Hello All – On Thursday, May Day, and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, tens of thousands mobilized, joined, and protested against the Trump dictatorship and especially his assaults on workers and immigrants. According to one account, events took place in nearly 1,000 towns and cities, and in all 50 states. We had a good turnout on Saturday here in Hastings, where about 250 people joined, with many speaking out at our “open mic.” (You can see some good pictures on the CFOW Facebook page.)
So what did people have to say? What were our issues? Well, just about everything, as in just 100 days Dictator Trump has managed to enrage just about every person in America. At Thursday’s NYC rally and march, Democracy Now! was there to record peoples’ voices; check it out. And for those who would like to learn or recall how “May Day” fits into our world and our history, I recommend this essay by SDS stalwart of yore Robert Ross, “May Day 2025: The Current Installment of an Annual Remembrance” [Link].
And then there is Israel’s war – genocide – on Palestine. More than a year ago, the International Court of Justice deemed it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Since then, the sadistic attack on Gazan institutions and people has intensified. All schools, hospitals, mosques, journalists, medical workers, UN relief workers, and all the fabric of community has been targeted and decimated by the US bombs dropped from US-made planes piloted by Israelis. Since Israel broke the most recent ceasefire, for the last two months Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza preventing all food, water, medicine, and medical personnel from entering Gaza. No Western media are allowed in, and so all our useful information comes from Palestinian journalists in Gaza, of whom more than 200 have been killed since October 2023. Currently thousands of children – and no doubt the elderly and/or sick – are on the edge of dying from starvation. What makes those especially sadistic is that the war crimes against Palestinian civilians are not hidden, but are broadcast and live-streamed in real time. Anybody who wants to know what is happening can use their own eyes. Soon thousands in Gaza will succumb. The “Christian” West averts its eyes and talks of tariffs.
USEFUL READING ON STARVING GAZA
As Gaza Siege Grinds On, Gazan Children Go Hungry and Patients Die
By Erika Solomon and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, New York Times [May 4, 2025]
---- It has been more than 60 days since Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid entering Gaza — no food, fuel or even medicine. Israel says it will not relent until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds after a two-month cease-fire collapsed in March. It has argued that its blockade is lawful, and that Gaza still has enough available provisions. But humanitarian groups and European officials accuse Israel of using aid as a “political tool” — and warn that the total blockade violates international law. The severity of the siege means it now affects nearly every part of the lives of the roughly two million people trapped inside Gaza, compounding the struggles of a population that has lived for nearly two decades under the partial blockade imposed by Israel and backed by Egypt after Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007. … As supplies of clean water, food and medicine dwindle, preventable diseases and illnesses are surging — and so is the likelihood of dying from them, doctors say. Aid groups are raising the alarm in increasingly drastic messages, warning that the humanitarian support for Gazans is “on the verge of total collapse.” … Already, the United Nations said, 91 percent of the population analyzed — just under the roughly two million believed to be in Gaza — is estimated to be facing “food insecurity,” with most enduring “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels. [Read More]
As Israel Openly Declares Starvation as a Weapon, Media Still Hesitate to Blame It for Famine
By Belén Fernández, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [April 25, 2025]
---- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival. … As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza. [Read Moe]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “'Genocide in Action' as 60-Day Blockade Plunges Gaza Into Mass Starvation,” by Julia Conley, Common Dreams [May 2, 2025] [Link]; “'We'll Die Whether From Hunger or the Bombing': Gaza Faces Critical Food Shortage,” by Sheren Falah Saab, Haaretz [Israel] [April 25, 2025] [Link]; ““Deprivation by Design”: Israel Intensifies Mass Killing Campaign in Gaza With Starvation and Daily Strikes,” by Rasha Abou jalal and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Drop Site News [April 30, 2025] [Link]; and “Israel, Gaza, and the Starvation Weapon: The ICC Tests a Rarely Prosecuted War Crime,” by Boyd van Dijk, Foreign Affairs [May 4, 2025] [Link].
