CFOW Newsletter - The UN says the Earth is "boiling" - What to do?

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

July 30, 2023

Hello All – So July has been the hottest month in human history. There is no doubt that in a few years a new record will be set. If we really cared about this – if we felt we had an obligation for the well-being and "pursuit of happiness" of future generations – what would we do?

The effects of global cooking  are very visible and thus well known: the fires in Canada and Greece, draught and climate refugees in the Middle East and Africa, etc.  But in the USA, our mainstream media is still reluctant to connect "the weather" with "climate change," and still more reluctant to connect the climate crisis with the burning of fossil fuels.  President Biden refuses to recognize a "climate emergency," and has approved several drilling and infrastructure projects that can only be regarded – under the circumstances – as insane.

New to me this month was the news about the incredible warming of the oceans. Swimming off the coast of Florida is now similar to jumping into a hot tub. According to a report in The Washington Post, "The North Atlantic has baked in record daily warmth every day since early March. With the average sea surface temperature in this region now approaching 77 degrees Fahrenheit, as hot as it's ever been and more than 2.5 degrees above average, the North Atlantic has warmed almost beyond the most extreme predictions of climate models."

Clearly an existential danger to humans rests in the "private property" protections extended to the fossil fuel companies, and to the political power that their billions in profits gives them.  When will one or more nations simply nationalize these industries and, for starters, cancel all fuel exploration projects?  Should we think of "martial law" and taking over the management of fossil fuel giants as something that is taboo, something that is simply not done by responsible governments?  Sham "climate summits" are not working.  Can't we think of anything more effective to save ourselves?

 Some useful reading about Global Boiling

(Video) As the U.N. Warns "The Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived," Biden Resists Declaring a Climate Emergency
From Democracy Now! [July 28, 2023]
---- July is on pace to be the hottest month ever recorded, and the impact of the soaring temperatures is being felt across the globe in massive heat waves, wildfires, flooding and more. On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the world has entered the "era of global boiling," and President Joe Biden gave a major speech to unveil new measures to combat the crisis but resisted calls to declare a climate emergency.[Guests are climate journalists David Wallace-Wells and Dharna Noor.] [See the Program].

Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests
By Damian Carrington, The Guardian [July 25, 2023]
---- The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate he new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050, if global carbon emissions are not reduced. …A collapse of Amoc would have disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and west Africa. It would increase storms and drop temperatures in Europe, and lead to a rising sea level on the eastern coast of North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets. [Read More]  Also of interest is "Scientists detect sign that a crucial ocean current is near collapse," by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post [July 25, 2023] [Link].

An important action re: dumping radioactive water at Indian Point
The dumping is scheduled for August. There will be an important rally tomorrow, Monday, at 4 pm at the Cortlandt town hall.  Here's a short video that explains the issues and why the rally is important.

CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.)  A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page.  Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!

Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers remember the Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor, who died this week at the age of 56.  As a musician, she is especially remembered for her 1990 hit "Nothing Compares 2 U" (and much more); but instead of a "star," she preferred to be a rebel and a fighter for justice, and so this is how we remember her today.  A transforming moment was her appearance in 1992 on "Saturday Night Live," where she sang the Bob Marley hit "War," and finished by tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul 2 in protest against the Catholic (esp. Irish) Church's sexual abuse of children. Since her death, the many memories/articles about her are stunning in their revelations of a person with wide-ranging concerns and angers.  Ones I liked include "Making the radical case for Sinéad O'Connor: She was right all along," by Meredith Blake [Link]; "The Other Sinead O'Connor, Pro-Palestinian Critic of Violent Israeli Extremist Ben-Gvir, and Muslim Convert," by Juan Cole, [Link]; and "I Will Rise and I Will Return: The Lucidity of Sinéad O'Connor," by Lee Hall [Link]. And of course, there's her music.  Enjoy!

Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW

CFOW Weekly Reader

The War in Ukraine
The long-awaited Ukrainian "counteroffensive" against the Russian invaders officially began this week.  On Monday The Wall St. Journal observed that "Ukraine's Stalled Offensive Puts Biden in Uneasy Political Position." But on Wednesday, according to The New York Times: "The main thrust of Ukraine's nearly two-month-old counteroffensive is now underway in the country's southeast, two Pentagon officials said on Wednesday, with thousands of reinforcements pouring into the grinding battle, many of them trained and equipped by the West and, until now, held in reserve." In effect, Ukraine's military is on probation, with military planners in the USA and NATO countries assessing whether the war remains a good investment, considering the risks and costs.

The cost of the war took a dramatic turn this week as Russia ended its participation in the deal brokered by the UN and Turkey that allowed Ukraine to export food from its ports on the Black Sea.  Thousands of tons of grain were destroyed this week in attacks on Odessa ("enough to feed more than 270,000 people for a year, according to the U.N. World Food Program") and Kherson ("In two or three months, we may not have a single port left," said a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian southern command); and a secondary port on the Danube River, bordering Romania, was also hit. How will the USA/NATO respond to a Black Sea blockade of Ukraine?  Lots can go wrong.

