Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 9, 2018
Hello All – Sunday was the 17th anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan. Back then, CFOW was just three weeks old. We were talking about many things: one of them was the possibility that tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan might starve, as the World Food Program – on which more than a million people depended, in light of Afghanistan's ongoing famine – had announced that it was removing its staff because of the impending US attack. At last Sunday's CFOW meeting we reminisced about that day, October 7, 2001, astonished that such a cruel and apparently pointless and endless war continued. Equally astonishing is the ignorance of the US population about the war, and the widespread indifference (apart from military families) that such an atrocity has been carried on by our government in our name. The war in Afghanistan is both an ethical disaster and a political failure. It's time to for ALL progressives to stand up and protest it, even if the only practical outcome of protest is to alert our neighbors that the war in Afghanistan is starting its 18th year.
As described in some good/useful reading linked below, a new report from the UN's panel on our climate crisis concludes that very bad things will happen sooner than expected, perhaps as soon as 2040. And the bad things will be much worse than previously thought. The nations of the world know not what to do except wring their hands and call for more studies; except for the United States, where "more studies" by the government are forbidden, because the whole thing is a hoax. We already see how extreme weather – fires, draught, and hurricanes – wreck havoc in many parts of the world. Regime change, especially here at home, has become a matter of self-defense for our species. How can we allow this to continue?!!
Finally, there are some good/useful articles linked below about Sunday's presidential election in Brazil. Brazil suffered two decades of military dictatorship (1964-1985), and now Sunday's front-runner (pending a second round of voting), a former military officer and an advocate of a military/capitalist dictatorship, looms likely to be the country's next president. As Walden Bello writes in another article linked below, Brazil seems about to join a growing number of more-or-less liberal democracies that have elected authoritarian, right-wing governments. While there are significant variations on how this has come about, common features include the failure of liberal governments to curb the destructiveness of "free-market" capitalism, and the scapegoating of immigrants and the concomitant rise of racist nationalism. And in the background, often bankrolling rightwing anti-liberal election campaigns, stand ranks of wealthy business interests, hoping to benefit from the destruction of (even weak) labor, environmental, and other "safety-net" protections that hinder even greater profit. Despite its obvious idiosyncrasies, "Trumpism" is a disease attacking liberal democracies world wide. Our fight Is not just against Trump and his like, but against the Trump Agenda, a racist and militarized nationalism; in Hannah Arendt's words, an alliance of the Mob and Capital.
News Notes
The last day for voter registration is Friday, October 12th. If you have a NYS Drivers License, Permit, or Non-Driver ID, you can register online by October 12th here. Otherwise, applications to print and mail are here. (They must be postmarked by October 12th.) You can also register in person (by October 12th) at the Westchester Board of Elections
On October 2nd, prominent Saudi journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2 and then "disappeared." The Turkish government (not the most reliable source, but…) says they have evidence to suggest he was murdered inside the consulate by a Saudi hit squad. The Saudis deny this; but there is worldwide outrage against what appears to be another one of their crimes against their own citizens. Here is some useful background info from Aljazeera. A coalition of groups, including WESPAC, will hold a protest rally on Wednesday at 5 p.m. at the Saudi consulate, 866 2nd Ave. between E.46th St. & E.47th St. Some CFOW stalwarts will be going on the 3:53 train from Hastings; please join us!
Lara Alqasem, a 22-year-old American student who arrived in Israel last week to start a master's degree program at Hebrew University, is entering her sixth day of detention Monday at Ben-Gurion Airport. She is accused of being a threat to Israeli security because of her previous support of BDS activities. Her detention was triggered because her name was listed on the US website of "Canary Mission," which blacklists students critical of Israel. Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper, wrote a strong editorial on her behalf and against the border practices of the Israeli government. You can read more about "Canary Mission" here.
"Meddling," and especially Russia's alleged "meddling" in the US 2016 election, is always in the news. Turning the mirror on ourselves, here is "A Short History of US Meddling in Foreign Elections" (video). The list of "meddled elections" is a long one: in 1984 Edward Herman and I wrote a book about "Demonstration Elections," describing how & why the USA staged and choreographed elections in the Dominican Republic (1965), Vietnam (1967 and 1968), and El Salvador (1982). Yes, election "meddling" is bad; let's also demand that our government stop doing it.
Here is some useful advice from Indivisible Central, who should know about these things: "Why You Should Not Call Members of Congress Who Aren't Yours." [Link].
