Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
February 6, 2019
Hello All – The slow-motion coup in now underway in Venezuela is the outcome of 20 years of effort by the United States to stop the "Bolivarian Revolution" begun with the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998. The immoral and illegal train of events put on the tracks by the Trump Team is a clumsy but logical outcome of the "shadow war" directed at Venezuela by the Bush and Obama administrations in the past. The embrace of this barbarism by our mainstream media is nothing new (see Vietnam, Iraq, etc.), What is new, it seems to me, is the brazenness by which the Trump administration is claiming the Godfather's right to say what goes in Latin America. While there are undoubtedly scads of "covert operations" going on, the main thread of events is clear as day, with little outrage from our political and intellectual elite.
It seems to me that the Trump Team and its chosen puppet Juan Guaidó have gotten off to a poor start. Despite the whirlwind of strong-arm diplomacy to generate the appearance of support for Guaidó, the Venezuelan military failed to defect to the Opposition. And last Saturday, the Opposition rally in Caracas failed to elicit a repressive response from the government, thus not fulfilling its role of providing a sufficient cause for "humanitarian intervention" by the US Marines. The next step appears to be focusing on the delivery of humanitarian supplies to the people of Venezuela, thus presenting the bizarre spectacle of the leader of the international economic embargo against Venezuela demanding the right to invade to country to deliver emergency food and medicine, etc.
In the few weeks since the coup surfaced, a substantial amount of research and analysis has appeared on non-mainstream media sites such as Venezuelanalysis and Democracy Now! As in the past several newsletters, useful articles about the US/Venezuela are linked below; and there is an excellent compendium of news from the past weeks at the website Popular Resistance. I think that the longer the Trump Team dilly-dallies with its military action, the more opposition to an invasion – and support for negotiations and for ending the economic sanctions – will grow in the USA and around the world. All supporters of peace & justice need to speak up; many thousands of lives may be at stake.
News Notes
Last night's State of the Union speech was… well, long. Demcracy Now! had a useful review this morning featuring Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar discussing the "liar-in-chief." And in a tour de force of analytical improv, please welcome Stephen Colbert.
And speaking of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her Honored Guest at the SOTU was Ana Maria Archila, the Queens women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake in his elevator and nearly derailed the Brett-Kavanaugh-for-Supreme-Court charade. Ana Maria was also on Democracy Now! this morning; see it here. And for more from AOC, here's a long/pleasant interview with her speaking about what it's like to be a newcomer in the Belly of the Beast [Link].
Dahr Jamail has written very thoughtful articles on the climate crisis, some of which have been linked in this newsletter. Now, he and Barbara Cecil have begun a series of articles, which I will follow with interest, called "How Then Shall We Live?" Check out the first installment here.
The Eliot Engel Watch
With the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, our congressman, Eliot Engel, becomes one of the most important people in the USA re: foreign policy, war & peace. So the CFOW Newsletter is inaugurating an Engel Watch to keep better track of what EE is up to. On the bright side, Engel has become a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal legislation put forward in the House by AOC and Massachusetts congressman Markey. On the down side, he started off his relationship with newly elected congresswoman Ilhan Omar, just named to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which EE chairs, by telling her "that he would not allow some of her 'particularly hurtful remarks' to be 'swept under the rug." According to the New York Times report, "Democratic critics of Ms. [Rashida] Tlaib and Ms. Omar held out hope that time in Congress could temper their views. 'You hope that when people are elected to Congress, they continue to grow,' Mr. Engel said, 'and I hope that will be the case here.'" And the "mansplainer" didn't stop there; he criticized Rep. Tlaib for having the nerve to try to organize a congressional delegation to the Palestinian territories, wisely counseling: ""Instead of her [Rep. Tlaib] talking about things, she's new here, she ought to listen and learn and open her mind and then come to some conclusions." [Link]. Supporters of Palestinians have been warned(!); and the Engel Watch will follow this mess closely.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Sunday, February 17th – CFOW stalwart Elisa Zazzera will speak about our food system – how our food is produced and brought to us - and what "community supported agriculture" (CSAs) can do to connect us more closely to the source. At the Hastings library (Maple Ave. and Spring St.), at 2 p.m.
Sunday, March 3rd – Please join us for the next monthly meeting of CFOW. At these meetings we review events of the past month and make action-plans for the month to come. We meet at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 p.m. 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 (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. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your 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 and the set of readings on Venezuela, I encourage you to check out Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel's remarks on the dangers inherent in ending the INF Missile Treaty; two articles on the end (?) of the war in Afghanistan; a useful interview with economist Robert Pollin on how a Green New Deal might work; and ("Our History") the fascinating/frightening story of "Judeo-Bolshevism," a distorted concept that influenced much of the past century, and may be morphing into Islamophobia today. Read on!
