Hello All – A good place to start this week’s newsletter is with the Bernie Sanders-AOC “red state” rallies. They have drawn huge audiences under the banner of Fighting the Oligarchs. The reasons why people turn out is illuminated in this video, “Who’s Coming to the Bernie/AOC Rallies?” which focuses on Denver. Sanders and AOC, as well as interviewed rally-goers, speak directly to the lies of the Trump people and deplore the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to mount a effective defense of our rights and our democratic institutions. Yesterday Sanders and AOC were in Los Angeles, where 36,000 people turned out to hear their message. To me this indicates that We the People can be awakened to fight the Trump/Musk dictatorship if our messaging speaks to the real needs of middle-class and working-class people and is encased in a fighting spirit.
Another issue on the minds of many of us this week is the escalating aggression by the Trump people against dissent. This is most evident in the utter cruelty of the legal action against Mahmoud Khalil, the Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, and hundreds more. Secretary of State Rubio has apparently canceled the student visas of more than 1,000 foreign students, though no one really knows how many or why. Journalist Belén Fernández writes, “The US is in all-out kidnapping mode, and no one is safe.” She notes that the purge has moved on from dissenting students to labor organizers. If we don’t stop this, where will it go?
Finally, the Trump/Musk onslaught against our liberties and institutions has crowded out serious mainstream media coverage of the on-going genocide in Gaza. This week Trump reiterated his view that US policy (and Israel’s as well) is to “cleanse” Gaza of its Palestinian population so that it can be turned into some kind of tourist resort and homes for rich people. What is going on in Gaza is beyond belief for those not cursed with a knowledge of history. There is no sign that the US or the “advanced” countries will lift a finger to stop this. And (alas!) the growing opposition to Trump (Hands-Off, for example) excludes any mention of US militarism and the Gaza genocide. Why is this? US support for the Israel’s war on Gaza is opposed by a growing number of Americans. According to a recent Pew Reserch Center poll, 52 percent of us now have a negative view of Israel, including 69 percent of Democrats (71 percent of those under 50). The Democratic Party leadership essentially concedes power to the Trump fascists in order to retain their death-grip on Israel and its genocide. We must change this.
ESSAYS ILLUMINATING SOME OF THIS WEEK’S EVENTS
Mahmoud Khalil’s ‘Letter to Columbia’ from jail
By Mahmoud Khalil, Columbiw Spectator [April 6, 2025]
--- To Columbia—an institution that laid the groundwork for my abduction—and to its student body, who must not abdicate their responsibility to resist repression, Since my abduction on March 8, the intimidation and kidnapping of international students who stand for Palestine has only accelerated. … The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon. The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine. … To members of Columbia’s faculty who pat themselves on the back for their progressive leanings but are content to limit their participation to performative statements: What will it take for you to resist the destruction of your University? Are your positions worth more than the lives of your students and the integrity of your work? … The student movement will continue to carry the mantle of a free Palestine. History will redeem us, while those who were content to wait on the sidelines will be forever remembered for their silence. [Read More]
What Comes Next in Mahmoud Khalil’s Fight Against Deportation
By Jonah Valdez, The Intercept [April 12, 2025]
---- From a small courtroom in a remote immigration jail in Jena, Louisiana, Judge Jamee Comans ruled on Friday that the government can deport Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil based solely on his advocacy for Palestine. … Two major paths remain open to Khalil: one within the immigration court system, and the other in federal district court. Despite Friday’s immigration court decision, Khalil’s attorneys continue to argue in federal district court in New Jersey for his release on free speech grounds. A resolution in the federal case could arrive in a matter of days or weeks. In immigration court, Khalil could apply for asylum, appeal the ruling before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and pursue further appeals within the U.S. circuit court — processes that could stretch for months or even years. [Read More]
Trump and Netanyahu Reaffirm Their Vision for the Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [April 7, 2025]
---- President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at the White House on Monday and reaffirmed their desire for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, both claiming that there are other countries willing to take in the Palestinian population. Trump also said it would be a “good thing” for the US to take over and control Gaza. “Well, you know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate,” he told reporters at the Oval Office. The president said that if the Palestinians are “moved around to different countries,” it would create a “freedom zone” in Gaza. “You call it the freedom zone, a free zone, a zone where people aren’t going to be killed every day,” he said. [Read More]
Infinite License [Gaza]
By Omer Bartov, New York Review of Books [April 24, 2025 issue]