When President Trump spoke at the opening session of the UN recently, his claim to great governing evoked laughter. But lots of other things happened as well. The team at Popular Resistance interviewed UN expert Jim Paul about "What Happened at the United Nations Last Week"; read about it here.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Friday, October 12th – CFOW music favorites Hudson Valley Sally will be in concert at the Croton Public Library at 7:30 p.m. To preview (pre-hear?) some of their fine music, go here.
Tuesday, October 23rd – What will probably be the final court case in the Stop the Algonquin Pipeline campaign will be heard at the Cortlandt town court, 1 Heady St. in Cortland, starting at 9 a.m. This case involves defendants who crawled into a pipeline to halt construction. They defendants face serious charges, but the case is also important because the judge has stated she will allow the "necessity defense," allowing the defendants to argue that what they did was not illegal, because they were attempting to stop a greater harm. I'll post more about this as details emerge.
Sunday, November 4th – CFOW's monthly meeting will be held at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m. At these meetings we review our work over the past months and make plans for what's coming next. Everyone is welcome at these meetings!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page.
Please Support CFOW
CFOW runs on a shoestring; but with the price of shoestrings these days, we're asking for your support. If you can make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This has been a rough week for peace & justice stalwarts, so the Rewards are old favorites on the mellow side. Here are a sweet duet from Ray Charles and Norah Jones ("Here We Go Again"); some stride piano by Albert Ammons ("You Are My Sunshine"); a favorite of mine from Django Reiinhardt and Stephane Grappelli ("Viper"); and some fun from Fats Waller ("Your Feet's Too Big"). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Sieg Heil Deja Vu? Understanding the Global Rise of the Extreme Right
Foreign Policy in Focus [October 8, 2018]
---- Just a few years ago, the idea that the extreme right would come to power in what were regarded as stable liberal democracies would have been dismissed not only by liberals but by more left-wing progressives. Yet, in just eight years, 2010-2018, the world has seen the extreme right move from being outside the corridors of power to the center of power itself. There is, of course, Donald Trump. But before his surprise electoral victory in November 2016, Viktor Orban had come to power again in Hungary in 2010 — this time reincarnated as a man of the hard right instead of the liberal democrat he was in the late nineties. Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalists achieved a smashing electoral victory in India in 2014. And Rodrigo Duterte's tough law-and-order line carried him to the presidency of the Philippines in May 2016. How do we explain this sudden resurgence of the authoritarian right? [Read More]
The Land Belonged to Them: Revisiting a Palestinian Family, 25 Years After Their Land was Taken
, Counterpunch [October 8, 2018]
---- A quarter of a century ago, I watched Israel take the Palestinian Khatib family's land. With a British film director, we filmed the bulldozers closing in on the garden wall of the house of Mohamed and Saida Khatib and their son Sulieman amid their little orchard of olives, grapes, figs, apricots and almonds, beside Saida's old chicken coop. "It's mine – it was my father's and my father's father's," crippled old Mohamed told me. "What do you expect me to do?" His 35-year-old schoolteacher son was going to the Israeli court to prevent this act of theft, he said. The family had refused compensation. The land belonged to them. … But on the 25th anniversary of that old film we made – and on the 25th anniversary of the Oslo agreement that might, if it had not been so flawed, have saved the Khatibs – I was back in Jerusalem, and I could no longer ignore the track down to the house. Nor the absence, amid the modern Israeli housing blocks, of the garden where, day after day – for these films take many hours to shoot – we had talked to the family. [Read More]
Putting War Back in Children's Culture
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [October 7, 2018]
---- Children's culture proved remarkably predictive when it came to the nature of twenty-first-century war. It was Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas who, in 1977, first brought war back into a children's (and adults') culture that had been emptied of it by Vietnam. In the early 1980s, it was toymakers at Hasbro who, unlike policy makers in Washington, grasped that the Soviet Union had had its day as our super-enemy, that it no longer gripped the imagination, and so gave their newly revived fighting man, G.I. Joe, a foe more suitable for a new age, one that couldn't be more familiar today: terrorism. … Those in a position to produce movies, TV shows, comics, novels, or memoirs about Vietnam were convinced that Americans felt badly enough without such reminders. It was simpler to consider the war film and war toy casualties of Vietnam than to create cultural products with the wrong heroes, victims, and villains. In Star Wars, George Lucas successfully challenged this view, decontaminating war of its recent history through a series of inspired cinematic decisions that rescued crucial material from the wreckage of Vietnam. [Read More]
(Video) Could Brazil Return to a Dictatorship? Glenn Greenwald on Possible Election of Far-Right Demagogue
From Democracy Now! [October 5, 2018]
---- Voters in Brazil head to the polls on Sunday in an election that could reshape the political landscape of South America. Polls show the current front-runner is the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army officer who has openly praised Brazil's military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. Bolsonaro has a long history of making racist, misogynistic and homophobic comments, and has risen in the polls since September 8, when he was stabbed while campaigning. His campaign directly benefited from the jailing of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in April, who had been leading in all presidential polls before being forced to drop out of the race. Lula's handpicked successor, Fernando Haddad, is currently placing second in most polls. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. He has been covering the election from Rio de Janeiro. [See the Program] Also very interesting is this article by Chomsky, "I Just Visited Lula, the World's Most Prominent Political Prisoner. A "Soft Coup" in Brazil's Election Will Have Global Consequences," The Intercept [[Link] and "The Bolsonaro Effect," by Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Mury Scalco, NACLA [October 4, 2018] [Link].