Rewards!
The newsletter's rewards give stalwart readers an oasis of calm, before plunging into the past week's dreadful stories. First up, and of course very topical, is a beautiful version of Ry Cooder's "Across the Border Line." And while we're in the neighborhood, let's listen to Cooder's "Paris, Texas," from Wim Wenders' great film of the same name. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
An Interview with Noam Chomsky: Ocasio-Cortez and Other Newcomers Are Rousing the Multitudes
By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [January 30, 2019]
---- A quick glance around the world today reveals that politics almost everywhere — from the federal government shutdown in the US to the power struggle in Venezuela and from Macron's crisis in France and UK's Brexit nightmare to the Israeli-Iranian rivalry – are engulfed in a state of uncertainty and turmoil. Meanwhile, oligarchy is replacing democracy as the widening social and economic gap between rich and poor continues unabated. So, who rules the world now? The US is in a state of relative decline, but neither Russia nor China has the capacity to control global developments. How do the super-rich and corporations factor into this equation? In this exclusive interview, world-renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky provides penetrating insights into some of the most critical developments going on in the world today. [Read More]
Waiting with Immigrants
By Molly Crabapple, New York Review of Books [January 29, 2019]
---- To be an immigrant in America is to wait. This goes double for the millions of immigrants who have found themselves at the sour end of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaucracy—and triple in the age of Trump. If you are an immigrant in the process of deportation proceedings, you must wait for your Master Calendar, on which a bureaucrat will assign you to a check-in date several months into the future. At this check-in, you may win several more months of anxious waiting—or disappear into a detention center, where you will wait for a one-way plane ride to a country you may no longer know. And if, for instance, your paperwork is straight but, twenty years ago, you jumped a turnstile or got into a barfight, then ICE has a mandate to hunt you down. Once snatched, you, too, will wait in a detention center, losing your job, your apartment, and possibly your health, while the months pass until a judge grants you a bond hearing. Then, you will appear in court—in chains or via video link—and learn how many thousands of dollars your family must pay for you to have the privilege of waiting outside a cage. While you wait, though, New Sanctuary has made the commitment to wait with you. Founded in 2007, the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City is "an interfaith network of congregations, organizations, and individuals" that "stands publicly in solidarity with families and communities resisting detention and deportation. … I began to volunteer occasionally with New Sanctuary shortly after Trump's election. [Read More]
Smoked Out
By McKenzie Funk, London Review of Books [February 7, 2019]
[FB – The author reviews/tries to review four interesting books on climate change while a refugee from his home in Oregon, smoked out by wildfires.]
---- When I finally turned to Todd Miller's Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, the mid-term elections were approaching and Trump had dispatched US troops to the Mexican border to repel a caravan of hungry asylum-seekers from Central America. In the news, there had been little attempt to explain why farmers from Guatemala and Honduras – two 'dry corridor' countries wracked by consecutive years of drought – were trekking to the United States. Miller's book was a welcome antidote. 'Just like super-typhoons, rising seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of climate change,' he writes. 'Just as tidal floods will inundate the streets of Miami and the Arctic ice sheets will melt, if nothing changes we will find ourselves living in an increasingly militarised world of surveillance, razor wire, border walls, armed patrols, detention centres and relocation camps.' One important revelation in Miller's book is that climate change science is wholly uncontroversial inside the military and security establishment, even high up in the Trump administration. [Read More]
THE US WAR ON VENEZUELA
The US Is Orchestrating a Coup in Venezuela
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [February 2, 2019]
---- As Venezuela's second president, Simon Bolivar, noted in the 19th century, the US government continues to "plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty." From engineering coups in Chile and Guatemala, to choreographing a troop landing at the Bay of Pigs intended to establish an exile government in Cuba, to training Latin American strongmen at the School of the Americas in torture techniques to control their people, the United States has meddled, interfered, intervened and undermined the democracies it claims to protect. Now, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and the infamous Elliott Abrams are working with opposition groups in Venezuela to carry out a coup d'état. [Read More]
Venezuela: The U.S.'s 68th Regime Change Disaster
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, Common Dreams [February 4, 2019]