Finally, significant escalations of the war took place last week, as Ukraine hit Moscow with several drones, Belarus (now with tactical nuclear weapons from Russia) moved a "training exercise" to the Polish border, and the Biden administration announced that it was sending a $400 million military package to Ukraine, bringing the total military shipments since the start of the war (February 2022) to $43 billion, drawing from a congressionally authorized fund of $113 billion.

Some useful reading about the war in Ukraine

Why Ukraine's counter-offensive is failing

By Daniel L. Davis, Responsible Statecraft [July 19, 2023]

---- Combat reality, however, has now swept away those optimistic claims and exposed the harsh truth: Ukraine is unlikely to militarily evict Russia out of its territory, no matter how many men they feed into battle. As unpalatable as it is for all supporters of Ukraine, the most prudent course for Zelensky may now be to seek a negotiated settlement that preserves as much freedom and territory as possible for Kyiv. Ending the war now would end the deaths and injuries for tens of thousands of Ukraine's brave and heroic fighters — men and women whom Kyiv will need to rebuild their country once the war ends. [Read More]

The Global Crisis at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Site Demands Immediate United Nations Intervention
By Harvey Wasserman, et al., Counterpunch [July 28, 2023]
---- The global crisis at six Ukrainian atomic reactors and fuel pools has escalated to an apocalyptic threat that demands immediate action. Protecting our lives on this planet now demands immediate deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force to operate and protect this plant. … The six reactors and six fuel pools at Zaporizhzhia are burdened with far more potentially apocalyptic radiation than was released at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl or Fukushima.  [Read More]

Solidarity needed for Russian anti-war socialist Boris Kagarlitsky
By Federico Fuentes, Greenleft [July 27, 2023]
---- Internationally renowned Marxist sociologist and anti-war socialist Boris Kagarlitsky is currently being held in a Russian pre-trial detention centre and faces the possibility of up to 7 years' jail if found guilty of the trumped-up charge of "justifying terrorism". Kagarlitsky's arrest is a politically-motivated attack against one of the most vocal critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is also part of a broader campaign to clamp down on anti-war dissidents in Russia. [Read More]

Featured Essays

(Video) Demand U.S. End Korean War After 70 Years as Biden Admin Ramps Up "Nuclear Blackmail"
From Democracy Now! [July 26, 2023]
---- North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea Monday, hours after a second American nuclear-armed submarine arrived in South Korea. Meanwhile, peace activists are gathering in Washington, D.C., for a national mobilization to call on President Biden and Congress to officially end the Korean War, 70 years after the signing of the July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice that ended active military conflict. To discuss the renewed call for peace and the history of "the dirtiest war of the 20th century," we're joined by two guests: Bruce Cumings, professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of several books on Korea, and Christine Ahn of the organization Women Cross DMZ and the coordinator of the campaign Korea Peace Now! Ahn calls for the U.S. government to "atone" for its role in the war by replacing the ceasefire with a peace agreement, not feeding into the peninsula's nuclear hostilities. [See the Program]

What's Happening in Italy Is Scary, and It's Spreading

By David Broder, New York Times [July 27, 2023]

---- Ahead of Italy's election last fall, Giorgia Meloni was widely depicted as a menace. By this summer, everything — her youthful admiration for Benito Mussolini, her party's links to neofascists, her often extreme rhetoric — had been forgiven. … But the comforting tale of a populist firebrand turned pragmatist overlooks something important: what's been happening in Italy. Ms. Meloni's administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents. … For Italy, this is bad enough. But much of its significance lies beyond its borders, showing how the far right can break down historic barriers with the center right. Allies of Ms. Meloni are already in power in Poland, also newly legitimized by their support for Ukraine. In Sweden, a center-right coalition relies on the nativist Sweden Democrats' support to govern. In Finland, the anti-immigrant Finns Party went one better and joined the government. Though these parties, like many of their European counterparts, once rejected membership in NATO and the European Union, today they seek a place in the main Euro-Atlantic institutions, transforming them from within. In this project, Ms. Meloni is leading the way. [Read More]

More about the film, "Oppenheimer"
(Video) U.S. Developed First-Strike Weapon and Used Japan to Prove it
A discussion with Paul Jay and Peter Kuznick, The Analysis [July 27, 2023]
---- The biggest shortcoming is this failure to accurately assess what scientists knew and what others knew before the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. There was quite a bit of controversy, and that does not come across. … The final word is always given to Oppenheimer or military people who say that if we don't drop the bomb, we're going to have to invade, and America is going to lose about a half million boys in an invasion. That is the fundamental myth of the atomic bombing. The idea that the only way to avoid an American invasion of Japan and fighting against these fanatical Japanese who were preparing to resist and would have cost a half million to a million to several million American and Japanese lives, that the only way to do that was to drop the bomb. What we know in reality is there were two other major factors that could have ended the war. [See the Program]

They faced the first atomic blast's fallout. 'Oppenheimer' ignores them.
By Karin Brulliard and Samuel Gilbert, Washington Post [July 29, 2023]
---- The atomic bomb dropped on [Hiroshima] had been developed and tested in Tularosa's own backyard — that pre-dawn blast jolting communities across southern New Mexico, shooting a mushroom cloud 10 miles into the sky, then raining radioactive ash on thousands of unsuspecting residents. What happened here in the aftermath, surviving "downwinders" and their relatives say, is a legacy of serious health consequences that have gone unacknowledged for 78 years. Their struggles continue to be pushed aside; the new blockbuster film "Oppenheimer," which spotlights the scientist most credited for the bomb, ignores completely the people who lived in the shadow of his test site. [Read More]

