Hello All – In developing her ideas about the origins of fascism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of “the alliance of the mob and capital.” It was a strange alliance, lubricated by anti-Semitism and (colonial) white supremacy, and a revolt against “respectable” society while raising up the political power of the largest bankers and most aggressive industrialists. To succeed, of course it needed a charismatic leader such as Hitler or Mussolini.
After one week of Donald Trump 2.0, we can see the outlines of the incipient fascism of the Trump agenda. At its starkest level, Trump’s inaugural theatrics joined “the mob and capital” on stages everywhere. The demonization of the “elites”; the scapegoating of immigrants; the bounty of gifts to big corporations and the rich; and on and on. Whether the “state” (deep or shallow) will be subsumed by this agenda, or whether the tattered remnants of liberals will endure, remains undetermined. Whoever fights harder will prevail.
For progressives unconnected with strong institutions, our efforts need to focus on building and strengthening supportive communities. At the end of the day, much of the Trump agenda must be carried out against and within local and state institutions: local governments, state government, the courts, the cops, the schools, etc. While mindful that our fight for freedom and democracy will be fought against a background of the maneuvering of “Great Powers” and giant corporations, communities of resistance will have a role to play in limiting and frustrating the implementation of fascism – from “sand in the gears” to creating strong and democratic institutions.
For Concerned Families of Westchester, the core item in our resistance will be opposition to war – to end US support for the wars in the Middle East and to prevent new ones. After one week it is apparent that the “ceasefires” in Gaza and Lebanon are fragile. Working for peace should be on the agendas of communities of resistance. We can do it.
ROADS TO WAR & FASCISM
Has democracy failed in Israel? Fatima Bhutto & Yuli Novak
---- For five years, Novak led Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation which uses anonymous testimonies from ex-soldiers to reveal the crimes committed by the Israeli military. In 2022, she fled the country after finding herself the target of a vociferous campaign led by Israeli politicians, who labelled her a traitor. Novak is currently the executive director of B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO that documents human rights violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory. In the third episode of Reframe, Fatima Bhutto interviews Yuli Novak on the nature of Israeli militarism and what it means to be a human rights defender in Israel after October 7. [Read More]
'No Innocents in Gaza': Reflecting on Israel's First Fascist War
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [January 19, 2025]
---- The war that is supposed to end Sunday will go down in history as the First Kahane War. It is fundamentally different from all of Israel's previous wars. The only war that resembled it was the 1948 war, that caused the Nakba, but the motivations behind that war were different. That was a war to establish a Jewish state; this is a war to establish a fascist state. The State of Kahane has risen in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu's criminal spinelessness made it possible. It wasn't only the neo-Nazi right-wing parties: It was, above all, the prime minister's own Likud party that brought Kahanism to power. The profound change that has occurred in Israel is best exemplified by the war in Gaza. Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist, pro-population-transfer far right; and the spirit of Kahanism seized control of its goals and conduct. It wasn't only the scale of the army's cruelty; it was, above all, the way in which cruelty was rendered into a value in Israeli society as a whole, into an opportunity, an asset, a miracle. Cruelty as something to be proud of, to aspire to, to boast of and to flaunt. … Israel has become a state that aspires to the killing and destruction of Arabs solely for the sake of killing and destroying Arabs. It did not used to be like this, and it certainly did not take pride in it. This is a profound change, one that we will struggle to undo. It portends a pitch-black future. [Read More]
(Video) Prof. Norman Finkelstein on the Gaza genocide
From The Community Church of Boston, [January 17, 2025]
---- Professor Norman Finkelstein talks to the Community Church of Boston about the genocide in Gaza. Following his talk, there is a Q&A discussion. Norman G. Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1987. He is the author of many books that have been translated into 60 foreign editions, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish suffering, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, and most recently, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It: Politically Incorrect Thoughts on Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom. In the year 2020, Norman Finkelstein was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world. [See the Program]
NEWS NOTES
(Video) Jamaal Bowman on What He Learned in Congress
With Peter Breitart, [January 26, 2025]
---- Jamaal Bowman lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations. I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same. [See the Program]
Last week was the fourth anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Signed by more than 100 countries (but none of the nine nuclear powers), the Treaty now confronts nuclear-weapons states with the reality that they and their bombs are outside the world’s norms and community. For a useful briefing on the Treaty and what it means by Larry Wittner, go here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) 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 make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
The amazing pianist Yuja Wang was back in the news this week, both directing and performing several classic pieces in NYC on Thursday. For a musical treat, here are two of her “encore” presentations: the "Carmen Variations" and Mozart's "Turkish Marh." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
'The Exceptions Have Become the Rule.' Naomi Klein on Trump, Gaza and the End of the 'Liberal Order'
From Democracy in Exile [DAWN] [January 21, 2025]
Interviewer: In your view, could the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas lead to a meaningful resolution of the underlying issues in Gaza? What steps should be taken to ensure that these pauses in hostilities do not merely serve as a prelude to further violence, but instead pave the way for lasting peace and justice?
