Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
November 26, 2018
Hello All – Yet another report (linked below) details the circles of Hell into which Yemen is descending. For those coming late to the story, three years ago Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened in Yemen's civil war, relying (until recently) primarily on air power. To an extent still largely unknown, the Obama and then the Trump administrations have assisted this air war, providing in-air refueling, targeting and other intelligence data, re-supplying both regimes with bombs and other ammunition, and participating in the naval blockade of Yemeni ports, ostensibly to prevent weapons from being smuggled in, but de facto preventing food and medicine deliveries as well.
The war is now a sprawling War Crime. Bombing civilian targets, conspiring to enable the spread of the world's largest cholera outbreak (more than a million cases), and using a food-and-medicine blockade as a weapon to compel surrender are simply 21st-century Nazi tactics. As of today, tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, and the UN says that 14 million people are on the brink of starvation.
The military situation now focuses on the siege of the port city of Hodeida, the only remaining port through which supplies can arrive to those in territories still resisting the Saudi attacks. The "demand" of the civilized world for more than a year has been the implementation of a bombing halt, then a ceasefire, and then some kind of peace negotiations. Yet neither the Obama nor the Trump administrations, nor the US Congress, has managed to get itself behind such a simple demand.
The revival of the 1973 legislation called the War Powers Act now offers a glimmer of hope. In essence, the War Powers Act requires the President to get the consent of Congress for military actions lasting more than a few months. Liberals in both the House and the Senate tried unsuccessfully to pass such a Resolution last year; more recently the House was prevented from even voting on a Resolution through the parliamentary gimmicks of House Republican leader Paul Ryan.
In the wake of the Khashoggi murder, Official Washington and the mainstream media have rediscovered the War in Yemen, and there is now a tailwind behind efforts to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by cutting off (and thus largely stopping) the Saudi air war. In the House, the War Powers Resolution originally had less than three dozen co-sponsors. Then, in September, some leaders of the House Democrats joined as co-sponsors, including our own Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey. And last week, Majority-Leader-to be Nancy Pelosi also became a co-sponsor. It is thus highly likely that, when the new Congress convenes in January, a Resolution under the War Powers Act will be voted on and passed by the House.
In the meantime, in the remaining two months until this Blessed Event takes place, a Yemeni child will die every ten minutes, more market places and school buses will be bombed with USA assistance, and the defense perimeter of the port of Hodeida may collapse. These (and many more horrors) are world-class War Crimes, worthy of convening another Nuremburg Tribunal. One tiny but useful thing we can do right now is to call our congressional representatives and demand that passing a Resolution under the War Powers Act be the first order of business come January. So please give Nita Lowey (202-225-6506) and Eliot Engel (202-225-2464) a call and demand that they support legislation to end this war. Thanks.
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is one of our many contested holidays. Like Columbus Day, for example, Thanksgiving floats a mythical covering over events to convert their historical meaning into their opposite. I think the founding myths of many countries do this. Thanksgiving, of course, celebrates the fellowship and interdependence between Indians and Pilgrims; and until recently that was all that most of us knew. The historical ironies on this Thanksgiving Day are especially strong, as the Wampanoag Indians – the tribe whose ancestors shared that first Thanksgiving meal – have just lost their federal status as a tribe, and thus their right to 321 acres placed into a trust for them by the Obama administration. This effectively revokes the sovereignty of the Mashpee Wampanoag people. For some interesting articles that plug the Mashpee Crime into a long history of Indian-USA relations, check out "Thankstaking in the Trumpfederacy: Terminate the Tribe That Aided the Pilgrims" [Link] and "No Thanks for Thanksgiving" [Link]. On a more positive note, Hastings RISE posted some useful ideas to help us (and especially schoolchildren) un-learn the old myths: check out "Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combating Racism in Schools" [Link].
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!