War & Peace
(Video) 'War Made Invisible' With Norman Solomon
From the Katie Halper Show [July 25, 2023] – 60 minutes
---- Norman Solomon talks about how America hides the human toll of its military machine. Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. [See the Program]

Soldiers Mutiny in U.S.-Allied Niger
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [July 26, 2023]
[FB – We remember a similar pattern during the civil wars/state terror in Central America during the 1980s, where the most blood-thirsty attacks on civilians or dissenters were by battalions trained by the USA at Ft. Bragg, etc.]
---- Soldiers from Niger's presidential guard blockaded the office of President Mohamed Bazoum on Wednesday, according to published reports. The West African regional and economic bloc ECOWAS has termed it an "attempted coup." The mutiny is the latest in a long line of military uprisings in West Africa, many of them led by U.S.-trained officers. It was not immediately clear [FB – but now is] if any of the Nigerien troops involved were trained or mentored by the United States, but the U.S. has trained members of Niger's presidential guard in recent years, according to Pentagon and State Department documents. U.S.-trained officers have been involved in at least six coups in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali since 2012. In total, America's mentees have conducted at least 10 coups in West Africa since 2008, including in Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, 2022); Gambia (2014); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, 2021); and Mauritania (2008). [Read More]

The State of the Union
The Teamsters' Proposed Agreement With UPS Is a Great Victory by and for the Workers
By Jane McAlevey, The Nation [July 27, 2023]
---- Six days before their national contract with the United Parcel Services was set to expire—the moment US labor law officially removes complex pro-employer barriers banning workers from waging a strike—the Teamsters announced that they had reached a Tentative Agreement (TA) in their national negotiations with UPS. Teamster members will have from August 3 to August 22 to read, celebrate, debate—and ultimately vote to ratify or reject the proposed TA. … For now, I want to celebrate the real wins we know about and focus our collective attention on some vexing questions about how workers can—and must—win when key windows of opportunity and leverage open up in this increasingly nightmarish political, ecological, and economic terrain for working people. How can we move from clawing back losses—and there have been plenty—into actually changing the terms of the game in workers' favor? [Read More]  The Teamsters for a Democratic Union have played an important role in making the union more democratic and effective; read about their work here.

Housing Is a Human Right — Governments Need to Recognize It
By Farrah Hassen, Otherwords [July 20, 2023]
---- In the wealthiest country on the planet, too many people still lack access to housing. The pandemic revealed the full extent of the U.S. housing crisis. Where were the roughly 580,000 people living unhoused in 2020 to go under "stay at home" orders? And what about those facing eviction? At the same time, the pandemic proved that federal intervention could ease the crisis. Eviction moratoria and unemployment relief helped keep more people housed, fed, and secure. But these initiatives ended too quickly. Lifting federal pandemic eviction protections in 2021 put as many as 17 million people at risk of becoming unhoused.  [Read More].  Also of interest is "Other Countries Know Housing Is a Human Right. Why Doesn't America?" by Sasha Abramsky, The Nation [July 28, 2023] [Link]

Israel/Palestine
(Video) Israel's Fight over Judicial Changes Ignores Occupation & Apartheid
From Democracy Now! [July 25, 2023]
---- We speak with two Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv after lawmakers in Israel passed a highly contested bill Monday weakening the power of the Supreme Court by preventing it from blocking government decisions it deems unreasonable. The bill is part of a broader set of judicial reforms pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has sparked months of unprecedented protests, which continued last night. …It's time for the U.S. to show Israel there are consequences for apartheid and anti-democratic legislation, says Gideon Levy, columnist for Haaretz. "What kind of democracy can exist in an apartheid state?" he asks. [See the Program]

Israel's One-State Reality: It's Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution
By Michael Barnett, et al., Foreign Affairs [April 14, 2023]
[FB – This article is of interest in part because it is published in the flagship journal of the US foreign-policy Establishment.  The ideas, familiar to most readers of this newsletter, have now reached the level of "mainstream," though still rejected by the Biden administration and most of the US political elite.]
---- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's return to power in Israel with a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state solution. Members of his new government have not been shy about stating their views on what Israel is and what it should be in all the territories it controls: a Greater Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians who remain there. As a result, it is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality. [Read More]

CFOW Newsletter - Dangerous escalation in the Ukraine war

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

July 23, 2023

Hello All – After more than a year of fighting, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending. Someday – but when? – there will be a ceasefire and negotiations. But until that time, the killing will continue and the whole world will be in danger.  

According to the Washington Post, the United States is pressuring Ukraine to be more aggressive, to launch the long-awaited counter-offensive that will include a dozen new, US-trained battalions and use some of the advanced equipment (tanks, artillery, etc.) sent to Ukraine in recent months. But this counter-offensive has stalled, and Ukraine has gained little ground this year.  There are rumblings that Ukraine is "on probation," and that the funders and military suppliers of their army and government may be running out of patience.