Securing Our Elections/Protecting The Vote
[FB – Among the simple steps that can be taken to protect the integrity of our elections is the ability of candidates to gain a recount – a hand-recount – in the case of a very close election. Many states allow this automatically, but in NY a candidate must go to court, and the court seldom grants such a recount. A bill that would fix this problem has been in the Westchester County Legislature now for five months, without action. Please call you county legislator and ask him/her to support the Right to Recount legislation. Thanks.]
The Crisis of Election Security
By Kim Zetter, New York Times [September 26, 2018]
---- As the 2018 elections approach, the American intelligence community is issuing increasingly dire warnings about potential interference from Russia and other countries, but the voting infrastructure remains largely unchanged. D.H.S. has now conducted remote-scanning and on-site assessments of state and county election systems, but these are still largely Band-Aid measures applied to internet-facing servers. They don't address core vulnerabilities in voting machines or the systems used to program them. And they ignore the fact that many voting machines that elections officials insist are disconnected from the internet — and therefore beyond the reach of hackers — are in fact accessible by way of the modems they use to transmit vote totals on election night. … How did our election system get so vulnerable, and why haven't officials tried harder to fix it? The answer, ultimately, comes down to politics and money: The voting machines are made by well-connected private companies that wield immense control over their proprietary software, often fighting vigorously in court to prevent anyone from examining it when things go awry. [Read More]
The Myth of the Lazy Nonvoter
By Sarah Jackel and Stuart A. Thompson
---- If history is any indicator, only around 40 percent of eligible voters will vote in the midterm elections. Most people assume that voter turnout remains this low because Americans are apathetic and simply don't want to vote. But it's more likely that most Americans do want to vote, and one of the root causes of low turnout is this country's framework of restrictive voting laws. The United States is unique in allowing state laws to largely govern voting in federal elections. Ever since key federal protections were dismantled by the Supreme Court in 2013 – including portions of the Voting Rights Act, which required some states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before changing voting procedures — state lawmakers have had more latitude than ever to enact laws affecting whether, how and when one can vote in a federal election. [Read More]
"Justice" Kavanaugh and the Protests
(Video) The Uproarious Laughter and Impunity of Powerful White Men – A good, short overview of what just went down, from The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill [Link].
(Video) Where Does #MeToo Go from Here? Women Are "On Fire" with Rage as Kavanaugh Joins Supreme Court
From Democracy Now! [October 8, 2018]
---- Thousands of women protested outside the U.S. Capitol and across the country on Saturday as Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, just hours after the Senate voted to confirm him. "I hope that it is deep enough that it is forming a strong, cohesive movement among people that will resonate through this country and change the culture," says Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, who joined the protests. We also speak with longtime feminist activist and writer Soraya Chemaly, author of the new book, "Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger." She says conservatives' biggest fear since the "Me Too" movement is that women are telling the truth. "And if women are telling the truth," Chemaly notes, "then it's not just an indictment of a few bad apples, but an indictment of the entire system." [See the Program] Another Democracy Now! segment is also useful: (Video) "They Did Not Care": How the GOP Dismissed Assault Accusations & Confirmed Kavanaugh," [October 8, 2018] [Link].
Kavanaugh Is Confirmed. Now What?
By Nan Aron, The Nation [October 7, 2018]
---- We are in a political climate that is already transformed, after another year of relentless Trumpism, from the one in which Neil Gorsuch got his successful shot at the high court. Not only that, but the battle over Brett Kavanaugh has plumbed a deep well of anger and pain that was waiting to come to the surface. Thousands of people marched and demonstrated in opposition to Kavanaugh. That his candidacy coincided with a maturing #MeToo movement certainly helped. But the outpouring was a lot like another mass uprising we saw right after Donald Trump's election, the Women's March, and it is similarly inspiring. I now believe that for a new generation of voters—especially women—the Senate's catastrophic handling of this nomination and its contempt for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's act of national witness is a defining moment, when business as usual will no longer do. [Read More] And I thought this article was also interesting: "Kavanaugh's Defenders in Congress Don't Care About Process," by Patricia J. Williams, The Nation [October 4, 2018] [Link].
