A word from our sponsor: Next Saturday, October 17th, Concerned Families of Westchester will host one of the many “New Kings” events that will be held across the USA. The point of these events is to get out the vote, to encourage voting early, and to protect the election from Trump’s evil schemes. Our event will be held in Hastings, on Warburton Ave., across the street from our traditional vigil spot at the VFW Plaza. This is a “visibility event”: we will hold our signs, forming a long line on Warburton Ave. Our event begins at noon and goes until 1 pm. We hope you will join us. And please help us out by signing up on the “No Kings” site, where you can also learn more about the event.
Resuming our regularly scheduled program, we have a few thoughts about the rapidly spreading US-Israel war against Iran. Three brief points. First, the relative success of Yemen’s Houthis in bombing Saudi Arabia and closing the Red Sea to oil shipments may be drawing Pakistan and Turkey into the war, based on their recently concluded military pact with Saudi Arabia. As many warned at the start of the war, the “adventure” of the US and Israel has the potential to become a World War. Today, when Trump was asked if he would also start bombing Yemen (the US has a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis), he said “maybe.”
Trump has frequently said that he would not resume bombing Iran prior to the November elections, and that he planned to resume bombing after the elections if Iran did not surrender. But there are many hints or contrary straws in the wind that suggest that renewed bombing of Iran is possible before the election. The most comprehensive summary of why and how this might happen was laid out in an article in The Atlantic on October 7. A looming defeat of the Republicans in the election is one factor possibly triggering bombing. Another is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s looming defeat in Israel’s October 27 election. If Netanyahu decided to attack Iran, would this draw in Trump/the US, as happened on February 28, 2026?
Finally, all this is complicated by growing revelations about the significant damage suffered by US military bases and military equipment in the early rounds of the war. The removal of a fleet of US long-range bombers from a base in England, based on a rumor that Iran might attack the base, was indicative of frayed nerves of the US military planners. A report from the Intercept’s Nick Turse of the US losses during the war says “some crucial bases have sustained so much damage that U.S. operations have been radically disrupted and, according to the second official, ‘base posture in the region may never recover.’” Pre-election military action is not guaranteed to rally the troops; it may well build further hatred towards Trump and his stupid war.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THE WAR AGAINST IRAN
Why Doesn’t Iran Concede under US Pressure? The Limits of Coercion
By Mohammad Amin Ahmadi, Informed Comment [October 9, 2026]
---- In his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, U.S. President Donald Trump said that before both major stages of the war with Iran, he had given Tehran opportunities to reach a deal and accept Washington’s conditions. Iran refused, he said, and the United States then launched Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury. Yet even after these military operations, Trump said that a deal with Iran was still possible. Trump’s account brings a larger question: Why has increasing pressure on Iran failed to produce the kind of concessions Washington expected? … This cannot simply be explained as Iranian stubbornness. Iran has negotiated before and has accepted significant compromises. The 2015 nuclear agreement itself showed that Tehran could make major concessions when they were part of a reciprocal bargain. The question, therefore, is not why Iran refuses to negotiate. It is why Iran refuses to accept a one-sided agreement under pressure. [Read More]
Where Are the Iran War Protests?
By Frida Berrigan, Tom Dispatch [October 9 2026]
---- The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions. … But we have not seen a reprise of the massive protests that marked the lead-up to the Iraq War 23 years ago. Maybe it’s understandable. And maybe it’s OK. … Activists today are marching less and instead mobilizing for community power over the long haul. This means relationship building, visible and decentralized resistance, and crisis response that transforms into solidarity after the acute crisis subsides. ... The past teaches us that the tactics must keep changing. Most of what worked in 1963 in Washington wasn’t applicable to organizers in 1982 and was outdated by 2003. And that is OK; we don’t still use mimeographs or fax machines, either. There might not be millions of people in the street to oppose the war on Iran but that doesn’t mean people are not resisting. It just looks different. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
CFOW has endorsed Kisha Skipper for election in the (Yonkers) district 15 for the county legislature. Kisha is the president of the Yonkers NAACP and an active voice in the community. She has spoken at several CFOW rallies, and we are on the same page in terms of program, etc. To learn more about her and her campaign, go to her campaign website - https://www.kishaforwestchester.com. And of course she NEEDS MONEY – To make a donation to her campaign, go here.