Naomi Klein: It's a huge question and a complicated one, but I think it's just important to begin by recognizing the importance of the cease-fire, if it is indeed a cease-fire. I'll believe it when I see it. The relief that that represents to hundreds of thousands, millions of people in Gaza, and the impossible nightmare that doesn't end with a cease-fire—without hospitals, without adequate water, with the decimation of the farms. The end of the bombs does not mean the end of the genocide, unfortunately. But nothing can happen until the bombs stop falling. So the importance of it is enormous, is incalculable. … I don't think this is happening because of Trump's threats. I think this is happening because of a deal. It had to stop at some point, and it's stopping at a time that is most politically useful to Trump. He is going to be grateful to Netanyahu for delivering this to him—and Netanyahu knows this. This is a very dangerous dance. What we know about Biden and Blinken is the same thing we've known for months, as well—that they could have had a cease-fire if they had used the actual levers that the United States has, primarily to withhold weapons, to withhold aid, to enforce the Leahy Law. That was always possible for them to do. [Read More]
‘The Entire Human Rights System Is in Danger’: In Conversation With Francesca Albanese
By Sebastian Shehadi, Novaramedia [January 22, 2025]
---- Francesca Albanese is the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967, and the first woman in the role since its establishment in 1993. A human rights lawyer of over two decades’ experience, she is one of 12 country-specific rapporteurs who document human rights violations on behalf of the United Nations human rights council, including in Myanmar, the Central African Republic and Iran. … Unlike most western diplomats, who tend to be more cautious in their assessments, Albanese has not hesitated to call Israel’s war in Gaza genocidal (see her UN reports ‘Anatomy of a genocide’ and ‘Genocide as colonial erasure’), a claim that she justifies with detailed reference to the UN genocide convention and a comparative history of other recognised genocides. [Read More]
I Protested Trump’s First Inauguration. But I’m Not Marching Against Him Today.
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [January 20 2025]
---- There is little point in going to Washington today to oppose Trump’s return — Trumpism never left. There are more urgent tasks now. The last eight years, but particularly the second half of Biden’s presidency, proved what many on the left had feared: Liberal Democrats’ antifascist rhetoric was hollow. The outraged voices of the #resistance to Trump 1.0 have spent the last years pushing Trump-worthy anti-immigration policies, throwing trans people under the bus, backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, fear-mongering over crime rates, and pouring funds into police budgets rather than meeting people’s needs. Democrats licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist. Whether Democrats’ rightward appeals were ill-conceived electoral strategies or signs of ideological alignment with Trump is irrelevant; the violent political work done is the same either way. … The challenges we face are enormous and growing. We find ourselves in a grimly defensive position. The task is urgent to build resilient communities, including rapid-response networks to defend neighbors and colleagues from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, or ensuring the wide circulation and accessibility of abortion pills and hormones. [Read More]
THE CEASE FIRE IN GAZA
[Video] From The Beinart Notebook – 40 minutes
---- Peter Beinar:I spoke with my friend, the brilliant, Gaza-born, political analyst Muhammad Shehada, about the ceasefire agreement, the horrific conditions in Gaza, and what might come next. [See the Program]
Two Myths About the Gaza Ceasefire
By Gilbert Achcar, ZNet [January 23, 2025]
---- There are two conspicuous myths about the Gaza ceasefire that went into effect last Sunday. The first myth attributes the agreement to pressure from Donald Trump, who had expressed his desire to have it done before he took office, and even threatened to bring “hell” (as if what the people of Gaza had experienced for 471 days had not been hell) if the ceasefire did not happen on the desired date. … The second myth is somewhat related to the first, by portraying the current truce as a great victory achieved by Hamas. In front of the formidable genocide that the people of Gaza have been subjected to; of the Strip’s reoccupation by the Zionist army after nearly twenty years of its withdrawal from it, thus allowing for the self-administration of Gaza; its destruction in a way that history has not witnessed anywhere on such a scale since World War II; the destruction of its environment and other requisites of life; the release of hundreds of detainees in Israeli prisons coinciding with the arrest or re-arrest of thousands; and the escalation of the fascist attack by the Zionist government and settlers in the West Bank and their creeping annexation of it – in front of this huge catastrophe, for anyone to claim that what happened is a victory for the people of Palestine that brought them “closer to the end of the occupation, liberation, and return” is beyond nonsense, a manifestation of lack of shame and decency. [Read More]
Israel's Ban on UNRWA Is Set to Take Effect. So What Will Happen in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank?