---- In his masterpiece, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, William Blum, who died in December 2018, wrote chapter-length accounts of 55 U.S. regime change operations against countries around the world, from China (1945-1960s) to Haiti (1986-1994). Noam Chomsky's blurb on the back of the latest edition says simply, "Far and away the best book on the topic." We agree. … Since Killing Hope was published in 1995, the U.S. has conducted at least 13 more regime change operations, several of which are still active: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; the 3rd U.S. invasion of Haiti since WWII; Somalia; Honduras; Libya; Syria; Ukraine; Yemen; Iran; Nicaragua; and now Venezuela. … It's no coincidence that two of the main targets of current U.S. regime change operations are Iran and Venezuela, two of the four countries with the largest liquid oil reserves in the world (the others being Saudi Arabia and Iraq). [Read More]
The U.S. Helped Push Venezuela Into Chaos — and Trump's Regime Change Policy Will Make Sure It Stays That Way
By Mark Weisbrot, The Intercept [
---- Washington has been trying to topple Venezuela's government for at least 17 years, but the Trump administration has taken a more openly aggressive tack than its predecessors. Last week, administration officials kicked their efforts into high gear by anointing their chosen successor to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros in advance of any coup d'etat. The 35-year-old Venezuelan member of Congress Juan Guaidó announced that he was now president, and the Trump administration, along with allied governments, immediately recognized him — in accordance with a previously arranged plan. It is clear that President Donald Trump's goal is regime change; his administration is not even trying to hide it. And his allies, like Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have long made it obvious what they are after. It would be a terrible mistake to keep going down this road. [Link]. Economist Mark Weisbrot also appeared recently on The Real News Network; watch "New Oil Sanctions on Venezuela: "Would Destroy What's Left of its Economy" [January 30, 2019] [Link].
The New Cold War and Venezuela
By Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ZNet [February 6, 2019]
---- The current situation in Venezuela is a tragedy in the making, and it will very likely cause the death of many innocent people. Venezuela is on the verge of foreign military intervention, and the ensuing bloodbath may take on dramatic proportions. This much has been stated by Henrique Capriles, the best-known leader of the opposition to Nicolas Maduro, when he said that puppet-president Juan Guaidó is turning Venezuelans into "fodder for cannon". …He further knows that despite the tremendous suffering brought upon the country by the toxic mixture of domestic political mistakes and external pressure – notably by way of an embargo that the United Nations view as reprehensible from the humanitarian point of view –, the people of Venezuela remain imbued with a deep sense of nationalist pride that fervently rejects all foreign intervention. [Read More]
Also informative/useful on US & Venezuela – "Recognising Juan Guaidó risks a bloody civil war in Venezuela," by Temir Porras Ponceleon, The Guardian [UK] [February 5, 2019] [Link]; "Elliott Abrams, Trump's Pick to Bring "Democracy" to Venezuela, Has Spent His Life Crushing Democracy," by Jon Schwartz, The Intercept [January 30, 2019] [Link]; "No Coup! No War! Hands off Venezuela!," by Eduardo Correa Senior and James Patrick Jordan, Venezuelanalysis.com [January 31, 2019] [Link]; "86% Of Venezuelans Oppose Military Intervention, 81% Are Against U.S. Sanctions, Local Polling Shows," by Ben Norton, Information Clearinghouse. [January 29, 2019] [Link]; and "Veterans Call to Resist U.S. Coup in Venezuela," from Veterans for Peace [Link].
WAR & PEACE
Trump is igniting a perilous new nuclear arms race
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation [February 5, 2019]
---- President Trump is about to launch a new nuclear arms race. On Friday the administration announced that the United States will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between Russia and the United States. Trump boasted last fall that "we have more money than anybody else by far. We'll build it up until [China and Russia] come to their senses." Trump's announcement triggers the six-month period the treaty requires before full withdrawal. If no agreement is reached with Russia, the wraps will be off. The New START treaty, which limits strategic weapons but expires in 2021, will be a likely casualty. Russia, China and the United States will invent more weapons and deploy them in more places, with faster speeds on hair-trigger alerts. Human error, accident or mishap can already touch off a global nuclear catastrophe. If Trump has his way, the chances of that will rise greatly. [Read More] And for some useful background on how this INF Treaty came about in the 1980s, read "Goodbye, INF Treaty. Hello, New Arms Race?" by Robert E. Hunter, LobeLog [February 5, 2019] [Link]. Last October, as the Trump team was getting ready to scrap the INF Treaty, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a useful collection of articles analyzing what this would mean and why it was happening [Link].