Last month tens of thousands of people in Spain marched and protested as 87-year-old pensioner Maria del Carmen Abascal was evicted from her home of 70 years, carried out on a stretcher by police. This outrageous act sparked wide-ranging protests against Spain’s housing (and other) crises. One outcome of the protest was the Spanish government’s (unsuccessful) attempt to establish an eviction moratorium. Sadly, as a court ruled that Maricarmen must be returned to her home this week, she died. Yet the struggle, now in her name, goes on. To learn more, see this week’s Democracy Now! program
President Trump constantly claims that the Strait of Hormuz is wide open, and that the oil is flowing and prices will soon fall. Yet The Maritime Executive, which tracks this kind of thing, writes that “the volume of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz has again fallen off… The latest reversal followed an increased pace of attacks on tankers” (October 8). If so, lower gasoline prices before the election may not happen. To learn more (wonkish), go here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter reader will give our music department the day off, and instead turn to Annie Leonard’s wonderful short video “The Story of Stuff” for illumination and enjoyment. The 20-minute film’s promo says, “The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.” All true. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) Author Arundhati Roy’s fight against injustice
From Aljazeera [“Talk to Aljazeera”] [October 5, 2026] – 28 minutes
---- Since winning the Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel, author Arundhati Roy has not shied away from political issues. Whether she is writing fiction, nonfiction, or political essays, she focuses on social injustice. The internationally acclaimed writer is an outspoken critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration. She describes India as a super poor nation, with a government that disempowers its citizens and silences dissent. Her activism goes beyond the pages of her books – she has also taken part in demonstrations against Modi’s policies. Supporters describe her as unrelenting in holding the political establishment to account. But critics accuse her of being divisive and anti-India. Despite what she calls scandal after scandal in the country, she is optimistic that political change is on the way. [See the Program] - The Modi government deployed overwhelming force against the demonstrations in Dehli this week by the “Cockroach Movement.” For insights, go here.
(Video) Navi Pillay, South African Jurist, Wins Nobel Peace Prize in “Stinging Rebuke to Donald Trump”
From Democracy Now! [October 9, 2026]
---- The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, the South African jurist who led the United Nations commission of inquiry that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Pillay’s long career in international human rights law includes work as a defense attorney for anti-apartheid activists, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a former judge at the International Criminal Court and the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014. “Everybody in the human rights movement reveres Navi Pillay,” says war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody, who calls the award “a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump.” Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, also comments on the Trump administration’s decision to deport a Nicaraguan opposition activist, Jeffrey Jarquín, from the United States, where he was in the process of seeking asylum. Upon his return to Nicaragua, Jarquín was immediately imprisoned at the same facility in which he was once tortured. [See the Program]
She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.
[FB – An interview with Miriana Spoliaric of the International Committee of the Red Cross]
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, New York Times [October 10, 2026]
---- Are we already in the middle of a new world war without realizing it? That’s the provocative question I wanted to explore when I sat down with someone in the rare position to know: Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The I.C.R.C. is a secretive organization that is not well known outside war zones. Unlike the American Red Cross, which deals with blood drives and American disaster relief, the I.C.R.C. is the independent and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements created in the wake of World War II that laid out the rules of war. In her role, Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. She rarely gives interviews because of the politically fraught and confidential nature of her work, but she sat down with me just after the most recent U.N. General Assembly because she is deeply worried about not only the growing number of conflicts in the world but also how complex they have become. [Read More]
French Students Vs. NATO
By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [October 9, 2026]
---- For the third week in a row, high school students across France are taking to the streets demanding more investment in their education. They want more teachers, smaller classes, decent school buildings and a public education system that works for poor and working-class students. But their struggle comes at a moment when France faces mounting pressure to cut public spending while dramatically increasing its military budget. The question at the heart of this uprising goes far beyond education: Will France invest in its young people—or in missiles, weapons and war? Books or bombs? What began in the Paris suburbs has spread to more than a thousand schools. On October 6, more than 250,000 people reportedly took to the streets in demonstrations supporting the students. … The student movement is unfolding just as NATO is pressuring European governments to massively increase military spending. Under intense pressure from Washington, NATO leaders agreed in 2025 to a staggering new target: 5 percent of each member country’s GDP by 2035. At least 3.5 percent is supposed to go directly to military expenditures, with another 1.5 percent devoted to military-related infrastructure, cybersecurity and “resilience.” This represents an enormous shift from NATO’s previous 2 percent target, which many members already struggled to meet. For countries facing growing deficits, heavy debt and deteriorating public services, such an increase comes at a steep price. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Has France’s Government Overplayed Its Hand?,” By June Loper and Harrison Stetler, The Nation [October 8, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