---- If we take into account the killed, the wounded, the thousands buried under the rubble, the thousands of “indirect” deaths due to the destruction of most medical facilities, the thousands of children who will never fully recover from the long-term effects of starvation and trauma, we can undoubtedly conclude that Israel has deliberately subjected the Palestinian people in Gaza, most of whom are refugees from the partition of Palestine in 1948 or their descendants, to “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as stated in Article II(c) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The rest of the world, especially Israel’s Western allies and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States, will have to grapple with this reality for many years. How was it possible, well into the twenty-first century, eighty years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this “crime of crimes”? [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST – “Israel’s Road to Genocide,” a review of a new book by Arab-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine,” Jewish Voice for Labour [April 4, 2025] [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.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter has resumed its weekly Monday night vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW 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!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart readers bring back some of my favorites, perhaps linked in newsletters long ago. I hope you will like "You Are My Sunshine” from Albert Ammons; "Bound for Glory", written by Phil Ochs and sung by Hudson Valley Salley; "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?" by Anne Feeney; and "Julie" by Rhiannon Giddens. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
Trump Faces Palestine: The Colonial View of the World Never Dies
By Aviva Chomsky, Tomdispatch [April 11, 2025]
---- In the colonial view of the world — and, in its own strange fashion, Donald Trump’s view couldn’t be more colonial — White European colonizers were embattled beacons of civilization, rationality, and progress, confronting dangerous barbaric hordes beyond (and even, sometimes, within) their own frontiers. Colonial violence then was a necessary form of self-defense needed to tame irrational eruptions of brutality among the colonized. To make sense of the bipartisan U.S. devotion to Israel, including the glorification of Israeli violence and the demonization of Palestinians, as well as the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Black South Africa, student activists, and immigrants, it’s important to grasp that worldview. … As an expansionist Europe grew ever more expansive, it brought rights-holding Europeans and those they excluded, suppressed, or dominated into the same physical spaces through colonization, enslavement, transportation, and war. Enslaved Africans were inside the territory, but outside the legal system. Expansion required violence, along with elaborate legal structures and ideologies to enforce and justify who belonged and who never would, and — yes! — ever more violence to keep the system in place. [Read More]
The Democrats’ Lost Millions
By Kali Holloway, The Nation [April 10, 2025]
---- The Democrats’ takeaway from Trump’s victory should be that a party’s political priorities must resonate with the identities of its base. But they have fundamentally misunderstood this assignment, yet again. The consequences of that misunderstanding—or refusal to understand—were reflected in 2024’s turnout, when, by some estimates, a staggering 19 million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home. It’s not that Dem voters became Republican en masse this election. In fact, in “nearly a third of the top 50 counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican, Trump’s vote actually declined from his 2020 numbers,” writes Steve Phillips, of both The Guardian and this magazine. Trump increased his vote total by just 2.8 million over 2020. The far bigger problem was Harris’s nearly 7 million vote shortfall compared with Biden four years ago. [Read More]
Democracy Disappeared
By Henry Giroux, Counterpunch [April 11, 2025]
---- Dissent, once the lifeblood of democracy, is now branded as terrorism. The protester is no longer a citizen with a voice but a suspect under surveillance, a body to be silenced, imprisoned, or vanished—sometimes in distant nations where autocrats echo Trump’s contempt for law and human rights. Under the creeping shadow of authoritarianism, a student with a green card becomes a threat, a journalist is branded a traitor, entire immigrant populations of color are viewed as a threat to national security and rendered disposable. Atrocities—such as the relentless bombardment and starvation of Palestinian women and children—vanish from mainstream coverage, their suffering lost in the machinery of genocide and indifference. In a culture fragmented into a thousand soundbites, social responsibility holds no market value; it evaporates in the toxic air of manufactured ignorance, hate, and despair. The moral compass of American society spins wildly, as cruelty becomes normalized, and conscience is silenced in the name of security, profit, and power. [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
“An Abrupt Plunge Into Hell”: Gaza After the Ceasefire
By Huda Skaik, The Intercept [April 12, 2025]
---- It feels as though time has folded back on itself. The bombing on Gaza resumed in the darkness of the night of March 18, and has continued for weeks since. It feels like a flashback — like the first day of October 7, when the morning broke with the same shock, the same uncertainty. On one level, we expected the war to resume. In early March, the beginning of Ramadan, the first phase of the ceasefire deal ended. By March 2, Israel had closed the border crossings into Gaza, and aid — food — stopped entering.In the middle of March, Israel resumed killing people with drones across Gaza. One attack killed nine Palestinians: four journalists, the others aid workers. [Read More]
