerns over Sudan, critics have also raised significant questions about Nusseibeh’s ability to neutrally mediate the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict and hold Israeli leaders accountable for alleged war crimes in Gaza, where local health authorities confirm more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed since the outbreak of renewed hostilities in October 2023. While the UAE has regularly voted against Israeli policies at the UN General Assembly, Abu Dhabi established normalized diplomatic and security ties with Israel via the 2020 US-brokered Abraham Accords, a landmark diplomatic deal that Nusseibeh herself was a leading architect of. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly presented a security proposal for a so-called “Israel-UAE Hexagon Alliance” that explicitly listed Sudan’s RSF paramilitary as a “friendly” partner.
If elected, Nusseibeh, who has Palestinian heritage, would make history as the first woman to ever lead the United Nations, and only the second Arab national to hold the secretary general post. Her candidacy has also broken longstanding informal regional rotation conventions that many member states argued should prioritize a candidate from Latin America for the 2026-2033 tenure. The UN has not yet released a revised timeline for final voting on the next secretary general amid the ongoing Security Council impasse.

The 1996 Israeli parliamentary elections initially appeared to be a guaranteed victory for then-incumbent Prime Minister Shimon Peres and his center-left Labor Party. Peres had centered his re-election platform on a landmark “land for peace” framework, vowing to cede territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to establish a sovereign Palestinian state, a deal he argued would end eight decades of bitter Arab-Israeli enmity. His rival, the then-young Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, was launching the first of what would become 11 national election campaigns, six of which ultimately secured him the prime minister’s office. Rejecting the principle of Palestinian statehood entirely, Netanyahu proposed a counter “peace for peace” model that would leave the West Bank and Gaza under full Israeli control, with Palestinian residents granted no sovereign rights and encouraged to resettle elsewhere in the Middle East. In the early months of 1996, this hardline platform gained almost no traction with the Israeli electorate: January polling showed Peres holding a commanding 20-point lead over his challenger. That trajectory shifted catastrophically in the lead-up to May’s ballot, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out a string of deadly attacks across Israeli civilian spaces, bombing two public buses, a bus stop, and a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 59 people in total. The carnage re-framed Peres’ peace overtures in the public eye as dangerously naive. Though the incumbent ordered a swift military retaliation campaign, the show of force failed to calm a terrified, enraged public. Netanyahu’s “peace through strength” platform resonated deeply in the altered security climate, and he pulled off a razor-thin 1 percentage point upset to claim the premiership. Thirty years later, Netanyahu is once again on the national ballot, this time as a deeply embattled incumbent facing widespread public fury over the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust: the October 7, 2023, Hamas cross-border raid that killed more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, including women and children, with militants infiltrating southern communities using hand gliders. A broad cross-section of Israeli critics accuse Netanyahu of ignoring repeated intelligence warnings about Hamas’ offensive capabilities and failing to implement adequate border security protocols to prevent the massacre. To date, Netanyahu has refused to acknowledge any personal or administrative shortcomings ahead of the attack, instead launching the most massive military campaign against Palestinian territories in Israel’s history: a combined air, ground, and artillery offensive across the Gaza Strip that has destroyed swathes of civilian residential and commercial infrastructure, with Hamas officials reporting a death toll of at least 70,000 people. The Hamas raid and subsequent Israeli retaliation have rippled out to ignite a wider regional conflagration that has drawn in multiple global and regional powers. Iran and its allied militia networks — Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi movement in Yemen — have launched coordinated missile and drone attacks targeting Israeli territory. Israel responded with a ground invasion and partial occupation of southern Lebanon to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities. A joint U.S.