A brief history of Israeli ceasefire violations, from 1948 until today
By Jared Hillel, Mondoweiss [October 9, 2026]
---- Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza, we look at a brief timeline of a long-established Israeli practice of sabotaging negotiations and violating ceasefire agreements to advance their goals. As it stands, Israel has killed over 1,400 Palestinians since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, 2025, striking the enclave every single day. While the number of violations have been egregious, the injustice of post-ceasefire Israeli aggression is nothing new. In fact, what has played out in the last year fits into a broader historical pattern, one that innocent civilians across the Arab world have borne witness to time and time again. [Read More]
‘Did he know?’: Why Israel is rejecting an October 7 reckoning
By Yoav Litvin, Aljazeera [October 4, 2026]
---- As Israel prepares to mark three years since the October 7 attacks and with less than a month to go to parliamentary elections, one topic is dominating the electoral agenda. Media reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates before the attacks have put his alleged responsibility back in the spotlight. “Did he know?” is the question on everyone’s lips. Listening to the accusatory choir, one might think that Israeli society finally is acknowledging the real meaning of October 7. Yet the opposite is true. Instead of giving a platform to a reckoning, the elections function to scapegoat Netanyahu for his alleged role in facilitating Hamas’s attack while absolving Israeli society and the Zionist movement of its collective responsibility for the preceding violence and ensuing genocidal aggression. [Read More]
(Video) “Origins of a Genocide”: Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara on “Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East”
From Democracy Now! [October 7, 2026]
---- Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide is the new book by Al Jazeera senior political analyst Marwan Bishara discussing the crucial 12 days between Benjamin Netanyahu’s October 7 speech and Biden’s “rare” Oval Office speech on October 19. “October 7 was bloody, and it was horrific. … But Netanyahu and his government had to go overboard, to exaggerate, to lie, to deceive about what exactly happened” in order to justify their actions in Gaza, says Bishara. “Genocides don’t start with bombs; they start with ideology. And in this case, the ideology has been decades in the making.” “During the Biden administration, the United States was basically complicit in genocide,” adds Bishara. [See the Program] - ALSO OF INTEREST - “The scramble to rewrite Biden’s record on Gaza,” from Aljazeera [“The Listening Post”] first 11 minutes [October 11, 2026] [Link]
Settlers Commit the Pogroms. Israel’s Public Enables Them
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [October 6, 2026]
---- Day after day, headlines appear along the lines of “Israeli Soldiers and Settlers Block Palestinian Olive Harvest in West Bank’s Area B” (one example, from a report by Matan Golan on Saturday afternoon). An entire people bears responsibility for this routine, not just a handful. May the activists who use their own bodies to try to plug the ever-widening hole in the crumbling dam forgive me. Apart from them, there are no uninvolved civilians among Israel’s Jews. … It is not the Israeli media that is responsible for concealing crimes committed in plain sight, but Israel’s Jewish public, which refuses to have its peace disturbed. Except for the handful of activists. It is not editors who decided that the routine abuse Jews inflict on Palestinians fails to meet the threshold for news, but the ratings algorithm that obeys the voice of the masses. It is not television channel owners alone who set the priorities, but the viewers flicking between channels. The media is not betraying its role. It is simply heeding the will of the people. And the will of the people and the viewers is to wallow in their perpetual victimhood and soar on the wings of their pilots’ heroism. And move into villas overlooking a biblical landscape. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Why Violent Settlers in the West Bank Have Already Won,” by Ari Flanzraich, Ha’aretz [Israel] [October 11, 2026] [Link].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
From Bad to Better: The arc of the physical universe bends towards heat, but maybe we can bend it back
By Bill McKibben, Substack [October 9, 2026]
---- El Niño, likely exacerbated by climate change and definitely riding in on top of already overheated seas, will raise temperatures to places that no member of our species has yet experienced. It will be a preview of normal weather circa 2035 or 2040. It will be grim. And it also may—and here the arc starts to bend a little bit, so chin up—give us a chance to see if humans can rise to the occasion. We’ve had climate-driven disasters aplenty, of course, probably beginning around Katrina. But these will be different because they are the first to come in a period when an alternative to fossil fuel is now easy to imagine and cheap to provide. Now, if humanity decides to move fast, it can. And recognition of the danger plays a role in that. We got a bit of a controlled experiment in western Europe this summer, where temperatures reached their highest levels ever. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
ICE Is Everywhere and Acting with Impunity
By Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker [October 4, 2026]
---- ICE arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. Past calls by Democratic lawmakers for D.H.S. agents to end the practice of wearing masks in public were ignored, and this summer the department announced that it would be purchasing for its personnel twenty million dollars’ worth of gloves that deliver powerful electric shocks. Flush with cash from Congress, D.H.S. is planning to hire five thousand more ICE officers by the end of the year. Recently, it signed seven billion dollars in construction contracts to build more detention centers. Meanwhile, in all but one of the existing two hundred and thirty-nine immigration jails across the country, the A.P. reported, ICE has stopped listing in its online database, known as the detainee locator, the whereabouts of people in custody who have final deportation orders. If people’s names don’t show up in the locator, their family members and lawyers won’t immediately be able to find them. In July, sixteen thousand people arrested by ICE, or about a third of those entering detention that month, had final deportation orders. Given the lack of accountability at D.H.S., it should come as little surprise that Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, has taken the lead in prosecuting one of Trump’s principal obsessions: searching for evidence that noncitizens might vote in the midterms next month. Noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent, as D.H.S.’s own figures show. [Read More]
