HUMAN RIGHTS VS RELIGOUS RITES

Some Republican governors are rebranding June with conservative alternatives to Pride

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — June Pride celebrations, which often include parades, festivals and performances, began in 1970 to mark the first anniversary of the violent police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar, and have since expanded to cities worldwide.

Geoff Mulvihill, Marc Levy and Hannah Schoenbaum
June 8, 2026 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — June is widely recognized as Pride Month, but a handful of Republican governors have bestowed alternative titles that both supporters and opponents view as counterprogramming.

Without directly saying the idea was to replace Pride, the governors of Indiana and Tennessee rebranded June as Nuclear Family Month to celebrate units made up of “one husband, one wife and any biological, adopted or fostered children.”

In Alabama, it’s Strong Families Month, intended to coincide with Father’s Day. Gov. Kay Ivey’s proclamation says fathers are “the head of the household” and “homes led by a father and mother provide children with the structure and discipline necessary to succeed throughout life.”

The governors of Utah and Arkansas deemed it Fidelity Month, which emphasizes fidelity to faith, country and family — without comment on how those families might be comprised.

Last week, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ X account posted a link to an article about her proclamation that declared, “Another Red State is Counter-Programming Pride Month.”

She and the other governors haven’t answered questions from The Associated Press about why their proclamations are all set in June.

Family focus for June has come on strong this year

Republican lawmakers in at least four other GOP-controlled states have introduced legislation this year calling for June to be Fidelity Month.

An organization pushing that concept was founded by Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence who has long been a leader on conservative thought. His group did not respond to interview requests.

He told the National Catholic Register about the idea in 2023, saying “nobody gets a monopoly on a particular day or a particular month.”

June Pride celebrations, which often include parades, festivals and performances, began in 1970 to mark the first anniversary of the violent police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar, and have since expanded to cities worldwide.

“You can call it whatever you want, but one thing you’re not going to do is take away our pride or take away our joy,” said Jordan Braxton co-president of USA Prides.

Every Democratic president since Bill Clinton in 1999 has signed a Pride proclamation each year — and no Republican president has.

Last year, President Donald Trump’s Education Department began declaring June to be Title IX Month – and using it to open investigations into schools that allow transgender students to use the bathrooms or locker rooms that align with their gender identities.

One of the few GOP governors who has proclaimed Pride is Utah’s Spencer Cox, who did so in 2021, 2022 and 2023. In 2024, he deemed June a “Month of Bridge Building” before switching to Fidelity Month this year.

A poll released this week found that a two decade-long increase in acceptance of same-sex marriages and relationships has flattened — largely because more Republicans oppose them.

Conservatives say they’re ‘reclaiming the culture’

Last year, U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, introduced a resolution to make June Family Month — and to unrecognize Pride Month, saying “Americans are inundated with perverse Pride Month displays and events throughout the month of June that denigrate the nuclear family.” It never got a vote.

Some backers view the state measures as an opportunity for a cultural reset.

Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in an interview that it’s good to have the conservative recognitions because Pride celebrations “were going so far as to make it difficult to celebrate traditional marriage.”

The resolution approved by Tennessee’s Legislature and governor does not mention Pride Month specifically, while saying the “nuclear family is under attack in our beloved State and nation.”

But Lakie Derrick, a conservative activist who authored the measure with a friend, said she did indeed target it to June to counter Pride Month, which she said “goes against” American values.

“We’re just reclaiming the culture, and there’s no better month to do that than in a month where the culture says we’re gonna celebrate something so opposite to what we know to be right,” Derrick said.

Marina Lowe, who leads legal and legislative affairs for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Utah, said that Pride Month is not the antithesis of other values-based recognitions. Many LGBTQ+ people also value faith and family, she said, so “I don’t think that these positions need to be in conflict with one another.”

In Wenatchee, Washington, a school’s Turning Point USA chapter was able to get Family Month banners posted on light poles that in the past had displayed rainbow flags during June. A local gay rights group, Out NCW, struck back by buying two billboards and passing out yard signs supporting Pride, its president, AJ Soto, said.

For some, this is why Pride Month exists

Josh Coleman, president of Central Alabama Pride, which has 42 events planned over two weeks, said the celebrations, which culminate with a parade on June 13 and festival June 14, won’t be affected by the proclamation.

