Pro-Hamas Activity
This week, two hundred and fifty nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, in international waters where no state but the flag state has the authority to board a ship, the Israeli navy closed on fifty-four civilian vessels carrying four hundred and twenty-eight people from forty-four countries — doctors, nurses, lawyers, a retired mayor from Barcelona, a grandmother from Tunisia — and the baby formula, toothbrushes, and cans of beans they had loaded into the holds in Marmaris, Turkey, ten days earlier.
They had loaded the boats because they had read the reports.
In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine in Gaza for the first time in the region’s recorded history. Fifty-four thousand children were acutely malnourished. For every ten thousand, four were dying each day, of starvation or of the diseases that walk in behind it. Hospitals were operating without anesthesia. In the makeshift shelters, rats were biting children whose families had carried them there. Some fathers were burying their dead in plastic bags. The white shrouds had run out.
The water that morning was the color of slate.
The NAHSHON was an amphibious landing craft the United States had delivered to Israel three years earlier. The Israeli navy moved one hundred and seventy-five of the four hundred and twenty-eight onto her deck. The other two hundred and fifty-three were taken on smaller vessels to Ashdod, where Adalah, the Israeli human rights organization representing the detainees, would later catalogue their sworn statements: fifteen sexual assaults, twelve of them inflicted on the NAHSHON.
The statements name humiliating strip searches, sexual taunting, groping; multiple rapes, including anal rape and forcible penetration with a handgun. One boat alone yielded thirty-five broken ribs. The Spanish-Palestinian activist Saif Abukeshek was separated from the others; witnesses described his screams echoing through the steel of the ship.
When a woman tried to speak, she was grabbed by the neck and forced to her knees, while Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, walked the deck with a phone camera. “I was proud,” he said afterward, “that we treat the flotilla activists like supporters of terrorism.” The Israel Prison Service denies the allegations.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, had set the framing on X back in October, when an earlier flotilla was intercepted. He called the mission "a carbon-spewing Hamas-funded boat ride in violation of international law intruding into war zone to stand with terrorists." Hamas, the Palestinian faction the United States has designated a terrorist organization since 1997. Three weeks before this week’s interception, the State Department reissued the label, naming the Sumud Flotilla “pro-Hamas activity.”
Days later, the President of the United States stood at Joint Base Andrews and announced he might run for Prime Minister of Israel. He claimed he was polling at 99 percent there.
They came carrying food.
The Children of Darkness
For two years the Israeli state has told its own population that the people on the other side of the wall are not human.
On October 9, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered the siege of Gaza. “We are fighting human animals,” he said, “and we are acting accordingly. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.” A week later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” Amalek came into the speeches that followed — the biblical command to slay both man and woman, infant and suckling. That citation now sits in the South African genocide filing at the International Court of Justice.
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry found in September that Netanyahu and Gallant had committed “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” Incitement is a stand-alone offense under the Convention, prosecutable even if the genocide does not occur.
The flotilla sailed into that language. Then the handgun followed.
What a Ship is For
Suppose every one of them was guilty of exactly what Huckabee said.
They were stripped on the deck of the NAHSHON, and they were raped, and the handgun was used, and the Israeli state filed no charges and produced no court. The wealthiest military in the Middle East, armed by the most powerful empire on earth, sent a landing craft into international waters to torture civilians it had decided were adjacent to its enemy.
There is a different thing a warship can be.
The United States Congress, in March of 1847, with a million Irish already dead of hunger and the British government refusing to feed the rest, stripped the USS Jamestown of her guns and handed her to a Boston merchant named Robert Bennet Forbes, who filled her holds with eight hundred tons of donated food and pointed her at Cork. When she made the harbour on April 12, the people on the quay still strong enough to stand wept. One hundred and fifty more ships followed her across the Atlantic before the year was out.
The NAHSHON, days ago, carried one hundred and seventy-five humanitarians from their civilian boats into a steel hold off the coast of the population they had been trying to feed.
The flotilla broke no law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea guarantees freedom of navigation in international waters, and the only state with authority to board a ship in international waters is the flag state — Italy, Spain, Brazil, Turkey. Israel was none of them and boarded the vessels at gunpoint. Fourteen U.N. Special Rapporteurs used the word. So did the governments of Spain, Brazil, Italy, and Turkey. The word was piracy. Then the state that committed it made its kidnapped victims sign confessions admitting they had illegally entered Israel.
The label comes first.
Lineage
What is the lineage of a label?
Black, brute. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation inside the White House. The Tulsa Tribune ran a headline on May 31, 1921: Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator. By nightfall, Greenwood was burning. Three hundred dead. In 1955, the boy Emmett Till was fourteen years old. Carolyn Bryant admitted, half a century later, that she had made up the whistle.
Native, savage. Sand Creek, 1864. Colonel John Chivington’s troops fell on a sleeping camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho, killed two hundred and thirty mostly women and children under a U.S. flag and a white flag of surrender, and rode back into Denver with body parts strung from saddles.
Japanese, enemy alien. Executive Order 9066, signed February 19, 1942, sent one hundred and twenty thousand American citizens behind barbed wire. The Supreme Court approved it.
Mexican, bandit. The Texas Rangers killed somewhere between three hundred and five thousand people of Mexican descent along the Rio Grande between 1910 and 1920. Historians call it La Matanza.
Women, witch and feeble-minded. Twenty hanged at Salem in 1692. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the Supreme Court, in 1927, in Buck v. Bell, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By 1979, the United States had sterilized more than sixty thousand women under that ruling — most of them poor, Black, Indigenous, Latina.