It seems to me that the war is escalating on several fronts, and could spin out of control.  Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus, and the Wagner battalion, sent into exile in Belarus, is now training their host army on the border with Poland, which has brought its own troops up to the border on its side.  Russia has refused to continue the agreement with Ukraine allowing food exports, threatening to destroy ships and bombing the port of Odessa.  Ukraine has increased (I believe) the intensity of attacks on Russian-held Crimea.  And the United States has authorized an escalation of weaponry provided to Ukraine, with its cluster bombs already deployed on the battlefield and the promise of sending F-16 jet fighters now moved to the front burner.

One danger is that the war will expand to other countries.  Perhaps the United States and Russia will fight each other directly, risking a nuclear war that will kill everybody.  Certainly thousands of people in Africa and elsewhere will starve, as this week's breakdown of food exports from Ukraine shows.  And, tragically, the countries involved in the war will have little time to address the climate crisis, whose destructive impact on all of us is already happening.

The question for Americans is, What can our country do to move away from war and towards peace?  And for ordinary citizens the question is, How can we persuade our government to want to do this? One thing the USA could do to move away from war and towards peace negotiations would be to refuse to send new weapons to Ukraine that would escalate the war: cluster bombs, advanced artillery systems, jet fighters, and the like.  There is some support in Congress for moving towards peace; perhaps we can help it grow.

Some Reading on the War in Ukraine

Weary Soldiers, Unreliable Munitions: Ukraine's Many Challenges

By Thomas Gibbons-Nerr, et al., New York Times [July 23, 2023]

---- This New York Times analysis of the war is based on a dozen visits to the front line and interviews in June and July with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, where many of the battles are being fought. Those visits showed the Ukrainian military facing a litany of new and enduring challenges that have contributed to its slow progress. Ukraine has done well to adapt a defensive war — wiring Starlink satellite internet, public software and off-the-shelf drones to keep constant tabs on Russian forces from command points. But offensive operations are different: Ukraine has made marginal progress in its ability to coordinate directly between its troops closest to Russian forces on the so-called zero line and those assaulting forward. Ukrainian infantry are focusing more and more on trench assaults, but after suffering tens of thousands of casualties since the war's start, these ranks are often filled with lesser-trained and older troops. And when Russian forces are driven from a position, they have become more adept at targeting that position with their artillery, ensuring Ukrainian troops cannot stay there long. ;Read More]

The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War [Food and Famine]

By Alex de Waal, New York Review of Books [September 11, 2022]

---- The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are "severely food insecure." Forty million are in "emergency" conditions, one step short of the UN's technical definition of "famine." By early this year the combined effects of the climate crisis, the economic fallout from Covid-19, armed conflict, and the rising costs of fuel and food had already caused a sharp increase in the number of people in need of relief. Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly shut down wheat exports from the world's breadbasket. For five months, Russian warships blockaded Black Sea ports and stopped grain cargoes from leaving, both to strangle the Ukrainian economy and to destabilize food-importing nations to pressure the US and Europe into relaxing sanctions.  [Read More]

CFOW Nuts & Bolts

Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.)  A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page.  Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!

Rewards!

The 26^th of July is celebrated in Cuba as the anniversary of their revolution, the one that overthrew the hated (and US-supported) dictator Batista in 1959; and so the Rewards for stalwart readers this week are taken from the wonderful music of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club. I hope you will enjoy this short film about the reconstitution of the band; the album the musicians produced; and the full-length documentary film by German filmmaker Wim Wenders ($3 rent).

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

CFOW Weekly Reader

Featured Essays

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

By Jonathan Swan, et al., New York Times [July 17, 2023]

[FB – This useful article stitches together several threads emerging from the MAGA rightwing and how a Trump victory in 2024 could lead to an Imperial Presidency, eliminating many civil rights and social protections in the process.  This is a threat to pay attention to and to prepare for, in my opinion.]

----- Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands. Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president's recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control. Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control. [Read More]

Sudan's Repressed Democracy

By Rahmane Idrissa, New York Review of Books [July 18, 2023]

---- The fighting in Khartoum, now in its third month, is the latest disaster for a democracy movement that has long resisted Sudan's ruling regimes. … The events of 2018-2019 amounted to an attempted democratic revolution. Bare-handed youth and women were relentless and strategic enough to unseat al-Bashir and force a democratic transition during months of sometimes very dangerous initiatives: organizing demonstrations, including one at the army's own headquarters, distributing pamphlets, graffitiing buildings, using social media to gather support. … Now the "Sudan of the origins" is fighting against itself. But Hemetti and al-Burhan ultimately belong to the same military-Islamist apparatus, which is finally exploding in the face of its internal tensions. The real struggle is ultimately between them and the unarmed democratic revolutionaries. Those revolutionaries have been shoved to the sidelines now. But nothing in Sudan's history says they will ever give up. [Read More]

Oppenheimer and the Bomb

FB – The new biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb," should open the door to useful discussions about the decision to use nuclear weapons in the last days of the war against Japan (1945), and perhaps even about the strong international movement today to ban nuclear weapons.  But will it?  So far, media commentary is primarily about the personality of Oppenheimer, and the "tragedy" that befell him when he was exiled from the science-policy loop for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  To keep things in perspective, here is a link to a recent documentary film on "The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." And here is a link to some information about Joseph Rotblat, the atomic bomb scientist who quit the project when he learned that the Germans were no longer working to build a bomb, and who spent the rest of his life working for peace.  But the life and work and failures of Oppenheimer tell us a lot about America and American science in the cold war, and so two good articles about the person of Oppenheimer are linked below.  A future issue of the newsletter, reflecting on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6^th & 9^th), will have some things to say about why The Bomb was used.