WAR & PEACE
Reclaiming Armistice Day: A Day To Perpetuate Peace
October 2, 2018]
---- On June 4, 1926, Congress passed a concurrent resolution establishing November 11th, the day in 1918 when the fighting stopped, as Armistice Day, a legal holiday, the intent and purpose of which would be to "commemorate with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations." … Changing the designation of Armistice Day to Veterans Day, has provided the militarists and war profiteers the means and the opportunity, not to "reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace" as was originally intended in his Proclamation, but to celebrate and promote militarism and war, fabricate and perpetuate its mythology of honor and nobility, misrepresent members of the military and veterans as heroes, and encourage the enlistment of the cannon fodder for future wars for profit. Consequently, I advocate restoring November 11th to its original designation and to reaffirm its original intent. We must "Reclaim Armistice Day." [Read More]
It Is Time to End the Forever War in Afghanistan
By James Carden, The Nation [October 6, 2018]
---- Sunday, October 7, 2001, marked the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, which, in a nationally televised address, President George W. Bush said was "designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime." Seventeen years have passed since that Sunday afternoon, when Bush predicted the United States would "win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose." He concluded his brief remarks to a still-shaken nation by promising that "we will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail." But the reality turned out rather differently. Initial successes on the battlefield were followed by quagmire and an occupation for which the United States proved spectacularly ill-suited. [Read More]
Could Trump Take Down the American Empire?
October 4, 2018]
---- More than any other presidency in modern history, Donald Trump's has been a veritable sociopolitical wrecking ball, deliberately stoking conflict by playing to xenophobic and racist currents in American society and debasing its political discourse. That fact has been widely discussed. But Trump's attacks on the system of the global U.S. military presence and commitments have gotten far less notice. He has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides, about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments and commitments to South Korea and NATO. This has resulted in an unprecedented struggle between a sitting president and the national security state over a global US military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since early in the Cold War. … But Trump's unorthodox approach has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the US military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his administration will certainly bring further struggles over the issues on which he has jousted repeatedly with those in charge of the empire. [Read More]
Rethinking Nuclearism
By Richard Falk, ZNet [October 7, 2018]
---- To move toward a world without nuclear weapons requires an initial conceptual clarity that has so far been lacking. It may, of course, continue to be prudent for intrinsic reasons to adopt certain arms control measures, but to do so now with eyes wide open, which means recognizing that such a step is likely to be a step awayfrom adopting a transformative approach to nuclearism. What is wrong with this reliance on the managerial approach to regulating nuclearism based on the NPT, the NPT geopolitical regime, and arms control, especially given the apparent political unattainability of nuclear disarmament? I believe a series of strong critical assessments make the managerial approach ethical unacceptable and politically flawed…. If transformational approach is unattainable and the managerial approach deeply flawed, what does that suggest about the current phase of the struggle of the peoples of the world and their governmental allies against nuclearism? [Read More]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
IPCC: Radical Energy Transformation Needed to Avoid 1.5 Degrees Global Warming
By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News [October 8, 2018]
---- Without a radical transformation of energy, transportation and agriculture systems, the world will hurtle past the 1.5 degree Celsius target of the Paris climate agreement by the middle of the century, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Failing to cap global warming near that threshold dramatically increases risks to human civilization and the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth, according to the documents and summaries released Oct. 8. To keep warming under 1.5°C, countries will have to cut global CO2 emissions 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050, the report found, re-affirming previous conclusions about the need to end fossil fuel burning. Short-lived climate pollutants, such as methane, will have to be significantly reduced as well. More than 1.5°C warming means nearly all of the planet's coral reefs will die, droughts and heat waves will continue to intensify, and an additional 10 million people will face greater risks from rising sea level, including deadly storm surges and flooded coastal zones. Most at risk are millions of people in less developed parts of the world, the panel warned. [Read More] The IPCC report was a major story in The New York Times. Read "Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040," by Coral Davenport, [October 7, 2018] [Link].