Intel Chiefs Use 'Global Threat' Report To Uphold US War Machine
---- The corporate media's reporting on the testimonies of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and the directors of CIA, NSA and FBI on their annual assessment of "worldwide threats" emphasized the fact that they contradicted President Donald Trump's views on Iran, North Korea and Russia. Trump foolishly criticized the intelligence chiefs as "naïve" for refusing to support his unfounded accusation that Iran is systematically cheating on the nuclear deal. His remarks buttressed the media narrative of a struggle between an objective intelligence apparatus and a patently dishonest president who may even have colluded with Russia. But the media's emphasis on this narrative has obscured a more important story: The intelligence chiefs used the annual presentation of their "global threat assessment" to protect key policies and programs that provide their massive organizations with enormous power and budgetary resources. … It is all part of the elaborate process of perpetuating dangerous falsehoods that support unnecessary military confrontations with the Pentagon's chosen adversaries. [Read More]
The Long Goodbye of Antiwar Protest
---- It's been a case of the long goodbye for what's left of the peace movement in the U.S. On Saturday (January 26, 2019), a small group, very small by historic peace actions go, protested in front of the White House. Watching the protest and interviews with protest participants on The Real News Network was almost painful. Medea Benjamin's insightful observations, and a few other people's, about the ongoing coup against Venezuela were just about the only sane and adult comments in the "room." Across the globe, the vast majority of governments lined up behind the U.S. administration in its attacks against the people of Venezuela and Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro. The fallen zeitgeist of peace was as clear as it was after September 11, 2001. … A comment on The Real News Network piece observed that the disarray in the peace movement reached its apex during the Obama administration when people were sucked in by the empty rhetoric of hope and change and promptly left the streets and ignored Obama's expansion of the war in Afghanistan. [Read More]
The War in Yemen
Yemen's humanitarian catastrophe, in one chart
By Alex Ward, Vox.com [January 30, 2019]
---- The war in Yemen — a bloody, ongoing conflict in which the US has played an important role — has fallen out of the news. But a new US intelligence report shows exactly why it shouldn't. The annual Worldwide Threat Assessment report — which "reflects the collective insights of the Intelligence Community" including the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI, and many other federal bodies — contains a chart showing just how horrifying conditions for the Yemeni people have become. Of the nearly 29 million people in the country, about 22 million — nearly 76 percent of the population — need some form of humanitarian assistance. Among them, 16 million don't have reliable access to drinking water or food, and more than 1 million Yemenis now suffer from cholera. Those figures, which apparently come from US intelligence and mostly comport with publicly available numbers, show how the war has caused one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. And it's a crisis that the United States has helped fuel. [Read More]. Also useful/depressing is "UN: Saudi-Led War on Yemen has Killed 6,700 Children, Left 358,000 Severely Malnourished," from Middle East Monitor [January 2019] [Link].
The War in Afghanistan
It's Time to Let Go of America's 18-year Afghan War
By February 5, 2019]
---- The US can't make Afghanistan a coherent functional state with rule of law, gender equality, and respect for human rights, no matter how many troops or additional dollars we throw at this challenge. It is sad and tragic that we promised more in Afghanistan than we could deliver—and that in the eyes of the Afghan people, women in particular, the US has abandoned them. But that's no reason to stay in a never-ending war. What we could not accomplish with over 100,000 US forces — the maximum number deployed in 2010 — we certainly cannot with the 14,000 now in the country. It's neither pretty, satisfying nor politically convenient to admit. But it's time to let go of America's 18-year Afghan war. [Read More] And very interesting is this article about the gold rush to come: "Peace in Afghanistan? Maybe—but a Minerals Rush Is Already Underway," by Antony Loewenstein, The Nation [February 2, 2019] [Link].
By Kathy Kelly, The Progressive. [January 29, 2019]
---- On January 27, the Taliban and the U.S. government each publicly stated acceptance, in principle, of a draft framework for ongoing negotiations that could culminate in a peace deal to end a two-decade war in Afghanistan. As we learn more about the negotiations, it's important to remember others working toward dialogue and negotiation in Afghanistan. Troublingly, women's rights leaders have not, thus far, been invited to the negotiating table. But several have braved potential persecution to assert the importance of including women in any framework aiming to create peace and respect human rights. [Read More].
War with Iran?
Could Trump Really Launch a War With Iran?