Oppenheimer's tragedy—and ours

By Robert Jay Lifton, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [July 17, 2023]

---- In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was subjected to what was rightly called "an extraordinary American inquisition" under the name of a security hearing. Despite having served his country so devotedly in heading the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, he was now publicly humiliated, condemned as a security risk, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to step down from his government consultancies. Those hearings were skewed and manipulated in McCarthyite fashion. But while extremely harmful professionally and personally, the hearings were not Oppenheimer's greatest tragedy. His greatest tragedy was the success of his leadership in the creation of the weapon. His remarkable gifts as a physicist and as a human being were most realized in the building of a weapon that could lead to the destruction of humankind. …The "American Prometheus," as his biographers termed him, found his greatest life achievement in the creation of an instrument of genocide. In making the bomb, Oppenheimer became immersed in what I call nuclearism—the embrace of the weapon as serving humankind.  But with the later development of weapons a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, he became an articulate critic of nuclearism, perhaps the most articulate of all critics. [Read More]  Also of interest is "Creator and Destroyer: A rivalry to end the world," (about Oppenheimer and Edward Teller), by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review [April 2, 2005] [Link]

War & Peace

NATO Is a Warfare Alliance, Not a Force for Global Peace or Stability

By Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd, Code Pink [July 19, 2023]

---- At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe "anchors for global security" when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe. Our NATO allies are not, as Biden would suggest, anchors in a turbulent sea of demons but rather catalysts stirring the cauldron of war on behalf of US empire.  The instability of the NATO alliance was evident in the controversy over the key issue of Ukraine membership. … Once again, we see that NATO's modus operandi is war. NATO has never been a defensive alliance. It invaded Yugoslavia in 1999 without a mandate from the UN Security Council. NATO waged a 20-year war in Afghanistan, leaving the people dirt poor and back in the hands of the Taliban. NATO illegally toppled the government of Libya in 2011. In addition to the present war with Russia, it has its sights set on China, building up a provocative Asia-Pacific military alliance with South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to counter China. NATO is also a cash cow for arms manufacturers, and it is the enemy of nuclear disarmament in its opposition to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. [Read More]

The Climate Crisis

Big Heat and Big Oil

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker [July 16, 2023]

---- Scientists who calculate historic temperatures believe that this may well be the hottest it's been on Earth since at least the peak of an era known as the Eemian, a hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago, when rising temperatures pushed mastodons north from present-day Texas to the Yukon. This would mean that nothing even remotely resembling a human civilization has ever known a world this hot…. The Earth's temperature is going to go higher, no matter what we do: this month's all-time records will almost certainly be broken in the coming year, as the new El Niño gathers strength. Many scientists predict that we will at least temporarily pass the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase that nations vowed, in the Paris Climate Agreement, to try to avoid.…If the disasters we're seeing this month aren't enough to shake us out of that torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and twenty-five thousand years seem remote.   [Read More]

Also of interest – "As Global Heat Waves Break Records in Mideast and Elsewhere, How Hot it too Hot for us Humans?," The Conversation [July 20, 2023] [Link]; and "As Skies Turn Orange, Media Still Hesitate to Mention What's Changing Climate," by Olivia Riggio, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [July 18, 2023] [Link].

The State of the Union

The UPS Strike Looms as Corporate America Cashes In

By Stephen Franklin, In These Times [July 21, 2023]

---- The backdrop of what could be the largest strike at a single employer in decades is that CEOs and corporate America are making record profits as unions—from actors to Teamsters to hotel workers—fight back and flex their power this summer. … UPS will seek to hold the line on expenses. That could mean pushing back on workers' wages or trimming health care costs. Full-time drivers and part-time workers now get premium health insurance, a rarity among U.S. corporations. … If the Teamsters strike, it appears that it would be the second or third largest strike at single employer in U.S. history, and the consequences for the U.S. economy could also be broad. But the reverberations of these negotiations and of any strike are also deeply impactful and are very much linked to the various and wide-ranging struggles taking place today between labor and corporate America. [Read More]  Also of interest is "UPS Teamsters 'Just Practicing,'" by Alexandra Bradbury and Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes [July 19, 2023] [Link].

Vast majority of House Dems back GOP resolution saying Israel isn't an apartheid state

By Michael Arria, Mondoweiss [July 19, 2023]

---- On Tuesday the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that Israel is "not a racist or apartheid state." The final vote was 412-to-nine vote, with one present vote. … The nine Democrats to vote against the resolution were Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Summer Lee (D-PA), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Andre Carson (D-IN) and Delia Ramirez (D-IL). Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), a consistent advocate for Palestinian rights in congress, voted present. [Read More].  Also of interest is "On Israel and Palestine, US Electeds Are Out of Touch With Their Own Voters," by Phyllis Bennis, The Nation [July 19, 2023] [Link].