By Liza Rozovsky, et al., Haaretz [Israel] [January 17, 2025]
---- Israel's new legislation targeting UNRWA threatens to disrupt the agency's essential services in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and especially Gaza, where many residents depend on its aid. Under international pressure, Israel is negotiating with the UN to shift UNRWA's responsibilities to other organizations, facing challenges like vetting staff with alleged Hamas affiliations. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pushing for temporary solutions to maintain humanitarian support, as concerns grow over potential radicalization and instability if UNRWA's operations collapse. [Read More]
THE WEST BANK
(Video) Israel Continues Deadly Attack on Jenin; Trump Lifts Sanctions on Extremist West Bank Settlers
From Democracy Now! [January 23, 2025]
---- While a ceasefire is largely holding in Gaza, Israel is intensifying attacks on the occupied West Bank. The Israeli military has killed at least 13 people in a major military operation targeting Jenin that began on Tuesday when Israeli troops raided the city, backed by airstrikes, drones and U.S.-made Apache helicopters, following a six-week siege. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been “emboldened” by Trump’s lifting of sanctions on far-right Israeli settler groups. Further violence is increasingly likely, says Mariam Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and journalist based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. “We’re seeing Israel wage a war that very much resembles the practices they have committed in Gaza,” with Palestinians left “completely defenseless,” she says. “It’s a very slow slaughter of Palestinians. If you survive a bullet, you don’t know if you’re going to survive daily life.” [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST is “Mapping 1,800 Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank since October 2023,” from Aljazeera [January 22, 2025] [Link].
Jenin is ‘only the beginning’: Israel moves its war on Palestinians to the West Bank
By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [January 23, 2025]
---- On Thursday, the Israeli army continued its offensive on the Jenin refugee camp in the north of the occupied Palestinian West Bank for the third consecutive day. The offensive, dubbed “Iron Wall” has killed 10 Palestinians so far, and left at least 40 wounded. Israeli forces launched its offensive on Jenin early on Tuesday with air strikes on the refugee camp as well as an incursion by special forces, positioning snipers overlooking the camp. This initial attack was soon followed by large armored forces from the northern, eastern, and western sides of Jenin, accompanied by helicopter gunships that opened fire on Palestinians from the air, and Israeli D-9 bulldozers which destroyed streets and other already-damaged infrastructure. … The Israeli offensive began a month after the Palestinian Authority started its own operation in Jenin, aimed at regaining control from the local resistance groups. The PA and the Jenin Brigade reached an agreement a week ago through the mediation of many Palestinian political and civil society figures, but the clashes between the sides resumed last Sunday and continued until Tuesday morning, when Israel began its attack on the camp. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilise its citizens to fight?
By Peter Korotaev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, Aljazeera [January 23, 2025]
--- Over the past few months, Ukraine has increasingly been under pressure from its Western allies to start mobilising young men under the age of 25. This came after the mobilisation law passed in April did not deliver the expected number of recruits. Even the lowering of medical requirements – allowing men who had had HIV and tuberculosis infections to serve – did not help much. … So far President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has refused to move forward. Part of the reason is demographic fear: Sacrificing young men en masse in a prolonged conflict risks condemning Ukraine to an even bleaker future, where demographic decline undermines its ability to rebuild economically, socially, and politically. But the Ukrainian president also fears public anger. There is growing and palpable reluctance among Ukrainians to fight in the war. And this is despite the fact that their leaders and civil society frame it as an existential struggle for survival. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
For reality: A few thoughts on the last day of the old world
By Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years [January 19, 2025]
---- I think the era that began with FDR is ending now—an era marked, imperfectly, by the search for justice. President Carter, buried last week, was at the midpoint of that journey, when it had already begun to falter. President Biden, born under Roosevelt, tried (imperfectly but sincerely) to revive that streak. Now we will, at least for a time, replace justice with power as our guiding light. Power has always been a contender, of course, and always warped our reality, but now it has much fuller sway. And power, as Orwell perhaps understood best, often works by insisting that up is down. In the case of the climate crisis, which is the deepest problem our civilization confronts, that consists of claiming that global warming is a hoax, and that its main solution—clean energy—is expensive and ineffective. All this has been on display in Washington in recent days, as the grandees of the fossil fuel industry gather to celebrate Trump’s win, and as the president-elect’s cabinet nominees told the Senate that, even if turned out to be real, climate change was no great threat, and that they were intent on reviving even the coal industry with government aid. [Read More]
Should climate activists target fossil fuel subsidies?