“It’s not lost upon LGBTQ people when elected leaders don’t recognize or value the visibility of the community,” he said. “That’s why Pride started in the first place — to make sure the community had a community.”

Alex Richardson, chair of the board of directors at Indy Pride in Indianapolis, said he sees the governor’s proclamation there as a “swipe.” But he also believes the events there this month are celebrating some of the things the governor supports.

“Sure, the governor’s right, the nuclear family is worth celebrating,” Richardson said. “But I think so is the grandmother who raises her grandchildren, or the chosen family that shows up when a biological family can’t, or won’t, … or the weird blended households that are held together by love and effort.”

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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Mulvihill from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

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This story has been updated to correct ‘blended family’ to ‘biological family’ in a quote by Alex Richardson.

 What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About

by Sarah Posner

06.09.26 | TPM

President Trump and Defense Sec Pete Hegseth. TPM illustration/Getty Images.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ardent Trump loyalist, recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a disfavored religion in the Christian nationalist world of MAGA. He was triggered by the news, broken by the defense news site Military.com, that the Pentagon had eliminated 180 recognized religious faiths in order to “streamline the DoW [sic] collection of religious preferences collection [sic] for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” The Pentagon’s new list of what it calls Religious Affiliation Codes classified a number of religions, like Methodists and Baptists, as Christian. But Lee’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was not listed among the “Christian” faiths. He demanded — on X, of course, because United States Senators have no other means of either commanding attention or acquiring information — “why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches.”

Lee and other LDS lawmakers spent several days futilely seeking answers to that question. By midday Monday, Lee had lodged his complaint with management — that is, he called President Donald Trump, who “loves Latter-day Saints,” Lee assured his followers on X. The Pentagon then released a new list, which did not classify any religion as Christian. Was it a win? A win would have been for the LDS Church to have been included among the Christian faiths. Convincing the public that, yes, a religion that has the words Church of Jesus Christ in its name was actually Christian had been at the top of the senator’s to-do list this weekend. That the Pentagon chose to excise the Christian label entirely rather than apply it to Lee’s church was quite telling. But Lee declared victory anyway, writing on X that he was “grateful” to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for “correcting the error.” 

It’s hard to imagine why such a new classification system was even necessary, other than being another step in Hegseth’s march to his personal brand of Christian supremacy. Hegseth reportedly insisted on whittling the list down because the number of religions practiced by members of the military had “ballooned” to over 200 religions and needed to be reduced to an apparently very arbitrary 31. The new list omits, among others, atheists and Unitarian Universalists. In announcing the revised, Lee-approved list, the Pentagon wrote on X that “the Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.” 

But “adjudicating theological debates” is precisely what the Pentagon has done. Hegseth has made no secret of his religious agenda, as evidenced by his monthly prayer meetings on government property, at which his religious mentor, the Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, has preached. Wilson is not shy about his antipathy to the LDS Church. He has written that “Mormonism is not Christian” and is “a false gospel.” In April, responding to reader mail on his blog, Wilson thanked a correspondent, an Army chaplain, for the “heads up” about the “disturbing trend” of Mormon chaplains in the Corps. The reader prayed that Wilson could wield his “significant influence in certain spheres” to do something about this “heresy.”

The entire “reclassification” effort was sure to trigger complaints of both a constitutional and personal nature. But Lee, who has long shaped his political identity around his supposed expertise in the Constitution, had a deeply personal, not constitutional beef. Resolving it was also a personal matter: he expressed no concern that the list, or Hegseth’s hyper-sectarian prayer meetings, may run afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Instead, his campaign to have his own faith properly categorized as Christian was a cry for inclusion (oh, no! not that!) in the MAGA circle. As much as Lee prides himself on his MAGA bonafides, at its religious heart MAGA is an evangelical movement, and evangelicals have long considered Mormons weird outsiders, non-Christians, and even members of a cult. In the 1990s, former President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, received blowback for questioning his brethren’s insistence that Mormons are not Christians.