Israel/Palestine

[FB – Tens of thousands of people have rallied in several Israeli cities against the plan of the Netanyahu government to pass legislation that would severely weaken the Supreme Court and give more power to the governing coalition – in this case, himself.  The decisive vote in the Knesset is planned for tomorrow around noon [5 a.m. EST].  Some useful background is provided from two articles from today's Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper – "Marching to Jerusalem: Democratic Israel's Most Powerful Act of Defiance Ever" [Link]; and "Israeli Reservists' Step Was a Last Resort, but Also Set Dangerous Precedent" [Link]. NB it must be remembered that this Great Debate is largely confined to Israel's Jewish citizens; the opposition to the government plans has not addressed directly issues of concern to Palestinians.]

(Video) Palestinian Attorney Noura Erakat: The U.S. is Normalizing Apartheid by Hosting Israel's President

From Democracy Now! [July 18, 2023]

---- As President Biden meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the White House today, several progressive Democrats have announced plans to boycott Herzog's address to a joint session of Congress. This comes after Biden invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the United States this year despite recently criticizing the makeup of Netanyahu's far-right Cabinet as "one of the most extremist" he has seen. The visits from Israeli leadership are an attempt to "normalize apartheid," says Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, who compares today's U.S. support of Israel to the nation's support for South African apartheid. "The United States is complicit and a pillar of Israeli apartheid in its provision of unequivocal financial, diplomatic and military support." Erakat also applauds the efforts of activists and politicians who have shifted Democrats' sympathies more toward Palestine than Israel, according to a recent Gallup poll. [See the Program]

Enough Carrots. It's Time for the U.S. to Use Sticks to Change Israeli Policy

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [July 20, 2023]

---- Those who believe Israel must solve its problems by itself must also admit that this experiment has failed and is hopeless. The superpower has responsibility for the regional reality here. We'd have had a different Middle East and a different Israel had America been different. No other country has the power to change reality like America, and no other country has so betrayed its duty. Endless peace plans, empty talk about the two-state solution, which Biden keeps promoting shamelessly, knowing it's leading nowhere. And Israel is further than it has ever been from ending the apartheid. It is America's right to gorge Israel with its taxpayers' money, to arm it to the teeth and support it blindly in international institutions. But why not condition all this support on something? On something in return? On a change of direction? [Read More]

Our History

Remembering Staughton Lynd's Life Of Defiance

By Chris Hedges, The Real News [July 22, 2023]

---- The radicalism of the 1960s did not fall from the sky—it was built by the uncommon bravery of common people. One of those people was Staughton Lynd, a professor who accompanied movements for justice as a scholar, lawyer, and activist throughout his life. A conscientious objector to the Korean War, Staughton went on to join the Civil Rights Movement and oppose the Vietnam War through his scholarship and his actions. He passed away in Nov. 2022 just days before his 93rd birthday. A collection of his writings and speeches, My Country Is the World, was recently published by Haymarket Books. Activist, author, and lawyer Alice Lynd joins The Chris Hedges Report to remember her late husband alongside Luke Stewart, editor of My Country Is the World. Alice Lynd was a draft counselor and trainer of draft counselors during the Vietnam War. In 1968, she published We Won't Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors. [Read More]

 

CFOW Newsletter - The War in Ukraine: Negotiations, Not More Weapons

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

July 16, 2023

The United States should switch gears in Ukraine. It's time to put US efforts into working for a ceasefire and negotiations to end the fighting.  The fighting war will not be "won" by either Ukraine or Russia.  A stalemate in the fighting stretches into the future as far as the eye can see.  It's time to end the cruel "support" for Ukraine, which is destroying Ukraine and killing tens of thousands of people, making refugees of millions.  It's time to end the horrible danger that the war could escalate into a wider war, involving more countries, perhaps ending in a nuclear war.  It's time to stop.

The horror of this war is illustrated by the "debate" on sending cluster bombs to Ukraine.  Millions of these bombs, banned by a UN treaty supported by 123 nations, are now on their way to Ukraine.  When Russia used these bombs at the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine, the USA rightly denounced this as a "war crime."  Is it no longer a "war crime" when the bombs are made in the US?  Will Ukraine become another Laos, where cluster bombs killed 50,000 civilians during the Indochina wars, and where de-mining the unexploded bombs that still litter the countryside is expected to last for another century? Just because the government of Ukraine is fine with carpeting its territory with cluster bombs does not mean that this is morally OK, or that the USA should put these outlawed munitions in play.

Claiming to "support" Ukraine, the Biden administration has sent one piece of advanced weaponry after another to the battlefield – advanced artillery, Patriot missiles, battle tanks, depleted uranium shells, and now cluster bombs. On deck for the next pseudo "debate" about sending weapons to Ukraine are F-16 jets (made by General Dynamics) and the ATACMS artillery system (made by Lockheed), which has a range of 190 miles.. Each time the Biden people have pretended to be concerned, to weigh the pros and cons, and to have considered fears that the new weapons would allow Ukraine and its NATO advisers to take the war into Russian territory, perhaps initiating a nuclear war.  And each "debate" within the Biden political/military elite has eventually decided that the risks are low and gaining military advantage over the Russians is "worth it"; and so the new round of weapons are sent.  It's time to stop this charade. We have seen this movie too many times to take it seriously again. Let's speak out loudly and say, "No more weapons to Ukraine!"  Demand a ceasefire.  Negotiations are the only way this war will end.