Columbia, other universities, systematically suppressed pro-Palestinian speech, ACLU and Amnesty International report alleges
By Simon Leton and Emily Pickering, Columbia Spectator [October 2, 2026]
---- Columbia, alongside other U.S. universities, systematically suppressed pro-Palestinian speech, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International USA claims in a Sept. 23 report. The report alleges that Columbia suspended student groups for peaceful protest in an “unlawful” manner that exposed student activists to “excessive force” by calling law enforcement to campus, and was disproportionately harsh in its issuance of suspensions and expulsions against activists. The analysis used the University’s disciplinary responses, concessions made in negotiations with the federal government, and testimony from student protesters and other University affiliates to substantiate its findings. The 322-page document comes after a two-year investigation that covered 80 universities across the country. Columbia is featured as one of the report’s six university case studies. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [October 8 2026]
---- For more than 70 days, dozens of activists and an ancient cottonwood tree on the Arizona–Mexico border have successfully disrupted the construction of President Donald Trump’s ruinous $50 billion border wall. Since July, one protester at a time has occupied the cottonwood, or the grandmother tree, as it is locally known. After three other cottonwoods in the area were torn down by government contractors, the remaining grandmother on the U.S. side of the border became the site of a growing protest camp in the remote town of Lochiel, Arizona, and neighboring Sonora, Mexico, where organizers gathered for more than a year to oppose the border wall’s construction. On Monday, heavily armed federal agents moved in with force. Activists on the ground estimate that 150 Border Patrol officers — many of whom masked their faces — raided the encampment during the protesters’ morning prayer ceremony. At least 10 demonstrators were arrested, and the 200-year-old cottonwood was bulldozed. [Read More]
When All Else Is Out of Bounds, Zap Labor
By Arthur MacEwan, Dollars & Sense [October 2, 2026]
---- The Trump administration is very unlikely to cease its military actions in the Middle East (and elsewhere), to abandon the tariffs, or to stop pushing people out of the country—all of which affect prices by disruption of supply. And the government deficit and the massive expenditures on data centers are unlikely to be seriously affected by the Fed’s action on interest rates. So, when all else is out of bounds, zap labor. … Trump, however, seems oblivious to even the existence of an inflation problem and its severe effects on the cost of living. He seems to think that the important issue is keeping interest rates low as a means of pushing economic growth and keeping the stock market booming. It appears, however, that inflation has more people (voters) agitated than slow economic growth or a possible stock market slump. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Invention of Christopher Columbus, American Hero
By Ed Burmila, The Nation [October 9, 2017]
---- The American Revolution created the Columbus most of us over the age of 30 learned in grade school. Prior to the late 18th century, he was a historical footnote with no connection to the 13 colonies. An Italian, he sailed under a Spanish flag and landed in no part of the modern-day mainland United States. Yet when the need to develop a national history with no discernible connection to Britain arose during the Revolution, early Americans seized upon him. He was a blank slate on whom post-Revolution Americans could project the virtues they wanted to see in their new nation. Then, as now, the process of writing Columbus was one of defining what it means to be American. … Columbus had flaws as well. Until his death, he publicly insisted that he had in fact landed in East Asia as he originally intended. He was neither an especially talented mariner nor a success at founding a colony in the New World. Other than to allow him to begin bouncing around the Caribbean doing capricious and cruel things to its inhabitants, his famous voyage accomplished little. Yet almost nothing was known about Columbus in the American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution, and this worked in his favor. [Read More]
Remembering a Legend in the Radical Theater Movement: Judith Malina, In Her Own Words
By Karen Malpede, The Indypendent [September 30, 2026]
---- Karen Malpede was 26 when she met Judith Malina in 1972. Malpede was an aspiring playwright who had just released her first book, People’s Theater in Amerika, a history of radical theater in the United States. Malina and her husband Julian Beck, both anarcho-pacifists, had co-founded the Living Theater in 1947 and had won global acclaim as pioneers of experimental theater with plays like The Brig and The Connection that challenged both political and theatrical conventions. Living Theater was based in Lower Manhattan for most of its first two decades before its founders fled to Europe in the 1960s to avoid the wrath of Uncle Sam and his tax auditors at the IRS. They would eventually return to New York. “Judith read [my] book and came and found me and threw her arms around me,” Malpede told The Indypendent. She said ‘I finished your book at 4 am and I feel so close to you.’ And that’s it. We were family from then on.” Malpede would remain close friends with Beck and Malina until their deaths respectively in 1985 and 2015. Malina was an avid diarist who practiced her craft daily. Northwestern University Press recently released four volumes of her diaries from 1947-1971, that bring to life a unique artist and social revolutionary during the most creative part of her life. You can see Malpede’s full review of Malina’s diaries below. [Read More]