Jew, enemy of the Reich. The Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship in 1935, and the yellow star was sewn onto coats in 1941 on the order of the Reich Main Security Office, and the cattle cars rolled east under transport orders carrying the Reichsbahn’s accounting stamps. Never again, the world said in 1945, when the gates of Buchenwald opened. The new state, built on the land of people the labeling apparatus had already practiced on, began the practice itself.
A label writes the law that defends it. The law becomes the receipt of the label’s victory.
On September 22 last year, the President signed an executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Antifa has no membership rolls. The order produced an enemy that did not exist, allowing the apparatus to move against the people who do. Pro-Hamas is the label being practiced on foreigners. Radical left is the label being built for use here.
What the Label Does
Somewhere this week, someone watching the news paused on the word illegal and wondered whether the flotilla had broken some law they had not read. The State Department had used the word. The ambassador had repeated it. The cable anchor said it three times in a four-minute segment. By the end of the segment, the body had been stripped before the soldier reached it, and the law that defended the soldier had been written in the same word, and the obituary that erased the witness had used the language already at hand.
Every regime that has ever penned a population first penned a word for it. The Nazis sorted human beings into Untermensch. The Rwandan radio sorted them into Inyenzi — cockroaches. The Texas Rangers branded them bandido. The men in Washington and Tel Aviv have sorted four hundred and twenty-eight doctors and nurses and grandmothers into Hamas.
Pro-Hamas activity.
The Flotilla
The Global Sumud Flotilla was intercepted in international waters on May 18–19, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-navy-intercept-flotilla-boats-trying-to-breach-the-blockade-of-gaza
Around 430 activists from over forty countries were detained. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/22/gaza-flotilla-activists-allege-abuse-sexual-assault-in-israeli-detention
The INS Nahshon was delivered to the Israeli Navy in August 2023, built with U.S. military aid funds. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-navy-takes-possession-of-its-first-new-us-built-landing-craft/
Adalah documented fifteen sexual assaults, twelve on the landing craft used as a prison vessel. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-05-22/ty-article/gaza-flotilla-activists-report-over-a-dozen-sexual-assaults-in-israeli-custody/0000019e-5108-d637-a99f-77bac7dd0000
CNN confirmed sworn statements of rape and forcible penetration by a handgun. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/22/middleeast/gaza-flotilla-activists-sexual-assault-israel-intl
Adalah lawyers documented dozens of detainees with suspected rib fractures. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-896916
Ben-Gvir released video of himself walking the deck during the detention. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/22/gaza-flotilla-activists-allege-abuse-sexual-assault-in-israeli-detention
Huckabee called an earlier flotilla “a carbon-spewing Hamas-funded boat ride” on X.
Trump said at Joint Base Andrews he might run for Prime Minister of Israel. https://www.realitytea.com/2026/05/21/donald-trump-israeli-prime-minister-run-99-percent-approval/
The Famine
The IPC confirmed famine in Gaza on August 22, 2025. https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/countries-in-focus-archive/issue-134/en/
The World Health Organization confirmed the declaration. https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famine-confirmed-for-first-time-in-gaza
The IPC projected 132,000 children with acute malnutrition through June 2026. https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1159698/?iso3=PSE
The Children of Darkness
Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on October 9, 2023 and called Palestinians “human animals.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-defense-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza-after-hamas-surprise-attack
Netanyahu invoked Amalek in addressing soldiers and citizens after October 7. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-report-genocide-in-gaza-a-hrc-60-crp-3/
The UN Commission of Inquiry found incitement to genocide by Netanyahu and Gallant in September 2025. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/israel-has-committed-genocide-in-the-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds-16sep25/
The Jamestown
Congress stripped the USS Jamestown of her guns in March 1847 to carry Irish famine relief. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/nmusn/explore/photography/humanitarian/19th-century/1880-ireland.html
Lineage
Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House on February 18, 1915. https://woodrowwilsonhouse.org/wilson-topics/wilson-and-race/
The Tulsa Tribune ran “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator” on May 31, 1921. https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre
Carolyn Bryant admitted decades later she fabricated her account of Emmett Till. https://eji.org/news/emmett-till-accuser-admits-she-lied/ssion
Chivington’s troops attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864. https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/index.htm
FDR signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066
Texas Rangers killed hundreds to thousands of ethnic Mexicans along the Rio Grande between 1910 and 1920. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/forgotten-massacre-mexicans-borderlands-180961381/
Twenty people were hanged at the Salem witch trials in 1692. https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/salem-witch-trials
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “three generations of imbeciles are enough” in Buck v. Bell (1927). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200
The U.S. sterilized more than 60,000 people under Buck v. Bell rulings by 1979. https://www.npr.org/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations
The Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship in September 1935. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws
The yellow star was mandated for German Jews in September 1941 by the Reich Main Security Office. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-badge-during-the-nazi-era
James Q. Whitman documents that Nazi lawyers studied U.S. race law as a model in Hitler’s American Model. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model
Trump designated Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” by executive order on September 22, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/
The Brennan Center analyzed the Antifa designation and NSPM-7 as ungrounded in fact and law. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trumps-orders-targeting-antifascism-aim-criminalize-opposition
Thank you for doing the emotional and physical labor of parsing the alternative facts to bring us the truth. I knew I needed to subscribe when your emails stopped me cold - gut wrenched, staring at the ceiling, thinking about what we've become as a nation at the hands of this [expletive] regime, our role in destabilizing the world and causing irreparable harm to so many innocent human beings, and hoping against all hope that our children inherit the will, the means, and the moral fortitude to salvage what is left.
“Never again.” Heartbreaking irony.