‘I operated on more children in Gaza in one night than I do in the U.S. in a year’
By Michal Feldon, +972 Magazine [April 9, 2025]
---- On the evening of March 23, Feroze Sidwha, a trauma and critical care surgeon who had recently arrived in Gaza from California as a volunteer medic, was on his way to the surgical ward in Nasser Hospital when an Israeli airstrike tore right through it. Israel’s army said the strike was targeted at Ismail Barhoum, a senior figure in Hamas’ political bureau who was being treated for wounds sustained in a previous airstrike only days earlier, but the bombing also killed a 16-year-old boy and wounded several more patients. The slain teenager, named Ibrahim, was Feroze’s patient. “Ibrahim was supposed to go home today,” Feroze said when we spoke the day after the bombing. “He had some injuries to his distal colon which we repaired, but they were pretty destructive so we gave him a protective colostomy. He was recovering on the ward, and was in good shape. I never expected to have a patient killed in his hospital bed. I first encountered Feroze last October, when he and almost 100 other American medical personnel sent an open letter to the president and vice president of the United States detailing what they had seen during their time volunteering at hospitals in Gaza, and calling for an end to the war and to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. Three weeks later, I was among a group of over 100 Israeli medical personnel who signed another open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris in solidarity with those American doctors. Since then, Feroze and I have continued our collaboration. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “(Video) “Point-Blank”: Israeli Soldiers Execute 15 Gaza Medics & Rescue Workers, Bury in Unmarked Mass Grave,” from Democracy Now! [April 7, 2025] [Link]; “Media Find Ways to Minimize Israel’s Murder of Paramedics,” by Belén Fernández FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [April 11, 2025] [Link]; and “Wrought by the IDF in West Bank Refugee Camps” (aerial photographs), by Hagar Shezaf and Avi Scharf, Haaretz [Israel] [April 8, 2025] [Link].
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
(Video) How has the war in Ukraine divided Western countries?
From Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [April 12, 2025] – 30 minutes
---- US efforts to secure Russian agreement to a ceasefire in Ukraine appear no closer to yielding results, after US special envoy Steve Witkoff's third visit to Russia. Trump has told Putin he must bring an end to the war quickly. Witkoff's meeting with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Friday was held as European leaders met to agree a huge military support package for Ukraine. Nearly $24 billion has been pledged, with Germany and UK footing the largest share. With the US and Europe now taking different approaches to end the war - can either side bring Russia to the table? (See the Program)
WAR WITH IRAN?
(Video) Trump Threatens Joint U.S.-Israeli Attack on Iran If Talks on Iran’s Nuclear Program Fail
From Democracy Now! [April 10, 2025]
---- As the U.S. and Iran prepare for talks this weekend in Oman to discuss Iran’s nuclear weapons program, we speak to journalist Negar Mortazavi about the Trump administration’s negotiation strategy of “threats and pressure” and his diplomatic doctrine of “peace through strength.” Mortazavi is skeptical that the talks will result in Iran giving up its nuclear weapons program, as Trump’s team is demanding, and comments on the impacts of severe sanctions on Iran, which have devastated the country’s fragile economy. [See the Program]
THE WAR ON YEMEN
Progressives Push to Assert Congress Power Over Yemen War
By Matt Sledge, The Intercept [April 9, 2025]
---- Progressives in Congress demanded that President Donald Trump justify his legal rationale for strikes in Yemen that caused dozens of deaths, teeing up a potential move to stop future attacks under the 1973 War Powers Act. Democrats would face long odds invoking congressional war powers to block Trump as long as Republicans control Congress, but a letter sent to the White House on Wednesday and obtained by The Intercept represents a break from the party’s approach to the attacks against Yemen. Until now, Democrats have centered their critiques on the scandal over the administration’s planning of a March 16 strike on the Signal messaging app. While progressives are still worried about the Trump administration’s slipshod information security, they are also deeply concerned about what is happening in Yemen, says the letter led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Val Hoyle, D-Ore., who were joined by 30 members. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
(Video) Columbia Prof. Marianne Hirsch: Mahmoud Khalil Arrest Reminds Me of Growing Up Under Authoritarianism
From Democracy Now! [April 10, 2025]
---- Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch’s new article in The Forward is titled “I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook.” She tells Democracy Now! that seeing footage of the ICE arrests of Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk “brought back these feelings of terror that I had as a child.” Hirsch grew up in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and says she sees parallels between the climate of fear she was raised in and the repression of speech and protest on campuses today. Hirsch, who is Jewish, condemns the “anticipatory capitulation” of universities, like Columbia, to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding and says “the reason for this was never to fight antisemitism, but it was to decimate academia.” [See the Program]