-Israeli aerial campaign targeting Iran soon followed, with overlapping, shifting objectives ranging from crippling Tehran’s suspected nuclear weapons development program, to ousting the longstanding Islamic government in Iran, to securing unimpeded passage through the Persian Gulf and Red Sea critical global fossil fuel shipping lanes, goals that appeared to shift erratically based on daily announcements from U.S. President Donald Trump. In retaliation, Iran launched strikes against U.S. security partners in the Persian Gulf, the Houthi movement carried out attacks on Saudi Arabian territory, several Gulf Arab states retaliated against Iran with rocket barrages, and Saudi Arabia launched an extensive bombing campaign targeting Houthi positions in Yemen. Parallel to this multi-front regional conflict, Israel has moved to cement expanded control over the West Bank, combining conventional military operations with informal state support for extremist civilian settler groups that carry out targeted harassment campaigns against Palestinian rural communities. Despite the unprecedented scale of the ongoing regional turmoil, it remains deeply unclear whether Israeli voters will choose to oust Netanyahu in the upcoming national election. Polling data from the independent Tel Aviv-based Israel Democracy Institute reveals a starkly divided public mood: 90% of Israeli respondents expressed full support for Netanyahu’s ongoing military campaign against Iran, while 72% argued that the prime minister must accept full responsibility for the October 7 massacre and step down from office. Current pre-election surveys show Netanyahu locked in a dead heat with his leading rival, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, whose new centrist Yashar Party holds a narrow, marginal lead in aggregate polling. Eisenkot’s policy positions on defense and foreign affairs largely mirror Netanyahu’s: he has pledged to fully dismantle and disarm Hamas, support continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, contain Iranian regional influence through coordinated global economic blocs, and pursue limited, conditional negotiations for a future Palestinian state, though he has rejected Netanyahu’s strategy of direct aerial strikes on Iranian territory in favor of diplomatic and economic isolation. Eisenkot’s core selling point to voters is his reputation for uncompromising personal integrity — a deliberate contrast to Netanyahu, who has spent years facing a series of high-profile public corruption indictments. Even the name of his party is designed to highlight that contrast: Yashar translates directly to “straight” in Hebrew, a common colloquial term for honesty and uncompromising ethics. As voting day arrives, Eisenkot is waiting to see if that reputation for transparency will carry him straight to the prime minister’s office.

Top representatives from the three-nation Mecca Defence Alliance — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan — arrived in Tehran on Monday for high-stakes diplomatic negotiations, as key Middle Eastern powers move to de-escalate spiralling tensions stemming from the ongoing Israel-US military pressure campaign against Iran and build a localized security architecture free from external Washington control. The urgent diplomatic push unfolds against a backdrop of widespread anxiety that further military strikes by Israel and the United States could spark a full-scale regional conflagration, with cascading shocks poised to upend global supply chains and economic stability. The visiting delegation included Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir, and Turkish National Intelligence Organisation head Ibrahim Kalin, who held closed-door discussions with senior Iranian officials led by Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Confirming the landmark meeting on social platform X, Saudi Deputy Minister for Public Diplomacy Rayed Krimly emphasized that the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement bloc was prioritizing de-escalation and backing ongoing mediation efforts led by Qatar and Pakistan to reduce cross-border tensions. “This visit highlights the central, constructive role of Mecca Defence Agreement member states in shoring up regional security and stability, and our commitment to collaborating with every regional stakeholder to advance that shared goal,” Krimly wrote in his public post. Regional policy analysts have framed the gathering as a historic departure from decades of reliance on US-led security pacts, which have come under fierce scrutiny since the 28 February launch of the joint US-Israeli military campaign targeting Iran. Local governments across the Middle East have grown increasingly disillusioned with the so-called US “security umbrella”, which many argue has failed to shield regional partners while emboldening Israel to launch a wave of cross-border attacks across the region since the start of the Gaza conflict in October 2023. Over that period, Israeli strikes have targeted Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, and Yemen, while parallel efforts backed by the United Arab Emirates have sought to destabilize governments in Somalia and Sudan. Ali Salehian, director of the Center for Intellectual Diplomacy at Tehran’s Governance and Policy Think Tank, told Middle East Eye that the Tehran dialogue marked a paradigm shift for regional governance. “What makes this meeting truly transformative is the reality that all major