Thursday, November 29th – Veterans for Peace will hold a forum on "Save Our VA" at the Community Church (40 E. 35th St. – between Park and Madison) starting at 7:30 p.m. The forum describes/protests the Trump/Koch Bros. plan to privatize the VA medical system. Speakers include noted author Suzanne Gordon; James Young, Retired Navy Nurse & Brooklyn Director of National Nurses United; and Jasper Craven, Brooklyn-based Investigative journalist who writes about Trump Administration privatization schemes for The Nation, Washington Monthly, and other publications. For more information about this important issue, go here.
Saturday, December 1st – Each year WESPAC hosts the Margaret Eberle Fair Trade Festival and Crafts Sale. It's a good place to buy holiday presents, and it supports worthy causes. It goes from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Memorial United Methodist Church, 250 Bryant Ave. in White Plains. $5 suggested admission.
Sunday, December 2nd – The next CFOW 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 our meetings we review our work/the events of the past month and make plans for what to do next. Everyone is welcome at these meetings.
Saturday, December 8th – CFOW favorites Hudson Valley Sally will team up with Ellis Paul at the next installment of the Clearwater Walkabout Coffeehouse. The program runs from 7:30 to 10 PM at the Memorial United Methodist Church, 250 Bryant Ave. in White Plains. For more info, tickets, directions, etc., go here.
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 (usually) 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's expenditures are very small, but our Treasury is now pretty low. If you would like to support our work financially, please end a check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent Featured Essays, I especially recommend a comprehensive and up-to-date report on the horrors in Yemen; two good reports on the (very high) cost of our wars since 9/11/2001; a useful article that explains "the Green New Deal"; a thought-provoking article on the importance of our fight for "Freedom of Assembly"; and two good articles on the politics of moving toward single-payer healthcare. I also strongly recommend the article by Nation writer Katha Pollitt, in which she questions an electoral strategy that prioritizes appealing to Trump voters rather than mobilizing lower-income and/or young non-voters. Read on!
Rewards!
The newsletter's Rewards are a spot where stalwart readers can pause for breath, before the heavy lifting to come. This week's Rewards are from the Weavers, the early '50s folk group whose best-known member war/is Pete Seeger. Groups like the Weavers played an important role in my life, and I suspect in the lives of many, many others, in transmitting via music a sense of the culture and struggles of "the Old Left" to the fledglings of the 'New Left" in the late '50s and early '60s. These numbers are taken from the Weavers' "Reunion Concert" in (I believe) 1981. Here they are with "Get Up and Go" "Irene Goodnight." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Trump's Amoral Saudi Statement Is a Pure Expression of Decades-Old "U.S. Values" and Foreign Policy Orthodoxies
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept [November 23, 2018]
---- Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a statement proclaiming that, notwithstanding the anger toward the Saudi Crown Prince over the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, "the United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region." To justify his decision, Trump cited the fact that "Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world" and claimed that "of the $450 billion [the Saudis plan to spend with U.S. companies], $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors." This statement instantly and predictably produced pompous denunciations pretending that Trump's posture was a deviation from, a grievous violation of, long-standing U.S. values and foreign policy rather than what it actually and obviously is: a perfect example – perhaps stated a little more bluntly and candidly than usual – of how the U.S. has conducted itself in the world since at least the end of World War II. [Read More]
Thieves Like Us: the Violent Theft of Land and Capital is at the Core of the U.S. Experiment
Counterpunch [November 23, 2018]
---- What distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology attached to that violence and its political uses, even to this day. The post–9/11 external and internal U.S. war against Muslims-as-"barbarians" finds its prefiguration in the "savage wars" of the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. And when there were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the practice of "savage wars" remained. In the twentieth century, well before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged invasions and occupations in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Columbia and Southern Africa. In all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in war against savage forces. … Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few historians trace their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The origin of the United States in settler colonialism—as an empire born from the violent acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives—lends the country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA. … The privatization of land is at the core of the U.S. experiment, and its military powerhouse was born to expropriate resources. Apt, then, that we once again have a real estate man for president. [Read More]
Business as Usual: Washington's Regime Change Strategy in Venezuela