By
---- According to "On Thin Ice," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the Trump administration has concluded that its "maximum pressure" campaign of sanctions has largely failed to meet any of the White House's "goals" of forcing Iran to re-negotiate the 2015 nuclear agreement or alter its policies in the Middle East. While the sanctions have damaged Iran's economy, the Iranians have proved to be far more nimble in dodging them than Washington allowed for. And because the sanctions were unilaterally imposed, there are countries willing to look for ways to avoid them. … While the Trump administration is preparing to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the European Union (EU) is lobbying Iran to stay in the pact. Russia, China, Turkey and India have also made it clear that they will not abide by the U.S. trade sanctions, and the EU is setting up a plan to avoid using dollars. … The U.S. will try to get Iran to withdraw from the nuclear pact by aggressively tightening the sanctions. If Tehran takes the bait, Washington will claim the legal right to attack Iran. Bolton and the people around him engineered the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq (the Obama administration gets the blame for Libya and Yemen), and knocking out Iran has been their longtime goal. If they pull it off, the U.S. will ignite yet another forever war. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
"A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice": the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
An interview with author Shoshana Zuboff, by Sam Biddle, The Intercept [February 2, 2019]
---- Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Karl Marx's "Capital." Zuboff's book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it's an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It's hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff's, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who've made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way. An unavoidable takeaway of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. [Read More]
When 'Former' Spies Run Wild, Bad Things Happen
From Moon of Alabama [January 2019]
---- A number of related stories describe nefarious activities by 'former' NSA, 'former' CIA, 'former' military officers who joined private businesses which harm other people. They demonstrate that there is a structural problem when those trained to be weapons are allowed to run in the wild. Reuters just published a two part story about 'former' NSA staff, more than twenty in total, who since 2013 built a snooping center for the United Arab Emirates. The second Reuters story published today describes the technical side of the UAE's cyber-spy shop: UAE used cyber super-weapon to spy on iPhones of foes. The ex-Raven operatives described Karma as a tool that could remotely grant access to iPhones simply by uploading phone numbers or email accounts into an automated targeting system. Reuters does not say so, but from the description of the spy tools it seems clear that the Karma tool was bought from the notorious Israeli spy shop NSO Group. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The Path of Greatest Resistance
By David Cole, New York Review of Books [February 7, 2019]
[FB – This is a review of two new books: Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, by Zeynep Tufekci; and How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't, by Leslie R. Crutchfield.]
---- When a president manages to get elected despite obtaining nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent and then embarks on a series of controversial initiatives that please his extremist base but generally keep his approval ratings below 40 percent, the democratic process should respond accordingly. To a degree, it has. People have used the two most important tools of democracy—their voice and their vote—to register their disapproval. Will this response translate into meaningful long-term political and social change? The midterms provided an important early indicator that this is possible. If the threat posed by Trump inspires an alignment of progressive citizens and groups, we may see real long-lasting reforms. If the resistance to Trump fades, splinters, or self-destructs, however, the nation's future could be determined by his resilient base, even though it represents only a minority of the electorate. [Read More]
Here's What a Green New Deal Looks Like in Practice
An interview with Robert Pollin, by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [February 5, 2019]
---- With the climate change challenge growing more acute with every passing year, the need for the adoption of a new political economy that would tackle effectively both the environmental and the egalitarian concerns of progressive people worldwide grows exponentially. Yet, there is still a lot of disagreement on the left as to the nature of the corresponding political economy model. In the interview below, Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explains some issues raised by these positions, and how to move toward solutions grounded in a fuller understanding of economic development. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Israeli General Mounts Challenge to Netanyahu by Flaunting Gaza Carnage
January 29, 2019]
---- With April's elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister. Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some 31 per cent of the Israeli public prefers Gantz to head the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months away from becoming the longest-serving leader in Israel's history. Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to change direction after a series of governments under Netanyahu's leadership have over the past decade shifted Israel ever further to the right. … Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Israeli Siege of Gaza producing "Grotesque" Medical Crisis: European Doctors
February 3, 2019]
---- A group of eminent medical and health professionals has drawn attention to the devastating situation in the hospitals across the Gaza Strip. In a letter to the British Medical Journal, Derek A Summerfield et al referred to the fact that last August they published a rapid response to publicize "the cumulatively devastating effects upon Gaza's health system of 12 years of Israeli blockade and the strategy of de-development and impoverishment of Gazan society." Israeli restrictions, they pointed out at the time, have produced chronic shortages of almost all essential medicines and hospital equipment, of fuel to run hospital generators, the cancellation of all elective surgery (affecting more than 6000 people), hospital closures, and many doctors and staff on reduced or no pay. "Since last March," they have now pointed out, "Israeli snipers have been firing military grade ammunition and maiming bullets at the border at unarmed demonstrators, killing 257 to date." Indeed, this week BBC Radio 4 quoted the UN confirming that more than 23,000 Palestinians have been wounded. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism
By Christopher R. Browning, New York Review of Books [February 21, 2019 issue]
[FB – This is a review of A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, by Paul Hanebrink.]
---- One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink's A Specter Haunting Europe is its demonstration of how Europe's most pervasive and powerful twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink's approach is not to repeat what he considers an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the basis of historical facts and statistical data. … Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the "cultural logic" of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of "Asiatic barbarism," an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single "specter haunting Europe." [Read More]
