Israel Detains, Chokes, and Beats Up Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls

On Saturday night, the Israeli Defense Forces surrounded, beat, and choked American labor leader Chris Smalls as they unlawfully boarded the Handala, the most recent aid ship trying to reach Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Smalls was the only Black person on the flotilla and was punished much more severely than any of the other 20 members detained.

“When he reached the Israeli prison, U.S. human rights defender Chris Smalls was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition announced Tuesday morning. “They choked him and kicked him in the legs, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back. When his lawyer met with him, Chris was surrounded by six members of Israel’s special police unit. This level of force was not used against other abducted activists. We condemn this violence against Chris and demand accountability for the assault and discriminatory treatment he faced.”

“Pretty hard to believe that the particularly heinous and brutal treatment Christian Smalls was subjected to by Israeli authorities was not a function of racism given it was not inflicted on other Handala detainees,” University of New Brunswick professor Nathan Kalman-Lamb wrote on Bluesky. “And the US media dgaf.”

Smalls entered the public eye in 2022 after successfully founding a labor union at a Staten Island Amazon factory, garnering national praise and even a White House invitation from President Biden. Now he remains beaten and battered in IDF custody.

The IDF targeting the one Black man on the aid ship is sadly unsurprising, as is the lack of uproar from U.S. politicians and large media outlets. Yet another U.S. citizen assaulted and detained by the IDF, yet not a peep from either side of the aisle because Smalls is a Black American leftist who was standing up to Israel’s campaign of mass starvation and trying to deliver baby food and flour to suffering Palestinians in Gaza.

“I’m thinking of Chris Smalls. And about how, because he’s Black, no Greta Thunberg, no celebrity, no darling of the liberal class, he might not make it out alive,” author Camonghne Felix wrote on X. “Blackness, when vulnerable and on its knees, is a white supremacist fantasy.”

While smaller unions have spoken up to condemn Smalls’s arrest, Teamsters—which worked with Smalls on the Amazon Labor Union—has yet to make a statement on his violent detainment, failing spectacularly to meet the moment.*

While Smalls and other flotilla members remain in IDF custody, the coalition plans to send another aid ship very soon, yet another direct challenge to the Israeli government.

“We are calling on others around the world, definitely our countries, to live up to their obligation of enforcing international law, of protecting human rights, but also other institutions that are founded to do the same,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney and Handala member who was released from IDF custody due to her Israeli citizenship. “We should not be waiting for Israel to give permission for food or other humanitarian aid to enter … we need to be breaking, challenging and breaking the blockade.”

“And our governments not only have not been doing anything about it … the U.S. government did not make contact with any of the seven American citizens on board, but the [others], like France, Spain, Italy, contacted their citizens on board and told them that they are ready to provide consular services when Israel kidnaps us, which we found to be completely obnoxious,” she added. “They were legitimizing Israeli piracy on the high seas. And that is unacceptable to us. And that is the kind of impunity that our governments, all governments, really, have been allowing Israel to just violate international law.”

*This piece has been updated to correct a description of Teamsters.

Two antitrust officials at the Justice Department have received their pink slips.

The fired officials, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, were both responsible for preventing monopolies and investigating anticompetitive behavior amongst corporations. Their grounds for dismissal were not immediately apparent, though sources that spoke with CBS News Monday night claimed that their termination notices mentioned insubordination.

Alford and Rinner worked under Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, the chief of the division. Alford was principal deputy assistant attorney general and Rinner was the deputy assistant attorney general, fronting merger enforcement. Slater had recently taken on lawsuits against several major companies, including Capital One, Apple, and Google.

Their department had become the subject of criticism from some business leaders and colleagues. Earlier this month, CBS News reported that internal friction within the team had led to conversations about potentially pushing staffers out. On July 17, Slater met at the White House with the Office of Budget and Management, the National Economic Council, and the Federal Trade Commission. Staffers at those agencies have started to question if Slater is truly prioritizing Donald Trump’s policies, or whether she is walking her own path.

Some of the team’s disagreements were sparked during investigations into T-Mobile and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among others, according to sources that spoke with CBS.