This Landmark Trial of Climate Activists Puts the Political System Itself on Trial
By Wen Stephenson, The Nation [October 6, 2018]
---- On the morning of October 11, 2016, in what today might seem a different political era, five middle-aged climate activists from Washington and Oregon posted a well-reasoned if somewhat unusual letter to President Barack Obama. …The action that those five concerned citizens, now known to the world as the Valve Turners, took that day—manually closing the emergency shut-off valves on tar-sands pipelines in Washington, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, then peacefully awaiting their arrest—surely stands among the boldest acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, on climate or any other issue, in memory. … Much like the youth plaintiffs' case, the arguments underpinning the climate-necessity defense resonate powerfully in this political moment—and not only as a response to our climate emergency, but equally and inseparably, as a response to our political emergency, the crisis of our democracy, which long predates Donald Trump and is, in fact, among the root causes of the climate crisis itself. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
Facebook's New Propaganda Partners
By Alan MacLeod, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] [September 25, 2018]
---- Media giant Facebook recently announced it would combat "fake news" by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank. The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey. That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Howard Zinn: Don't Despair about the Supreme Court
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive [October 21, 2005]
---- It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice. The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king. … This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to get one person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or lose, can be used to dramatize issues. … Still, knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture--the media, the educational system--tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, [Read More]
Could the Trump Administration Succeed in Detaining Child Migrants Indefinitely?
By Michelle Chen, The Nation [October 6, 2018]
---- Upending two decades of precedent surrounding child detention, Trump's new proposal to deal with undocumented immigration could see children apprehended by immigration authorities facing jail time for months, perhaps indefinitely, as their immigration proceedings are pending. Until now, under a 1997 legal settlement known as the Flores Agreement, federal authorities had been barred from detaining children in "jail-like" settings. If the Trump administration prevails in overturning the precedent, children could be imprisoned, with or without their parents—even when they are pursuing a valid asylum claim, and even when their parents are being prosecuted separately for illegal border crossing. While the administration is pressing its new plans for indefinite detention, new internal auditing reports have emerged detailing egregious failures of the government to protect the health, welfare, and safety of migrant children in detention, or even to track family members who had been separated by authorities. A DHS watchdog report noted that children were kept in chaotic and inhumane conditions for prolonged periods as they underwent processing at the border. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
The past six months in Gaza have been like another war
By Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, Aljazeera [October 1, 2018]
---- As a doctor living and working in Gaza all my life, I thought I had seen it all. I felt I knew the limits of what Gaza can endure. But the last six months have been the most difficult I have experienced in my 15 years with MSF in Gaza. And I have lived and worked through three wars: in 2008, 2012 and 2014. The human suffering and devastation I saw over the past few months have reached another height. The shocking volume of wounded has been overwhelming. I will never forget Monday, May 14. In the span of 24 hours, the local health authorities recorded a total of 2,271 wounded, including 1,359 people injured by live ammunition. I was on shift that day with the surgical team of al-Aqsa hospital, one of the main hospitals in Gaza. … Of course, we continue to try to find a way to treat these people despite the hardships we face: overwhelmed hospitals and, because of the blockade, four hours of electricity a day, fuel shortages, depleted medical supplies, a lack of specialist surgeons and doctors, exhausted nurses and medics who have not being paid their full salaries for months on end, restrictions on patients leaving Gaza to receive medical treatment elsewhere and the list goes on. MSF is facing huge challenges and we cannot do it alone. We try. We push. We have to keep going. For me, it's a question of medical ethics. These injured people must get the treatment they need. Right now in Gaza, looking into the future is like looking into a dark tunnel and I'm not sure I can see a light at the end of it. [Read More]
As Gaza's economy collapses, so does any hope of peace
By Jonathan Cook, The National [UAE] [October 1, 2018]
---- The moment long feared is fast approaching in Gaza, according to a new report by the World Bank. After a decade-long Israeli blockade and a series of large-scale military assaults, the economy of the tiny coastal enclave is in "freefall". At a meeting of international donors in New York on Thursday, coinciding with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank painted an alarming picture of Gaza's crisis. Unemployment now stands at close to 70 per cent and the economy is contracting at an ever-faster rate. … Nonetheless, the political will to remedy the situation looks as atrophied as ever. No one is prepared to take meaningful responsibility for the time-bomb that is Gaza. In fact, the main parties that could make a difference appear intent on allowing the deterioration to continue. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ignored repeated warnings of a threatened explosion in Gaza from his own military. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Invention of Christopher Columbus, American Hero
By Edward Burmila, The Nation [October 9, 2017]
---- Columbus's quadricentennial was 100 years in the making, and it would take nearly another century for a more critical and historically accurate picture of Columbus to creep into the American consciousness. 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. [Read More] Also very interesting imo is "Whose History Matters? Students Can Name Columbus, But Most Have Never Heard of the Taíno People," by Bill Bigelow, The Zinn Project [October 2, 2018] [Link]