By Cam Fenton, Waging Nonviolence [January 21, 2025]
---- According to the International Monetary Fund, fossil fuels subsidies in the United States added up to a whopping $757 billion in 2022. Of this $3 billion are considered explicit subsidies — a more modern and well organized version of bags of cash — while the remaining $754 billion are implicit subsidies. This latter category is a confusing soup of uncounted environmental and human health damages. While the Biden administration took actions that will hopefully knock these numbers down, there is still a lot of public money flowing to Big Oil in 2025. … What I’m actually wondering is: How do you organize for the climate in this new political reality? So, I decided to play this exercise out, to make the case for — and against — running a fossil fuel subsidy campaign in the second Trump era with the goal of finding an answer to that broader question. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Trump’s Blitz on Immigration Aimed to Overwhelm. Here’s What You Need to Know.
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [January 23, 2025]
---- Pandering to his nativist base, Donald Trump made the central pledge of his 2024 presidential campaign a threat to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” On January 20, 2025, he began to fulfill that promise. … In a slew of anti-immigrant executive orders issued on the first day of his second term, Trump not only failed to take care that the laws be enforced but also violated several laws. [FB - The author discusses Birthright Citizenship, the ‘National Emergency” at the border, using the military to enforce immigration laws, the immigrant “invasion” of the US, and other topics.] These executive orders, which purport to replace law enforcement at the border with a full-scale military operation, are cruel, illegal and have instilled fear in countless immigrants in the United States. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
'It's Finally Over, I'm Going Home': Biden Grants Commutation—But No Pardon—for Peltier
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [January 20, 2025]
---- Just minutes before leaving office, Joe Biden on Monday commuted the life prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, the elderly American Indian Movement activist who supporters say was framed for the murder of two federal agents during a 1975 reservation shootout. "It's finally over, I'm going home," Peltier, who is 80 years old, said in a statement released by the Indigenous-led activist group NDN Collective. "I want to show the world I'm a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me." While not the full pardon for which he and his defenders have long fought, the outgoing Democratic president's commutation will allow Peltier—who has been imprisoned for nearly a half-century—to "spend his remaining days in home confinement," according to Biden's statement, which was no longer posted on the White House website after Republican President Donald Trump took office Monday afternoon. [Read More]
Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election
By Marina Pino and Julia Fishman, The Brennan Center [January 14, 2025]
---- Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision. [Read More]
How Redistricting Helped Republicans Win the House
By Nick Corasaniti and Michael Wines, New York Times [January 26, 2025]
---- A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics. Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis. Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses. [Read More]
What’s an H-1B visa? A brief history of the controversial program for skilled foreign workers
By Gabrielle Clark, The Conversation [January 14, 2025]
---- Republicans are feuding over how many people can obtain H-1B visas, permits that allow foreign professionals to legally work in the United States. Today an estimated 600,000 foreigners with H-1B visas have tech, academic, medical and other jobs. Two of President-elect Donald Trump’s most influential – yet informal – advisers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, want to expand the program to help Silicon Valley’s tech companies recruit what they call “excellent engineering talent.” Other conservatives with strong Trump ties, such as Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, see this immigration program as a “scam” and a cheap labor program as pernicious as “illegal immigration.” Although Trump, who previously criticized the program, has sided with Musk and Ramaswamy so far, based on my research I doubt the conflict between the sparring GOP camps will go away anytime soon. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Origins of Birthright Citizenship
By Robert L. Tsai, Boston Review [November 9, 2018]
[FB – This is a review of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, by Martha S. Jones.]
---- Thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, those born in the United States face a very different set of legal circumstances than the limbo that faced freed blacks prior to the Civil War. Generations of Americans have understood that amendment for what it says plainly: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” However, since the mid-1990s, a tiny minority has tried to dislodge this conventional understanding of the Citizenship Clause by claiming that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes the children of unauthorized migrants born in the United States. But that is not how the Reconstruction generation talked about the issue. Instead, the historical record demonstrates that they envisioned the exclusion of only the children of foreign diplomats born in the United States and Native Americans, who were at the time still deemed to be members of foreign nations. For everyone else, including the children of Chinese parents then barred from becoming citizens and Gypsies in Pennsylvania, birthright citizenship was to be the rule. [Read More]
(Video) Marcus Garvey’s Pardon Is Part of Undoing “Harms of the Past,” Honoring Black History
From Democracy Now! [January 24, 2025]
---- As one of his last acts in office, President Joe Biden issued a posthumous pardon for Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and generations of civil rights leaders. Advocates and congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey for years, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s 1923 mail fraud conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the popular leader who spoke of racial pride and self-reliance. Garvey was deported to Jamaica, his birthplace, and died in 1940 in England. [See the Program]