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 newsletter readers dip into the huge barrel of union and labor songs appropriate for May Day. One I’ve always liked is "You've Gotta Go Down and Join the Union," from the Almanac Singers. Pete Seegar, one of the Almanac group, has a thousand songs: here are some of them. And in a new mode, here is Patti Smith and a supporting choir with "People Have the Power!" Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES
Climate Change Summer or Nuclear Winter in Trumpworld
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch [May 2, 2025]
---- Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come. … Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity — that is, us — written all over it. After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6th and 9th, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as — forget global warming — a “nuclear winter.” [Read More]
How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [April 28, 2025]
---- Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration. On April 22nd, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. Trump’s policies are expected to drag U.S. growth down from 2.7% to 1.8%. … Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down—on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance. Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall. Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force. [Read More]
(Video) Gaza Aid Flotilla Attacked by Drones in International Waters; Organizers Blame Israel
From Democracy Now! [May 2, 2025]
---- A ship carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip sent out a distress signal overnight after it was bombed by drones in international waters near Malta. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the organizer of the voyage, is blaming Israel for the attack, which set the ship on fire, punched a substantial breach in its hull and cut off communication with those aboard. “We are dealing with a brutal attack on an innocent ship,” retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright, who was in Malta waiting to board the flotilla, tells Democracy Now! “While we cannot yet identify the source of the drones, there is no doubt in my mind that there is a history of violence that has been directed toward the flotillas from the state of Israel.” The climate activist Greta Thunberg was also set to join the flotilla and said in an online video that activists would “continue to do everything in our power to do our part to demand a free Palestine and demand the opening of a humanitarian corridor.” [See the Program]
Kashmir and the Indus
By Craig Murray [April 27, 2025]
---- India’s Hindutva President, Narendra Modi, has used the Kashmir terrorism incident to abrogate the 1960s Indus Waters Treaty – a longstanding goal of Modi. The Indian version of the “terrorist attack”, most of whose victims were Muslim, has largely been accepted by Western governments without evidence. … It is however certain that tearing up the Indus Waters Treaty is a long term Modi goal. The Indus supplies 80% of Pakistan’s agricultural water, and the supply is already insufficient, with disastrous salination of the lower reaches of the river as the sea creeps into the areas once occupied by the mighty flow. I visited the area of lower Sind five years ago and witnessed the fields encrused with white salt. India controls the upstream flow into Pakistan of approximately 70% of the total water of the Indus, about 55% of all of Pakistan’s agricultural water. … Modi does not have the physical power to stop the Indus, but does have the ability short term to divert more of the river to Indian irrigation and storage, sufficient to cause some immediate distress in Pakistan. Indian media are already thrilled with the idea. But long term major reblancing of the river water allocation would require substantive new infrastructure in India. SUch projects however would be both economically viable and likely wildly popular with Modi’s Hindutva base both for promoting Indian development and for damaging Pakistan. [Read More]
REMEMBERING VIETNAM – 50 YEARS LATER
How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America – Photo Essay
From The New York Times [April 30, 2025]
---- The images changed how the world saw Vietnam, but especially how Americans saw their country, soldiers and the war itself, which ended 50 years ago this month. There are so many ways to describe what photography from the Vietnam War captured and revealed, but maybe it boils down to what Tim O’Brien shared in “The Things They Carried.” “I survived,” he wrote in one of the book’s stories, “but it’s not a happy ending.” The war, which formally concluded on April 30, 1975, still elicits grief for all that was burned into memory and reinforced on film. [Read More]
Why Today April 30th Should Be a National Holiday
By Michael Moore April 30, 2025]
---- Fifty years ago today, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam defeated the United States of America. It’s called “The Vietnam War” — but the Vietnamese call it, more accurately, “The American War.” Because it was the Americans who invaded Vietnam eleven years earlier to kill and dominate its people. In those 11 years, we slaughtered two million Vietnamese and perhaps another two million southeast Asians in Cambodia and Laos and beyond. Nearly 4 million murdered by the United States! (For context, that’s about two-thirds the number of Jews that the Germans killed in the Holocaust during World War II.) Unlike the Germans, we, collectively as a nation, have never paid for these crimes against humanity. We have never admitted our guilt in this genocide, never apologized, never shown a speck of remorse, never made any reparations (and no, I don’t count the Nike factories). … No media today on this 50th anniversary will state the simple truth that we, the mighty USA, were defeated in Vietnam by one of the poorest countries on Earth, a country which did not possess a single aircraft carrier, no destroyers, no B-52-style bombers — not even one goddamn attack helicopter! They did not have tank divisions, nor a single canister of napalm, no amphibious assault vehicles, not even one pathetic military Jeep that wasn’t a Soviet tin-can knock-off with maybe three wheels on it. They had nothing but the will of their own people to be free of the freedom-loving Americans. [Read More]