Mahmoud Khalil and the Necropolitics of Trump’s Deportation Regime
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [April 11, 2025]
---- “The right to have rights,” which was first mentioned by philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany, highlights that a person is not inherently rights-bearing but must be acknowledged as a member of a political community to be granted any other rights at all. We might speak of universal rights, but they must be recognized and only have material force when recognized by state powers. It is precisely the removal of the right to have rights, the right to be recognized as a human under law, at which Trump aims. It is no accident that Palestinians and their supporters are among the first targeted. Israel, the U.S., and the so-called rules-based international order have designated Palestinians outside the bounds of rightful acknowledgment — that is to say, expellable, detainable, and killable — for 76 years. … Necropolitical governance — the deadly, racist ordering of life and death by Western liberal democracies — have typically sought to administer death behind closed doors or far from home. The public was not supposed to learn about the tortures in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison or the abuses in Guantánamo Bay; the police killings; the racist brutality of prisons; the pollution and its grossly unequal distribution of environmental devastation; and much more. The Trumpian move is to don the Totenkopf [Death’s Head], to embrace and supercharge this monstrous and grossly unequal death tableau. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “A Pro-Palestinian Activist Lost His Case, but the “Fight From Below” Continues,” by Benjamin Leynse and Avery Want, The Nation [April 7, 2025] [Link]; and “Jewish Groups and Synagogues Defend Students Detained by ICE,” by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times [April 12, 2005] [Link].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Hands Off…The Future
By Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years [April 10, 2025]
---- The impetuous imposition of steps that even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal calls nonsense are only a short-term way to wreck the economy. To make sure it tanks forever, you need to work harder. Which, sadly, the Trump administration is doing, Mark Gongloff and Elaine He at Bloomberg produced a remarkable timeline the other day showing in enormous detail how the Trump administration had, in a matter of weeks, undone twenty years worth of efforts to do something about the climate crisis. It’s not like the U.S. had been providing sterling leadership, but “nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed during his first months back in office.” As a result of this all-out effort to destroy climate action here and abroad, the analysts at the big banks declared last week that the effort to hold temperature increases to two degrees Celsius—never mind the 1.5 degree target we set at Paris—are probably dead. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The New McCarthyism Was Started by Liberals
By Jeet Heer, The Nation [April 9, 2025]
---- Writing in The New York Times, the columnist Michelle Goldberg argued, “The closest analogue to this squalid moment is the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the right exploited widespread fear of communist infiltration to purge leftists from government and cultural institutions.” …Goldberg’s Red Scare analogy is accurate—but too narrowly ideological, blaming the political purge on right-wing troglodytes like Senator Joseph McCarthy. In truth, both Red Scares were ignited by liberal Democrats—Woodrow Wilson during World War I and Harry Truman during the Cold War—although the rise of McCarthyism in the 1940s and ’50s showed how easily anti-subversive hysteria could be hijacked by anti-liberal Republicans. In both cases, the liberal embrace of militarism opened the door to a reactionary politics of suppressing the left. In 1971, the journalist Murray Kempton reviewed the convincing findings of the historian Athan Theoharis and concluded that “McCarthyism was only Trumanism carried to its logical conclusion.” … Echoing Kempton, we can say that Trumpism is only Bidenism carried to its logical conclusion. Joe Biden was in many ways heir to the militaristic liberalism of Wilson and Truman—especially visible in his efforts to revive the military Keynesianism of the Cold War. [Read More]
(Video) A War on the First Amendment: David Cole on Trump Targeting Students, Law Firms, Schools & Journalists
From Democracy Now! [April 9, 2025]
---- An immigration judge has announced she could rule as early as Friday on whether the Trump administration can continue to detain Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student protest leader incarcerated at an immigrant detention center in Louisiana. Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was seized by federal agents on March 8 and told his green card had been revoked. His case comes as many legal scholars say the country is facing a constitutional crisis on a number of fronts — from the Trump administration’s threats to ignore judicial decisions, to its targeting of law firms, to its use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan immigrants without due process. Trump “is trying to neutralize the opposition,” says David Cole, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and former ACLU national legal director. “He wants to violate the law with impunity.” [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protest under Trump,” The Guardian [UK] [April 9, 2025] [Link]; and “'Dystopian' Trump Plan for Massive Expansion of ICE Detention Centers Exposed,” by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [April 11, 2025] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump and RFK Jr. Are Destroying a Generation of Knowledge