Years later, Republicans contentiously chose a Mormon as their nominee for president. That nominee, Mitt Romney, had to try for the nomination twice — first in 2008, when his rival, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, was forced to apologize for wondering aloud in an interview with the New York Times whether Mormons believe Jesus and Satan were brothers. (They don’t, but it’s quite a common distortion promoted by those hostile to the LDS Church.) When Romney ran again in 2012, this time successfully securing the nomination, he had to endure attacks from another Southern Baptist minister, Robert Jeffress, who later went on to be one of Trump’s first evangelical endorsers and most loyal supporters. Jeffress called Mormonism a “cult,” with anti-LDS sentiment taking center stage at the 2011 Values Voter Summit, which at the time was otherwise a typically cohesive affair of religious conservatives with shared opposition to abortion and LGBTQ people and other demonized outsiders. Later, Trump would do something Romney couldn’t pull off — win over evangelicals.

France Asks Top Prosecutor to Probe Alleged Israeli Abuse of Gaza Flotilla Members

French nationals and people from dozens of countries who were abducted from the Global Sumud Flotilla say they were beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted by their Israeli captors.
 

Global Sumud Flotilla member Meriem Hadjal speaks to the press after arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on May 22, 2026.
(Photo by Firas Abdullah/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
May 29, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


France’s government on Friday asked prosecutors to investigate Israel’s alleged mistreatment of French nationals aboard the last Global Sumud Flotilla, which was intercepted earlier this month in international waters while trying to break the illegal decadeslong Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“Based on ⁠a report I requested from our Consul General in Turkey—who informed me of sexual violence, exposure to the cold, beatings, and repeated humiliation of French nationals—all of these acts are likely to constitute criminal offenses,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said during an interview with France Inter, adding, “I decided yesterday to refer the matter to the public prosecutor.”



‘Way Out of Line’: 15+ Countries Slam Israel’s ‘Intolerable’ Abuse of Gaza Flotilla Abductees



‘Yet Another Act of Piracy’: Israel Raids Humanitarian Flotilla Bound for Gaza

The move follows France’s indefinite ban from its territory of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who posted a video on social media showing him joyfully humiliating detained activists, journalists, and others who were mostly kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs and their foreheads forced to the ground following the May 18 interception of flotilla vessels off the coast of Cyprus and the abduction of all aboard.

“We cannot tolerate that French nationals can be threatened, intimidated, or brutalized in this way—all the more so by a public official,” Barrot said last week.

People from around 40 countries—including 37 French nationals—were seized from dozens of flotilla vessels and held in harsh conditions on what many of them called a “torture boat.”

According to Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF): “Detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

French medical professional Meriem Hadjal said she was “subjected to torture” in the container, where at least one Israeli soldier allegedly sexually assaulted her.

“We were treated like animals,” Hadjal added, accusing her Israeli captors of “sadism.”



GSF said Tuesday that “legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault” of flotilla members.

Numerous national governments condemned Israel’s treatment of the flotilla abductees, including the United States. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that Ben-Gvir “betrayed the dignity” of his nation, which receives billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover from the United States to carry out what many experts say is a genocidal war on Gaza.

Malaysia is reportedly preparing to initiate proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice over the abduction and alleged torture of its citizens, 29 of whom were aboard the flotilla. The ICJ is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

“We will not remain silent, we will not stop. While the legal team gathers all documentation on violations of international law; they were kidnapped more than once, they were tortured,” Amirudin Shari, chief minister of the Malaysian state of Selangor, said during a homecoming ceremony for the flotilla members at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Israeli troops have physically and psychologically tortured past flotilla abductees. Dozens of members of the previous Global Sumud mission required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces. In 2010, Israeli troops killed nine activists aboard one of the first-ever Gaza flotillas, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan.

As some countries pursue justice for flotilla members, others have declined to act. In the United Kingdom, Zarah Sultana, who represents Coventry South for the socialist Your Party in Parliament, is demanding “urgent action” in the wake of abuse allegations made by British flotilla abductees.



“France is acting. Spain is showing leadership. Where is the UK government?” Sultana said Friday on X. “Nothing but a simp for Israel, a genocidal apartheid state.”

Acceptable Till it Wasn’t: Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Global Sumud Flotilla

Binoy Kampmark

 May 26, 2026

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Photograph Source: שי קנדלר – CC BY-SA 4.0

It has been a sorry though predictable exercise.  When he lived up (or down) to expectations of atrocious conduct befitting the proud bigot that he is, Israel’s Minister for National Security had to be seen as aberrant, the man who strayed, if only slightly.  The conduct in question involved Itamar Ben-Gvir’s posting of footage on social media mocking the fate of activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla who had made a failed humanitarian effort to break the blockade of Gaza.  The activists, seized in international waters by Israeli forces off the coast of Cyprus, had been blindfolded, their hands bound, and forced to kneel on the floor at the Port of Ashdod.

