+ An Israeli soldier posted a photo of a Palestinian prisoner, stripped down to his briefs, and tied prone to a cot. He is blindfolded and his hands are cuffed behind him. A broomstick and a square metal pipe are lashed to his back. A caption to the photo in Hebrew reads: “Good morning!”
The Israeli government has confirmed the authenticity of the photo (though it did not identify the prisoner being tortured) and claimed it would launch an internal investigation into the circumstances of the photo. But it’s easy to predict the results. The investigation will write this off the way the US dismissed the repellent acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, as a mere incident, an isolated act by a few lowly, bored soldiers or guards, instead of yet more evidence of a systematic torture regime, which has been going on for decades at the direction of ranking Israeli politicians, and military and intelligence commanders.
+ The fanatical Zionist Rahm Emanuel, who volunteered twice to serve in the IDF, delivered a speech in Tel Aviv on Wednesday slamming Benjamin Netanyahu and telling the Israelis that the US will be forced to reconsider its alliance with the Jewish state if it doesn’t change course: “The United States cannot continue to finance and support that cynicism in silence. You cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight. You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and economic prosperity.”
+ Emanuel followed his speech with an interview on Israeli TV, where he continued to bash Bibi: “Israel has become a pariah. Israel lost the US. It lost Europe. You picked up Somaliland. As my mom said: ‘Such a deal!’”
+ When you’ve lost Rahmbo…Before you know it, HRC is going to be re-posting those old photos of her kissing Suha Arafat that almost doomed her first Senate campaign in New York.
+ Right on cue…
+ Emanuel is reading the political tea leaves, which show that Zoran Mamdani’s poll numbers are 32 points higher than Netanyahu’s.
Jewish Americans polled
Favorables (net)Josh Shapiro +20
Zohran Mamdani +5
Benjamin Netanyahu -27
Donald Trump -39AP-NORC poll | 6/11-6/17
+ 3: the number of cancer patients who die each day in Gaza following Israel’s destruction of the Strip’s health care system, including its oncology wards. More than 11,000 Palestinians are living with cancer in Gaza, around 4,000 of whom require immediate medical evacuation for treatment.
+ About one-third of U.S. adults — including roughly half of Democrats — believe that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians during the war in Gaza, an accusation that’s been leveled by some human rights organizations and vehemently denied by Israel and the U.S. government. About 2 in 10 Americans say Israel has not and the rest, about half, don’t know enough to say.
+ In the spring of 1968, a Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan, never a particularly political person, read a piece by the great Andy Kopkind describing Robert F. Kennedy’s courtship of American Jewish voters and donors, in which Kennedy disparaged his opponent, Eugene McCarthy, for being too indulgent toward the aspirations of the Palestinians. Kopkind also reported that Kennedy had pledged to push through the sale of US F-4 Phantom jets to the Israeli Defense Forces. After reading Kopkind’s piece, Sirhan inscribed “RFK must die!” in his diary. On the night of June 5th, Sirhan took his Iver-Cadet 22 calibre pistol to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shot Kennedy three times as the senator was talking to a dishwasher. Sirhan later told David Frost: “My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.”
+ Fast forward 58 years, RFK Jr. (who believes that Sirhan was a patsy and that his father was killed by a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar) maintains his father’s devotion to Israel: “If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against Palestinians, they could do it in a minute. That’s doing the opposite. Palestinian population is growing enormously around Israel. The number of Christians in Gaza has dropped by about 80% over the past 10 years. If you want to see what a real genocide is happening, it’s not in Israel. It’s happening in all the nations around it.”
+ Netanyahu: I look for Argentina (where Eichmann and 5000 other Nazis fled for sanctuary) in the World Cup. You know why?
Reporter: Messi?
Netanyahu: No, before Messi—Milei. He’s a superstar.