Some Reading about the War in Ukraine

Stop Biden From Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

By Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd, Code Pink [July 11, 2023]

---- President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine's slow counter-offensive against Russian troops. On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine "severely undermines our moral leadership." This time it's not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden's escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. [Read More]  For the last-minute maneuvering that prevented a vote on the amendment from progressive Democrats, read "Republicans Tank Amendment to Ban US Sale of Cluster Munitions Worldwide," by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams [Link],

(Video) "Madness of Militarism": Biden OKs Cluster Bombs for Ukraine Despite Risk of Civilian Casualties

From Democracy Now! [July 10, 2023]

---- The Biden administration is drawing outrage after announcing it will send cluster bombs to Ukraine as part of a new weapons package. When deployed, cluster munitions spread smaller "bomblets" across a wide area and regularly kill civilians, either on initial impact or from unexploded segments that go off later. Their use has been banned by 123 countries that signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the United States, Russia and Ukraine are not signatories to the treaty. This comes as a new Human Rights Watch report documents how Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munitions, including by Ukrainian forces. We speak to Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who calls the Biden administration's decision "appalling," and to writer and activist Norman Solomon. [See the Program]

Also of interest – "After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused to Rethink Strategy," by Lara Jakes, et al., New York Times [July 15, 2023] [Link]; and "The case for Ukraine's NATO membership is the zombie that won't die," by Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [July 11, 2023] [Link].

News Notes

Rally against Weapons for Ukraine

Anti-war organizations will hold a rally on Saturday, July 22 at 11 am at the Scranton (PA) Army Ammunition Plant to oppose sending cluster bombs, and all weapons, into the Ukraine War. We urge all who oppose the U.S. sending cluster bombs and any weapons to Ukraine and who want an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war to join us at the Scranton (PA) Army Ammunition Plant, 156 Cedar Ave., where the production of 11,000 artillery shells a month cannot keep up with the demand for killing.  Speakers will include David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War, Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day and formerly imprisoned nuclear war protester, and others.  The rally is endorsed by many peace organizations, including Veterans for Peace, Code Pink, and World Beyond War. To RSVP or for more info, Jack Gilroy – jgilroy1955@gmail.com – (607) 239-9605 or Nick Mottern – nickmottern@gmail.com – (914) 806-6179

Man Shot Dead by Police After a Report of Stolen Fruit

From the New York Times [July 13, 2023]

---- A New Rochelle, N.Y., police officer shot Jarrell Garris, 37, after he was accused of eating some grapes and a banana without paying, his family's lawyer said. The police said he tried to grab an officer's gun. Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat who lives in Yonkers and represents New Rochelle, said that the shooting reflects a long history of tension between the police and Black residents of Westchester County and across the country.New Rochelle Against Racism, a local activist group, said in a statement that local police "will need deep, transformational change if the Black community is to feel safe, protected and respected, rather than monitored, controlled and attacked." [Read More]

(Video) AOC Teams Up With Workers To Take On UPS

---- UPS workers are prepping for one of the biggest strikes in American history. We hit a Teamsters practice picket with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and hundreds of workers, who told us why 340,000 of them are ready to strike. The biggest demand? "We need to get paid." We've been covering UPS Teamsters ahead of their looming strike deadline later this summer. If UPS fails to reach a fair deal with workers, over 300,000 workers could walk out on the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history. [AOC speaks] 

CFOW Nuts & Bolts

Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.)  A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page.  Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!

Rewards!

This week's rewards for stalwart newsletter readers commemorate the anniversary of the French Revolution, sparked by the attack on the hated Parisian prison, "La Bastille" (July 14, 1789).  The Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – was unpopular with the conservative classes and their monarchs in the rest of Europe; and in 1792 several armies launched an attack on revolutionary France.  To repel this invasion "the nation" rallied, with those marching to Paris from Marseilles singing the song that would become the French national anthem.  The lyrics to La Marseillaise are stirring, combative, and mobilizing; and socialists throughout Europe over the past two centuries have adopted it as their own. Much later, the song played a role in defeating the Nazis, as this rare documentary footage reveals.

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

CFOW Weekly Reader

Featured Essays

In Memory of Those Still in the Water

By Amanda Gorman, New York Times [July 15, 2023]

---- On June 14, 2023, the migrant boat Adriana capsized off the coast of Greece, killing more than 600 men, women and children who had been crammed onboard the trawler by traffickers. As investigations by the BBC and The New York Times have revealed, officials and coast guard crews failed to treat the crisis as a rescue mission until the last few hours. Those on the Adriana died torturous deaths. At the water's surface, some clung to pieces of wood, surrounded by drowned friends, relatives and strangers. And yet, given the scope and horror of the disaster, few people seemed to care; the story was barely a blip on many news websites.  … Refugees and migrants dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean in search of safety is not new. The United Nations estimates that more than 27,000 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. As I am an African American keenly aware of our history, the tragedy of the Adriana is in some ways familiar to me, a haunting that is almost heritage: Humans squeezed onto a boat by their traffickers, crushed skin to skin, bone to bone, throats gasping in the breaths of a hundred suffering others, enduring or perishing in the hellish conditions of starvation and dehydration as the vessel churns them away from their homeland. [Read More]