The caption of the posted video featured the warming caption “Welcome to Israel”.  Ben-Gvir can be seen waving an Israeli flag, taunting the detainees with bellowing remarks.  One bound man can be seen having to hear the words “The people of Israel live” shouted in his face.

Much of this would have been filed in a drawer under the title of “acceptable conduct” and gone unremarked.  Ben-Gvir oversees the running of his country’s police and prisons, which he has served to corrupt and politicise with impunity.  He has been given vast latitude to be brutal and brutish, most notably to Palestinians.  With clear relish, he regularly posts videos of how Israel’s Prison Service treats its Palestinian inmates, which number somewhere in the order of 9,500.  (About half are held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, a ghastly statute that negates due process and opportunities for the detained to rebut allegations made against them.)

He has also been riding the wave of foamy intolerance stimulated by the attacks of October 7, 2023 by Hamas on Israel, leading a successful campaign to apply the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of attacks on the State of Israel and the Jewish people (that same penalty does not apply to Israelis for acts of terrorism).  On the occasion of his 50^thbirthday, his upstanding wife, Ayala, thought it fitting to present him with a cake decorated with a hangman’s noose.  In previous comments, he has also expressed a preference for shooting Palestinian detainees in the head.  And in terms of embracing the concept of a Greater Israel, Ben-Gvir is very much its podgy poster boy, indulging the murderous violence inflicted by fellow Israeli settlers in the West Bank upon their hapless Palestinian residents.

But Israel’s often smug propaganda establishment was not prepared for what followed.  A number of countries whose citizens had been detained expressed official outrage.  Israel’s ambassadors to Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada were summoned to seek formal clarifications about the position of the Netanyahu government.

The Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, along with her Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, declared the footage “unacceptable.”  It was “intolerable for these protestors, including many Italian citizens, to be subjected to treatment that is so degrading to human dignity.”  In addition to seeking the release of the Italian citizens, an apology was also sought “for the treatment of these protestors, and for the total disregard of the Italian Government’s explicit requests.”

The UK’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper expressed her concerns in a social media post.  “I am truly appalled at the video posted by Israeli Cabinet Minister Ben-Gvir taunting those involved in the Global Sumud Flotilla.”  The conduct had violated “the most basic standards of respect and dignity in the way people should be treated.”  The families of a number of British nationals had also been contacted in the hope of providing consular support.

Anita Annand, Canada’s Foreign Minister, told reporters that her government took the matter “very, very seriously. It’s a matter of humane treatment of civilians, and I can assure you that we are acting with absolute urgency.”  From Spain came the remarks of Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares that the treatment of the activists had been “monstrous”, while his Irish counterpart Helen McEntee expressed her shock at the footage while calling for the immediate release of the activists.

The South Korean President Lee Jae Myung went even further, casting an eye back to the entire seizure of the protestors at sea and posing a series of questions: “What is the legal basis?  Is it Israeli territorial waters?  Is that Israeli land?  If there is conflict, can they seize and detain third-country vessels?”

From Paris came the scolding words of Foreign Minister Jean-Nöel Barrot: “We cannot tolerate French nationals being threatened, intimidated, or subjected to violence in this way, especially by a public official. I note that these actions have been condemned by a large number of Israeli governmental and political figures.  On March 23, France went even further.  “As from today,” announced Barrot, “Itamar Ben-Gvir is banned from entering French territory.”  The decision was made in response to the minister’s “reprehensible actions towards French and European citizens who were passengers on the Global Sumud Flotilla.”

Faced with his fusillade of rage and query, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose form over substance.  While Israel retained, according to his statement, “every right to prevent provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters from entering our territorial waters and reaching Gaza”, Ben-Gvir’s approach was “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”  Even then, the sense was that Ben-Gvir had only just exceeded expectations of otherwise justifiable conduct.  He was, after all, responding to terrorist sympathisers and “provocateurs”.  Furthermore, Netanyahu could never profess ignorance of Ben-Gvir’s scorpion sting, coming from a repulsive creature convicted of 13 criminal offences, including publishing incitement to racism, expressing identification with a terror group, possessing propaganda material of a terror group, participating in a riot and defacing property.