regional powers, with the exception of the Zionist regime, are now collaborating to build an autonomous, independent regional order rooted in local stakeholders rather than external foreign actors,” Salehian explained. He added that the eroding credibility of US security guarantees has left many regional states exposed, not protected: “The steady decline of US global influence, paired with the total failure of its purported security commitments, has not placed these countries under a protective umbrella — it has turned them into potential targets for retaliatory strikes from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Governments across the region are also acutely aware that any new round of large-scale US-Israeli strikes against Iran would inflict severe economic pain on Gulf states and ripple out to hurt households worldwide. Even the partial disruption to global energy markets since the start of the latest tensions has driven up inflation and fuel costs, with Brown University’s independent Iran War Energy Cost Tracker calculating that US consumers alone have faced an extra $144 billion in cumulative energy expenses. Gokhan Cinkara, director of the Center for Global and Regional Studies at Turkey’s Necmettin Erbakan University, confirmed that the Mecca Alliance’s core priority in Tehran was to offer explicit reassurance to Iran that none of the bloc’s member states would participate in any potential offensive military action against Iranian territory. “This is a sincere, good-faith effort by regional states to draw a clear line that they will not be dragged into a war against Iran,” Cinkara noted, while tempering expectations for immediate, sweeping diplomatic breakthroughs. “We are not anticipating that the Mecca Alliance will sign a formal mutual defence pact or joint operational agreement with Iran. The bloc is actively working to carve out a neutral, alternative regional security framework that sits outside the existing Iran-aligned and Israel-aligned blocs that currently divide the region.” Many regional policymakers also cite the international response to the conflict in Ukraine as a critical cautionary tale, warning that overreliance on Western security partnerships can leave local states abandoned and unsupported if they are drawn into conflicts that do not serve their own core national interests. “Ukraine is a very clear lesson for every indigenous regional stakeholder: it has pushed all of us to sit down together, identify our shared threats, and build a collective, locally led understanding of how to address those risks without relying on outside powers,” Salehian added. The Tehran talks also send a clear, unified signal to both Washington and Jerusalem that, despite their respective outstanding policy differences with Iran, the Mecca Alliance members have no desire to see the wider region dragged into a catastrophic multi-front war. The diplomatic gathering came just days after Israeli media outlets — operating under strict state military censorship — reported a high-profile public rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Defence Forces chief Eyal Zamir, over a proposed pre-election military strike against Iranian territory that Zamir publicly opposed. Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, noted that the very act of holding the Tehran dialogue carried a symbolic weight that extended far beyond the content of the closed-door negotiations. “In the wake of the US and Israel’s unilaterally chosen military campaign against Iran, regional states are increasingly prioritizing their own national interests, building independent security arrangements, and maintaining open lines of communication with Tehran,” Citrinowicz wrote on X. “Their policy priorities no longer automatically align with Washington’s, and they certainly do not align with the hardline agenda of the current Israeli government.” Former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also hailed the meeting as a critical first step toward building a formal West Asia Security Network. “The security of our region cannot be imported from foreign capitals — it must be built collaboratively by the peoples and governments of this region, in partnership with one another,” Zarif stated. For Saudi Arabia, the Tehran discussions also provided a direct channel to request Iranian support for mediating an end to renewed clashes with Houthi forces in Yemen, as Riyadh seeks to avoid opening a new, costly front of hostilities directly linked to Tehran. The United Arab Emirates, which has maintained a close secondary partnership with the US-Israeli military campaign to reshape the region, has remained publicly silent on the high-profile Tehran talks. Salehian noted that the UAE’s ongoing provision of intelligence, security, and military support to Israel would shape its long-term position within the emerging new regional security order: “Their choices to facilitate aid for the Zionist regime will inevitably draw a response from the rest of the region. Where the UAE ultimately lands in this new security architecture depends entirely on the decisions its leadership makes moving forward.”