---- Despite US rhetoric, this regime change strategy does not take into account whether or not a government is democratically elected or the human rights consequences of such interventions. In fact, virtually all of the Latin American governments that the United States has successfully overthrown over the past 65 years were democratically elected. Among the democratically-elected leaders that have been ousted were Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (2004) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2009). Washington targeted all these leaders with economic sanctions and destabilization campaigns that created the economic chaos and humanitarian crises required to justify a military solution. The common denominator in all those cases had nothing to do with democracy or human rights, it was the fact that those elected governments had the audacity to challenge US interests in the region. The fact that a Latin American government might prioritize the interests of its own people over US needs is unacceptable in Washington. … US regime change policies are being coordinated with the opposition in Venezuela, which mostly consists of the country's wealthy elites who ran the country prior to the election of Hugo Chavez. The socialist policies of former President Chavez and current President Nicolas Maduro have infringed on the privileges enjoyed by these domestic elites and by foreign oil companies. [Read More]
The War for Survival
[FB – Leonard Peltier was convicted for murdering an FBI agent in 1975 during a FBI raid on an Indian reservation. He denies the killing, and there is much evidence in support of his denial. Peltier has been in jail ever since, and is now dying. He has been refused both parole and compassionate release to die at home. There is an international campaign to secure his release. Amnesty International gives a short summary of Peltier's case here.]
---- Well here it is, sorry to say, another year, and I'm still writing to you from a prison cell. I am still in pain from my illnesses with no knowledge of whether I will ever get treatments for them. But I'm alive and still breathing hoping, wishing, praying for not just my pains, but for all Native Nations and the People of the World who care and have positive feelings about what is happening to Mother Earth and against the evils committed by Wasi'chu in their greed for HER natural resources . It doesn't seem as if any changes for the good or safety of Mother Earth will happen soon. But the good-hearted People are fighting back, and some good People are winning in the struggles to beat back some of this evil and to make THE Changes, the safety networks, we need for our grandchildren and great grandchildren so that they will be able to live happy successful lives, at least decent lives, that most of the poor underprivileged in my generation never got to experience or enjoy in our short lives. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
How to Halt Yemen's Slide into Famine
From The International Crisis Group [November 25, 2018]
[FB – This is the Executive Summary of a lengthy report, linked here.]
---- The stop-start battle for control of Yemen's Red Sea coast, currently the most active theater in the country's multifaceted civil war, has reached the outskirts of the city of Hodeida. Unless the fighting is brought to a sustained halt, it could soon enter the port and city, which Houthi rebels have held since 2015. Such expanded fighting would block the country's primary gateway for importation of goods, including humanitarian aid, and thus tip a desperate population into what UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock has called "a great big famine." International stakeholders thus face a stark yet simple choice: prevent a destructive battle for Hodeida or assume complicity, through inaction, in mass starvation. They should not only choose the former but also move quickly to end the siege of Hodeida so that the present emergency does not recur. [Read More]
Planet of War
By Danny Sjursen, Tom Dispatch [November 25, 2018]
---- Our training scenarios were no longer limited to counterinsurgency operations. Now, we were planning for possible deployments to -- and high-intensity conventional warfare in -- the Caucasus, the Baltic Sea region, and the South China Sea (think: Russia and China). We were also planning for conflicts against an Iranian-style "rogue" regime (think: well, Iran). The missions became all about projecting U.S. Army divisions into distant regions to fight major wars to "liberate" territories and bolster allies. One thing soon became clear to me in my new digs: much had changed. The U.S. military had, in fact, gone global in a big way. Frustrated by its inability to close the deal on any of the indecisive counterterror wars of this century, Washington had decided it was time to prepare for "real" war with a host of imagined enemies. … It is often said that, in an Orwellian sense, every nation needs an enemy to unite and discipline its population. Still, the U.S. must stand alone in history as the only country to militarize the whole globe (with space thrown in) in preparation for taking on just about anyone. Now, that's exceptional. [Read More]
(Video) Costs of War: 17 Years After 9/11, Nearly Half a Million People Have Died in Global "War on Terror"
From Democracy Now! [November 21, 2018]
---- Nearly half a million people have died from violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" in the wake of 9/11, according to a major new report from Brown University's Costs of War Project. More than 17 years later, the war in Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history. Costs of War reports that more than 480,000 people have died from violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and civilians. Several times as many people have died indirectly because of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural problems, and war-related disease. The wars have uprooted 21 million Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani and Syrian people who are now refugees of war or internally displaced. The cost of the global so-called war on terror will soon surpass $6 trillion. We speak with Neta Crawford, director of the Costs of War Project. She is a professor and department chair of political science at Boston University. [See the Program] For more on the cost of the "War on Terror," read "America's Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion," by William D. Hartung, The Nation [November 21, 2018] [Link].
