+ More than two dozen Democrats stood up and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, roughly the same number that applauded every time he mentioned Israel.
+ Hours before the US/Israeli attack on Iran, Marco Rubio declared Iran a “state sponsor of wrongful detention,” which is some serious trolling for the man who signed illegal detention orders for Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Moshen Mahdawi and dozens of others, in a nation that has illegally detented thousands of people in the last year.
+ The Democrats never made a case for not attacking Iran. At best, they meekly criticized Trump’s lack of following a proper process for attacking Iran and he just ignored them. They didn’t defend one of the best things Obama did, the Iran nuclear deal. Biden had four years to reinstate the deal. Instead, he backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. The consequences of this war are as much on them as on Trump….
+ Right on cue: Sen. Tammy Duckworth: “I’m glad that Khamenei is dead … My problem with this whole thing is how President Trump has gone about doing this.”
+ During her campaign, Kamala Harris fingered Iran as the US’s most dangerous enemy. She offered as little evidence for this assertion as Trump did for his war.
+ Even Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney were smart enough not to go to war with Israel…In fact, Bush I and Bush II deliberately kept Israel from attacking Iraq in both Gulf Wars.
+ Tariq Ali: “Have heard from an Iranian friend that her partner in Teheran has sent her a message. He is a leftist and is telling her that the US/Israelis are targeting a number of known leftists homes in Teheran and elsewhere in an attempt to make sure there’s no opposition to their favoured candidate once they destroy the regime. What this reveals is the degree of penetration by Mossad in Iran. What it also means is that this is not going to be an easy occupation for the US and its Israeli buddies.”
+ One of the US/Israeli airstrikes apparently targeted the Evin Prison in the Pasteur area of Tehran, where Hossein Mousavi, the leader of Iran’s Green Movement, has been confined under house arrest since 2011. Though their residential building was damaged, Mousavi and his wife reportedly survived the bombing.
+ From the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, who has seen this play out before:
Under cover of the Israeli-American offensive on Iran, which could cost countless lives and plunge the entire Middle East into a spiral of violence and destruction, armed settler militias continue to launch organized violent attacks against Palestinian communities in an effort to expand ethnic cleansing throughout the West Bank.
Soon after the first air-raid sirens sounded this morning, settler militias set out to attack Palestinian communities across the West Bank, including in Masafer Yatta and the villages of Duma and Qusra, where only yesterday, two activists were assaulted and injured so severely they needed medical evacuation by helicopter.
B’Tselem cautions: Once again, as international attention shifts to the attacks in Iran, Israel will seize the opportunity to escalate violence, advance ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and intensify its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.
+ Trump unwittingly provided a macabre visual metaphor for the Gaza genocide that left mass graves of a hundred Palestinian bodies for each Israeli:
Believe it or not, Hamas worked along with Israel and they dug, and they dug, and they dug. It’s a tough thing to do, going through bodies all over. Passing up 100 bodies sometimes for each one then found. Tough job. And uhh. They finally got it back to 27. And then they found all 28.
+ A non-sequential note on how some of the Palestinian bodies met their fate: According to a new analysis by Forensic Architecture and Earshot “Israeli soldiers fired nearly a thousand bullets during the massacre of 15 Palestinian aid workers in southern Gaza on March 23, 2025 — with at least eight shots fired at point blank range…”
+ On March 25, 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested on the street by six ICE agents, after the Tufts’ Ph. D. Candidate’s F-1 student visa was personally revoked by Marco Rubio for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed. Öztürk was quickly sent out of Massachusetts to the ICE prison in southern Louisiana, where she was held for six weeks, until her release on May 9. Her arrest, detention and deportation have been ruled illegal by several courts and the feds have been enjoined against further proceedings against her. Last week, nine months after her release, Öztürk was awarded her doctorate. Öztürk had been targeted by the pro-Israel doxing website Canary Mission, which served as a malicious pipeline to Rubio’s office.
+ Meanwhile, last week, an immigration judge terminated removal proceedings for Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student, Palestinian activist, and U.S. permanent resident, whom the Trump administration arrested in April 2025 and attempted to deport under the foreign policy provision for protesting against genocide.
+ American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.” When he was pressed by Tucker Carlson on whether Israel has a legal right to all of the land (Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq), Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
+ Fewer and fewer Americans are buying what Huckabee’s feverishly trying to sell. For the first time, more Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. According to a new Gallup survey, forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis. By party, Americans’ sympathy resides more with:
Republicans
Palestinians: 13%
Israelis: 70%Democrats
Palestinians: 65%
Israelis: 17%Independents
Palestinians: 41%
Israelis: 30%
+ Speaking of Abraham and the righteousness of Biblical prophecy, a Pennsylvania man says God told him to stab his infant son with a knife and throw him in the snow. Afterwards, the man looked to the heavens and proclaimed, “I did it, God. I did it.”