The Illusion of a U.S.-India Partnership

By Arundhati Roy, New York Times [July 13, 2023]

---- The state visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to Washington last month was billed as a meeting of two of the world's greatest democracies, and the countries duly declared themselves "among the closest partners in the world." But what sort of partners will they be? What sort of partners can they be? President Biden claims that the "defense of democracy" is the central tenet of his administration. That's commendable, but what happened in Washington was the exact opposite. The man Americans openly fawned over has systematically undermined India's democracy. … And what kind of an ally will the United States be to India in the event of a confrontation with China? [Read More]

The Black Radical Tradition Can Guide Our Struggles Against Oppression

An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacobin Magazine [July 6, 2023]

[FB - Historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently published a new edition of his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Daniel Denvir interviewed Kelley for the Jacobin podcast the Dig]

---- The most important thing is that whatever their agenda is, their vision is not something that's made ahead of time. It is made in struggle and movement. If anything, the basic lesson of Freedom Dreams is not that people need to go to sleep, dream, and wake up in the morning with a new idea, but that what we think of as future thinking — dreams of possibility — comes out of struggle. It doesn't come out of think tanks or out of taking mushrooms. … I had been thinking about a new edition for a while, but especially after 2020, I was thinking about the long history of anti-state violence and what we witnessed, because the 2020 protests were a culmination of lots of things. That upsurge was a culmination of the Occupy movement. It had its roots in the anti-police protests erupting after Trayvon Martin and [Michael] Brown, the 2013-2014-2015 season. The other context, of course, is that we're facing a resurgent fascism. I say resurgent because fascism has a long history in the US. [Read More]

War & Peace

NATO Isn't What It Says It Is

By Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney, New York Times [July 11, 2023]

[FB - Mr. Anderson is the editor of "Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance Since the Cold War," to which Mr. Meaney is a contributor.]

---- NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to toast their success. Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of "brain death." Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed.  … But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful. [Read More]

US Intelligence Report Says Iran Is Not Trying to Make Nuclear Weapons

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [July 11, 2023]

---- A new US intelligence report has reaffirmed that Iran is not trying to build nuclear weapons despite constant claims made by Israel and Western media outlets to the contrary. The report noted that Iran has taken steps to increase uranium enrichment, which it called "research and development activities that would bring it closer to producing the fissile material needed for completing a nuclear device following a decision to do so." Iran has been enriching some uranium at 60%, a step it took in 2021 in response to an Israeli attack on its Natanz Nuclear Facility. But 90% enrichment is needed for weapons-grade, and there's no sign Tehran is looking to bring enrichment to that level. [Read More]

The Climate Crisis

(Video) Bill McKibben: Climate Crisis Needs Urgent Action as Earth Records Hottest Temps Ever

From Democracy Now! [July 7, 2023]

---- This week unprecedented temperatures driven by climate change shattered heat records around the world. More records could be broken soon, as scientists say 2023 is set to be one of the warmest years in the history of planet Earth. "We can't stop global warming at this point," says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. "All we can do is try to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilizations off at the knees." McKibben says these temperatures are the "inevitable result" of fossil fuel use, criticizes politicians for their simultaneous embrace of renewable energy and fossil fuels, and calls on activists to disrupt the status quo: "This is the last of these moments we're going to have when the world is summoned to action by events and when there's still time to make at least some difference in the question of how hot it ultimately gets." [See the Program]

Iraq's Climate Crisis: America's War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [July 10, 2023]

---- Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country. If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis. [Read More]

Civil Liberties

Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats

By Chris Hedges [July 9, 2023]

---- The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous.  The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.   [Read More]

Israel/Palestine

The Tale of Two Invasions: What the Last Attack on Jenin Tells Us About Israel Now

By Tareq Baconi, New York Times [July 10, 2023]

[FB - Mr. Baconi is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the International Crisis Group and author of Hamas Contained. He serves as president of the board of al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.]

---- Our screens are filled once again with images of weeping women, children, and the elderly marching down the street with their hands raised or waving white garments from slow-moving vehicles. Palestinians have seen this before, having lived through a long history of expulsions from their homes and villages under the threat of fire. The newest images came in last week during the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. …. More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance. ... The two invasions unfolded in vastly different contexts. Between 2002 and 2023, the illusion of partitioning the land into two states disintegrated. It exists now only in diplomatic talking points, hollowed out of all meaning, and replaced by a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, vindicating what Palestinians have long believed.[Read More]

Our History

Jesse Jackson's Politics of Peace

By John Nichols, The Nation [July 15, 2023]

---- Political historians recognize Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy as the great anti–Vietnam War candidates of the 1968 presidential campaign. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, is recalled as the most ardent foe of a US military intervention to be nominated by a major American political party since the party ran William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean and former Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich sought the Democratic presidential nod in 2004 as sharp critics of the Iraq War. And prescient opposition to the Bush-Cheney administration's war of whim, which Barack Obama voiced as early 2002, did much to advance his successful bid for the presidency in 2008. But of all the anti-war campaigns of the modern era, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential runs were uniquely dynamic bids. And they had a profound and lasting impact on progressive thinking about foreign policy. [Read More]