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
Climate Change Puts U.S. Economy and Lives at Risk, and Costs Are Rising, Federal Agencies Warn
By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News [November 23, 2018]
---- The U.S. government's climate scientists issued a blunt warning on Friday, writing that global warming is a growing threat to human life, property and ecosystems across the country, and that the economic damage—from worsening heat waves, extreme weather, sea level rise, droughts and wildfires—will spiral in the coming decades. The country can reduce those costs if the U.S. and the rest of the world cut their greenhouse gas emissions, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Capping global greenhouse gas emissions to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6°F) or less would avoid hundreds of billions of dollars of future damages, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, written by a science panel representing 13 federal agencies. The report, like a recent comprehensive assessment issued by the United Nations, signaled the mounting urgency for governments to act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before locking in high risks. And it underscored, without saying so directly, how the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction. [Read More]
Can the Blue Wave Deliver a Green New Deal?
By Christopher D. Cook, The Nation [November 24, 2018]
---- Support for a Green New Deal is building, both on the streets and inside Congress. In the past week, nearly a dozen members of the House—mostly newcomers like Representative Rashida Tlaib, but also a handful of sitting representatives like Ro Khanna, John Lewis, and Jared Huffman—have backed a proposal by Ocasio-Cortez for a select committee for a Green New Deal. This committee would be tasked with drafting a 10-year green jobs and infrastructure plan to radically reduce carbon emissions while expanding living-wage jobs. As detailed on Ocasio-Cortez's website, "The select committee shall have authority to develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan…for the transition of the United States economy to become carbon neutral and to significantly draw down and capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans." … s the Green New Deal hoopla builds, it's important to understand what it actually means. More than a decade in the making, the Green New Deal has many iterations, spanning from technocratic to transformational. It's a giant policy bucket that includes "clean tech" job incentives and credits, energy-system overhaul, massive expansion of renewable energy, green urban public works, agroforestry, and more. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
Why Freedom of Assembly Still Matters
---- For all of the talk nowadays about the decline and fall of democracy, not nearly enough attention has been given to attacks on the right to assemble and protest in streets and public squares. In fact, protests are essential to the democratic experience and can never be replaced by online activism, much less voting. Joining a rally can be risky…. And given the power and widespread use of modern surveillance technology, one also makes oneself identifiable to the government. Yet it is precisely these dangers that make public protest more powerful than, say, anonymous online activism. Being together in physical space can create a sense of collective capacity. Talking and acting in concert with others in a visible, mutually reinforcing way is central to the democratic experience. Thus, in addition to signaling a movement's goals to the wider public, physical gatherings can have a transformative effect on the participants themselves. Lastly, in physical space, action can speak as loudly as words in demonstrating new political and social possibilities. … Freedom of assembly is not reducible to free speech or freedom of association. It is a distinct and powerful form of democratic action. Those concerned about threats to democracy today should pay heed to the threat against physical gatherings. The right of assembly deserves more consideration – and more protection – than it has been getting. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
You Can't Get Conservative White Women To Change Their Minds
By Katha Pollitt, The Nation [November 22, 2018]
---- Why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it's what Jesus wants. …The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in the marginal number of repentant Trump voters you might be able to convert. It's in the nearly 40 percent of eligible voters—many of them younger voters, rural residents, and people of color—who in 2016 did not vote at all. [Read More]
Between a Wall and a Hard Place
By Danica Jorden, Open Democracy [November 24, 2018]