By Gregg Gonsalves, The Nation [April 10, 2025]
---- Why are they doing this? Some have tried to frame these cuts as responsive to a Make America Healthy Again agenda, or an attempt at downsizing a government gone wild—anything to try to shoehorn the rationale for these actions into some sort of standard, political logic. But I think something far more obvious may be at work, though it may be difficult to accept that it is happening here in the United States, or for most of the media to call it what it is. What we are seeing is a purge—of the administrative state, of the universities, of expertise—that is consistent with events like the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and ’70s, or the dismantling of the tsarist civil service after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Just because this moment isn’t associated with the intense political bloodshed of those eras doesn’t make the comparison any less apt. In one way or another, the goal is to get rid of an entire set of people and institutions in the service of a radical ideology. And what is rising in its place is also recognizable from history. From the Covid contrarians running the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to the anti-vaxxers down at HHS headquarters, we have our 21st-century Lysenkos propped up not by the strength of their ideas but by their political patrons in the White House. … We’re in deep trouble. The midterms, the 2028 elections, should they change the balance of power in Congress or who is in the White House, all come too late. The patient is bleeding out in the waiting room. American science, public health, and healthcare will be damaged for a generation or more. [Read More]
How to Fight Trump’s Attack on Farmworkers [Photo Essay]
By David Bacon, The Nation [April 2025]
---- On March 25, Alfredo Juarez was driving his compañera to work in the flower fields of Washington Bulb, the largest tulip grower in Washington State. His family, including two uncles, all work there, and until two years ago, he did too. That’s when Lelo (as he is known) started working full-time for the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ). That morning, however, was anything but normal. In the predawn darkness he saw flashing lights in his rear view mirror and pulled over. As a Border Patrol agent approached the car, Lelo rolled his window down partway. He asked why he was being stopped and if the agent had a warrant. When he reached into his pocket for his ID, however, the Border Patrol cop broke the window. The agent dragged him out of the car as his partner began shouting, demanding to know why he was being brutalized, before the agent took him away. The Border Patrol first brought Lelo to the nearby Ferndale Detention Center, and then to the giant migrant prison in Tacoma run by GEO Group. Within days, he was lined up to board a deportation flight to Sonora, Mexico. But, without a clear reason, he was called out of line and returned to detention while the others were flown off. There he remains, at least as of the publication of this article. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Fear Shadows Many Children in Immigrant Families,” by Miriam Jordan, New York Times [April 12, 2025] [Link]; and “Immigrant Worker Exploitation in America in Four Charts,” by Sarah Anderson and Revanna James, Counterpunch [April 8, 2025] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
How the Sanctuary Movement Was Really Born
By Kyle Paoletta, The Nation [April 10,2025]
---- Within two years, 287 churches had declared themselves as sanctuaries: They would provide shelter to refugees, even if doing so was illegal. Those churches were soon joined by more than a dozen cities that passed ordinances instructing local law enforcement officials to neither ask residents about their immigration status nor cooperate with federal immigration authorities conducting enforcement operations. In an apparent effort to stem the movement’s momentum, immigration officers arrested an activist in South Texas for transporting three Salvadoran refugees within the United States; in protest, Rabbi Joseph Weizenbaum organized a Freedom Seder at Tucson’s Temple Emanu-El, and volunteers drove 80 Central Americans from Southside Presbyterian to the synagogue in a two-mile convoy. In 1985, 16 Sanctuary Movement participants were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of “alien smuggling,” including Fife and Corbett, along with Ramon Quinones, a Catholic priest from Nogales, and three nuns. If federal officials thought the prosecutions would end the Sanctuary Movement, they were wrong: Over the course of the trial, the number of participating congregations more than doubled. All eight of the activists who were eventually found guilty were given probation by a judge who acknowledged that, though they had broken the law, they had “done so because of humanitarian concerns.” [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “History of Hollywood Red Scare Offers Insight Into Trump’s Free Speech Attacks,” by Ed Rampell, Truthout [April 8, 2025]. [FB – This is a review of Policing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Black List, and Cold War Movies.] [Link]; AND “Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration,” by Francisco Cantu, New York Review of Books [April 24, 2025 issue]. [FB – This is a review of The Afterlife is Letting Go, by Brandon Shimoda, about Japanese survivors of the US internment camps during WWII try to keep their families’ histories alive] [Link].