Business leaders were reportedly unhappy with Slater after she warned them not to engage with the administration via Trump-aligned lobbyists and consultants. In one meeting between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its prospective purchase Juniper Networks, Slater said that the businesses should only work through Justice Department officials, rather than outside consultants—for HPE, Trump allies Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz, according to CBS News. Businesses raised concerns with the White House over conversations of that nature, with leaders wondering why the DOJ was instructing them on whom they could hire.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy has responded to the deadly shooting in Midtown Manhattan with all the wisdom of a bumper sticker.

“We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control,” Kennedy said on Fox News’s Hannity Monday night. “And I don’t know exactly how to do that.”

Host Sean Hannity agreed with Kennedy, noting that New York already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. But the assailant reportedly drove to New York from Nevada, where there are only minor restrictions on purchasing assault weapons. Upon arriving in New York, the shooter killed four people, including an off-duty police officer.

Republicans love to feign ignorance about solutions to gun violence after deadly shootings, but without essential idiot control laws, they still manage to find their way onto national television to blow hot air in the hopes of being reelected.

One thing is clear: People are far safer dealing with an idiot than an assailant armed with an M4 assault rifle.

On X Monday evening, Marjorie Taylor Greene castigated fellow MAGA Republican Representative Randy Fine for denying the starvation crisis in Gaza. She also notably joined the small cohort of members of Congress to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Greene’s post came in reaction to a New Republic story on AIPAC hiding its endorsement of Fine, following his controversial comments last week in which he dismissed a report about the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, including children, as “Muslim terror propaganda.” “Release the hostages,” Fine wrote. “Until then, starve away.”

Greene questioned Fine’s commitment to his constituents in Florida’s 6th congressional district, citing his alleged decision to move with his wife to Washington, D.C., rather than, per Greene’s advice, to “live in the district he will represent.”

“I can only imagine how Florida’s 6th district feels now that their Representative, that they were told to vote for, openly calls for starving innocent people and children,” Greene wrote. “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

Greene added that Fine’s statement, as “a Jewish U.S. Representative,” will only “cause more antisemitism.”

Greene joins only a handful of progressive lawmakers in condemning Israel for committing genocide. Several leading humanitarian organizations have already concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza amounts to genocide, including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and, most recently, B’Tselem, a prominent Israeli human rights group.

Greene’s stance on Israel has radically changed since the period immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack—at which time she smeared a pro-Palestinian protest on Capitol Hill as an “insurrection” and sought to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib on spurious allegations of antisemitism. (The resolution attacked Tlaib for allegedly sharing a social media post “blaming America for allowing the deaths of Palestinian babies at the hands of Israel.”)

Since then, Greene has become a frequent critic of Israel, even introducing a bid earlier this month to cut funding for Israel’s missile defense system, in which she was joined only by four progressives and fellow Republican Thomas Massie.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department is moving to retaliate against one of the federal judges who stood up to Trump’s extrajudicial deportations.

Judge James Boasberg first appeared on the MAGA radar in March after blocking the Trump administration’s invocation of the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act to indiscriminately deport men Trump claimed were Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador. The administration ignored Boasberg’s order, and he claimed to have found probable cause for contempt on the administration’s part, although the D.C. Circuit Court has paused proceedings. Boasberg’s principled opposition quickly made him a villain to Trump, culminating in the DOJ’s most recent attack on him.

“Today at my direction, @TheJusticeDept filed a misconduct complaint against U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg for making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote Monday on X. “These comments have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.”

While Bondi has yet to actually specify what “improper public comments” Boasberg made to elicit such an attack, both her chief of staff and the right-wing Federalist have reported that this huge, inappropriate mistake Boasberg made was simply expressing his (valid!) concern that the Trump administration was liable to “disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis,” while at a judicial conference.

So Trump and Bondi are trying to sanction Boasberg for sharing his expert opinion, one of the primary functions of a federal judge.

Trump has called for Boasberg’s impeachment since March when he first ruled against the president’s deportations, and has continued to slander any judge who dares to rule against him as some radical, activist Obama judge. The targeting of Boasberg is unfortunately par for the course now, as judges will have to consider either capitulating to Trump or risking their safety, reputation, and livelihood.