---- Almost 3,000 Hondurans who walked and hitched rides en masse from their homeland through Guatemala and Mexico are now stuck on the Mexican side of the U.S. border in the city of Tijuana, waiting, hoping to have their refugee claims processed and be admitted into the United States. Some have family or friends across the way, others just knew they had to leave. The Central American group, known as the Caravan, started their 4,400 km (2,734 mile) march in San Pedro Sula on October 12, and it is made up of one third minors, with a great number of women with babies and small children, unaccompanied children and teens, LGBTQI youth and adults, and even senior citizens and handicapped individuals. Fleeing the world's most murderous region, they have sought safety in numbers on their journey north. … Who could have imagined that a group of poor people with little more than plastic thongs on their feet and 200 lempiras (8 dollars) in their pockets could have accomplished such a triumph? They have brought international recognition to the plight of their country and their people, organized themselves and are now at the doors of their goal. Upon their arrival in Tijuana, some young caravan members shimmied up the border fence and cried, "¡SÃ se pudo! (Yes, we could!)" [Read More]
---- Almost 3,000 Hondurans who walked and hitched rides en masse from their homeland through Guatemala and Mexico are now stuck on the Mexican side of the U.S. border in the city of Tijuana, waiting, hoping to have their refugee claims processed and be admitted into the United States. Some have family or friends across the way, others just knew they had to leave. The Central American group, known as the Caravan, started their 4,400 km (2,734 mile) march in San Pedro Sula on October 12, and it is made up of one third minors, with a great number of women with babies and small children, unaccompanied children and teens, LGBTQI youth and adults, and even senior citizens and handicapped individuals. Fleeing the world's most murderous region, they have sought safety in numbers on their journey north. … Who could have imagined that a group of poor people with little more than plastic thongs on their feet and 200 lempiras (8 dollars) in their pockets could have accomplished such a triumph? They have brought international recognition to the plight of their country and their people, organized themselves and are now at the doors of their goal. Upon their arrival in Tijuana, some young caravan members shimmied up the border fence and cried, "¡SÃ se pudo! (Yes, we could!)" [Read More]
Hidden Hunger
By Tara Duggan, The San Francisco Chronicle [November 25, 2018]
[FB – One of the people quoted in this article asks: ""How is it that people don't have enough for three meals a day in such a wealthy area?" Couldn't a similar article be written about Westchester?]
---- The Bay Area's hidden hungry are the Hayward delivery driver and homemaker who rely on the food bank to feed their family of five. They are the seniors struggling to get enough to eat in East Palo Alto, just 2 miles from Facebook headquarters and its free employee meals. They are the diabetics showing up in emergency rooms in Oakland with low blood sugar at the end of the month because they ran out of food. They are the undocumented families sharing tiny apartments in the South Bay, cooking beans on camp stoves in their bedrooms. More than 1 of every 10 people in the Bay Area today are hungry. But they are not only the visibly famished, digging through the trash in Union Square for the remains of someone's lunch. They are low-income families that have jobs and housing but have still fallen through the cracks during the Bay Area's spectacular rebound from the recession, as it has become the country's richest and most expensive region. [Read More]
HEALTHCARE/SINGLE-PAYER/MEDICARE FOR ALL
Importance of Aligning House and Senate Single-Payer Bills the Right Way
By Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, Physicians for a National Health Program [November 2018]
---- While both bills would cover all Americans under a single, tax-funded insurance program, they prescribe different provider payment strategies. The Senate version largely adopts Medicare's current payment mechanisms; the House bill's is modeled on Canada's single-payer program, also called "Medicare," which pays hospitals global budgets (much as a fire department is paid in the U.S.) and sharply constrains opportunities for investor-owned care. These differences haven't attracted much attention from politicians or the press, and few patients are aware of, or deeply concerned about them. That's not surprising, since both bills address the lay public's most pressing payment-related concern: they would drastically shrink (S.1804) or completely eliminate (H.R. 676) out-of-pocket payments for needed care. But these divergent payment strategies would create very different financial incentives for providers, shaping the culture of medicine and the financial viability of a single-payer reform. … In sum, the financial viability of a single-payer reform turns on cutting administrative costs and minimizing incentives for financial gaming. Maintaining Medicare's current payment strategies, as under S.1804, would be substantially costlier than adopting the non-profit global-budgeting strategy used in several other nations. [Read More]