Prior to the elections in March 2021, Netanyahu told Channel 12 that the future minister in his cabinet was “not fit” for ministerial duties.  When the interviewer pressed the PM on whether he considered Ben-Gvir a racist, Netanyahu blandly responded that, “His positions are not mine.”  The Israeli PM is, however, a man who puts gritty political survival above keen principle, an approach that has ensured him a remarkable longevity in politics.  His bigotry, no less felt than the far-right ministers he courts, is worn with softer, more acceptable shades.

Ben-Gvir, basking in the hot spotlight, is understandably confident in his survival as a member of the cabinet.  Supreme Court scrutiny of his fitness for office will hardly prove a discouragement.  “The days when terrorists want to hurt us, and we had to be apologetic, nice and understanding, are over,” he told the Knesset hours after posting the video.  He need hardly have concerned himself: the obituary of such niceness and understanding had long ago been penned.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Global Sumud Flotilla Urges Probe of US Complicity in Members’ Abduction and Torture by Israel

“The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools... is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.”


Members of the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla who were injured by their Israeli captors after their abduction on the high seas are attended to upon arriving at Istanbul Airport on May 21, 2026.
(Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
May 26, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Testimonies published Tuesday from activists, journalists, medical professionals, and others who took part in the latest international flotilla attempting to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza called for an investigation into US complicity in their illegal high-seas abduction and alleged torture, sexual assault, and other abuse by Israeli forces.

“As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” Global Sumud Flotilla’s (GSF) media team said in a statement.

“This role goes beyond the State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information,” GSF continued. “It includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured, and the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.”

That vessel, the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and was fully financed by the US government. GSF activists first became aware of what they now call the “torture boat” when it was used to detain members of the previous Gaza-bound flotilla, dozens of whom required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces.

This time, according to GSF, “detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

Flotilla participant Yassine Benjelloun described his mistreatment by his Israeli captors.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” he said. “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician aboard the flotilla, documented 35 GSF members with fractured or dislocated bones, as well as severe head injuries including concussions and eye or ear trauma, and 14 cases of sexual assault.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” Jihan said. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have. It was so devastating.”

Jihan said she was shoved, struck, punched, kicked, and choked by her captors, who forcibly stripped off her hijab.

In addition to the ship, the weapons used against the civilian flotilla members were also made in the USA.

“Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI),” GSF said. “These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.”

GSF argues that “none of this was accidental.”

According to former State Department official Josh Paul—who resigned in protest in 2023 over US arms transfers to Israel as it began waging a genocidal war against Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7 of that year—“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorized by law.”

“INS Nahshon‘s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms,” he continued.

“When this sale was authorized, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform,” Paul added. “The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident... but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse—whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

Paul was referring to the May 2010 raid on one of the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla convoys, during which Israeli forces killed nine volunteers aboard the MV Mavi Marmara, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan.

“While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away,” GSF said in regard to the latest flotilla.

Americans aboard past Gaza flotillas said the Trump administration failed to provide any consular support during their abduction and abuse.

This time, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—a Christian Zionist who has denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—joined senior officials from other countries in condemning Israel’s abuse of abducted flotilla members.

GSF said Tuesday that “the Israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons. The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

That support includes tens of billions of dollars in armed aid during the Biden and Trump administrations, which both also provided diplomatic cover for Israel, including vetoes of numerous Gaza ceasefire resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council.

Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza—including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble—while forcibly displacing, intentionally starving, or sickening around 2 million others.

Israel’s actions are the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 other nations. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.

Last year, a UN panel of experts said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a conclusion also reached by numerous governments, human rights groups, jurists, and scholars—including prominent Israeli and other Jewish Holocaust experts.

Flotilla participants have stressed that their ordeal pales in comparison to the plight of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children imprisoned by Israel, often without charge or trial under the country’s administrative detention regime. Israeli authorities are investigating the deaths of dozens of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom were allegedly tortured to death and executed. Others have allegedly been subjected to widespread rape and sexual abuse in Israeli detention.

“What GSF participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access,” the flotilla organizers said.

GSF is calling on the US government to take actions including the investigation of Israel’s use of US-origin arms and other equipment to abuse American citizens, a suspension of arms transfers to Israel pending the outcome of the probe, and “end unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.”