Lobbyist Documents Reveal Health Care Industry Battle Plan Against "Medicare for All"
By Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, The Intercept [November 20, 2018]
---- Internal strategy documents obtained by The Intercept and Documented reveal the strategy that private health care interests plan to use to influence Democratic Party messaging and stymie the momentum toward achieving universal health care coverage. At least 48 incoming freshman lawmakers campaigned on enacting "Medicare for All" or similar efforts to expand access to Medicare. And over the last year, 123 incumbent House Democrats co-sponsored "Medicare for All" legislation — double the number who supported the same bill during the previous legislative session. The growing popularity of "Medicare for All" in the House has made progressives optimistic that the Democratic Party will embrace ideas to expand government coverage options with minimal out-of-pocket costs for patients going into the 2020 election. But industry groups have watched the development with growing concern. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Israel has injured 24,000 Gaza protesters
November 25, 2018]
---- Palestinians have paid a great price for their call for life with dignity during mass protests held along Gaza's boundary with Israel over the past eight months. Some 180 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli occupation forces and nearly 6,000 others injured by live fire during the Great March of Return. "The vast majority of casualties were unarmed, and were fatally shot from a distance while in the Gaza Strip itself," according to a new report by the Israeli group B'Tselem, confirming previous findings by other rights organizations. … Altogether, a staggering 24,000 Palestinians have been injured during the Great March of Return protests – more than one percent of the territory's population. [Read More]
Also useful/illuminating about Israel/Palestine – "The two-state chimera is a cover for Israel's one-state reality," by Peter Oborne, Middle East Eye [November 25, 2018] [Link]; and "The Tide is Turning: Israel Is Losing on Two War Fronts," b [Link].
OUR HISTORY
When Max Eastman Was Young
By Alan Wald, Jacobin Magazine [November 2018]
---- When Eastman was put on trial on the grounds that editors of the Masses had published treasonable material that could obstruct the military draft, the thirty-five-year old became legendary as a figure who left an indelible mark on his generation of radicals. In two trials, in April and November 1918, the jury was deadlocked about Eastman and his fellow editors, though a mechanism was found to shut down the Masses by taking away its mailing rights. Simultaneously, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was charged under the same Act in response to his June 1918 antiwar "Canton Speech." At a trial in September of that year, Debs was sentenced to a decade of imprisonment (eventually commuted) and disenfranchised for life. The original Espionage legislation was passed in 1917, upon the US entrance into the war, and was intended to prohibit interference with recruitment to the armed forces and support of enemies during wartime. We now know, as Eastman argued in his Address to the Jury, that the law had little to do with "espionage" and great deal to do with censorship. In fact, no one was convicted of spying or sabotage at the time. The focal point for enforcement of the Act was speech and writing critical of US entry into World War I. [Read More]
(Video) WWI Through Arab Eyes
From Aljazeera English [November 18, 2014]
---- World War One was four years of bitter conflict from 1914 to 1918. Called 'The Great War' and the 'war to end all wars', it is often remembered for its grim and relentless trench warfare - with Europe seen as the main theatre of war. But this was a battle fought on many fronts. There is a story other than the mainstream European narrative. It is not told as often but was of huge importance during the war and of lasting significance afterwards. It is the story of the Arab troops who were forced to fight on both sides but whose contribution is often forgotten. They fought as conscripts for the European colonial powers occupying Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - and for the Ottomans on the side of Germany and the Central Powers. The post-war settlement would also shape the Middle East for the next hundred years. In this three-part series, Tunisian writer and broadcaster Malek Triki explores the events surrounding World War One and its legacy from an Arab perspective. [See the Program]