The First Forever War: The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Late
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [April 30, 2025]
---- When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago today, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed, and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States, came to a close. America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. April 30, 1975, was also, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell observed at the time, “the first day since September 1, 1939, when the Second World War began, that something like peace reigned throughout the world.” Peace on paper, perhaps, but the violence never really ended. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “US Defeat in Vietnam Was the Final Act of an Unjust War,” by Michael G. Vann, Jacobin Magazine [April 2025] [Link]; and “A Willful Amnesia” [The Vietnam War], by E. Ethelbert Miller, Washington Inspector [April 29, 2025] h/t JW [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Knock at the Door [Palestinian Prisoners]
By Lama Khouri, Counterpunch [April 28, 2025]
---- The scene has become tragically familiar in occupied Palestine: the pounding fists on the door in the dead of night, the splintering wood, the shouts in broken Arabic. Soldiers storm in, rifles raised, children jolt awake, and someone is taken for nothing more than attending a protest or being related to someone who did, or throwing a stone, or posting something on social media in protest to the atrocities committed against their own people. This past Thursday, April 17, 2025, marked Palestinian Prisoners’ Day amid the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank. Commemorated since 1974, this day honors the central role of Palestinian political captives in the struggle for national liberation. It is also a date etched in sorrow as well as resistance. Nearly one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1948—teachers, farmers, health workers, children, artists, and leaders. Today, nearly 10,000 remain behind bars, including 3,500 held in administrative detention without charge or trial, 400 children, and 29 women. [Read More].
Israel is on a home demolition rampage in the West Bank. Its aim is to force Palestinians to leave.
By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [May 1, 2025]
---- The demolition of Palestinian homes is the other side of the coin of Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land for settlement expansion. Since 2023, home demolitions have displaced 7,392 Palestinians. This demolition blitz has had the effect of clearing vast swathes of the West Bank of Palestinian physical presence, while limiting the urban expansion of Palestinians in their existing places of residence. In the past month alone, Israeli forces demolished 58 Palestinian properties — and 5,900 properties since October 7, 2023. … This most recent wave of demolitions was preceded earlier this month by statements made by Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, saying that “illegal building” on the part of Palestinians had become “a scourge” for Israel. Smotrich’s statements came in the context of his announcement of “a revolution” in settlement expansion in the West Bank that is “unprecedented since 1967.” [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
(Video) Is Trump’s “Minerals Deal” a Fossil Fuel Shakedown? Antonia Juhasz on New U.S.-Ukraine Agreement
From Democracy Now! [May 1, 2025]
---- The Trump administration has signed a deal with Ukraine to give the United States a long-term stake in the country’s oil, gas, coal and mineral resources as part of a joint investment fund with Kyiv. President Trump has sought to frame the agreement as repayment of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. We speak with investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz, who characterizes the deal as an “unprecedented” resource “grab” that allows Trump to reopen U.S. access to Russian oil and gas, which can be channeled through Ukrainian energy infrastructure [See the Program]. ALSO OF INTEREST is “With Minerals Deal, Trump Ties Himself to Future of Ukraine,” by Kim Barker, New York Times [May 1, 2025] [Link].
BOMBING YEMEN
(Video) Yemeni People in State of “Terror” After 1,000+ U.S. Airstrikes Kill Hundreds
From Democracy Now! [May 1, 2025]
---- A U.S. military strike on a migrant detention center in the north of Yemen has killed at least 68 people, largely migrants from African nations, bringing the death toll from U.S. attacks on the country to over 250 since mid-March. Middle East researcher Helen Lackner says the number of deaths is likely twice the officially recorded number, as the United States has now conducted more than 1,000 strikes on Yemen “on an absolutely nightly basis.” Lackner says the humanitarian crisis in Yemen has also been exacerbated by the end of U.S. aid and the U.S.'s designation of the country's Houthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organization.” “People who are living in the country are suffering on a daily basis from basically terror and fright or from being attacked and possibly being bombed and killed [at] any time.” [See the Program]. ALSO OF INTEREST is “Animated maps show US-led attacks on Yemen,” from Aljazeera [May 1, 2025] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
From Evasion to Defiance
By David Cole, New York Review of Books [May 1, 2025]
---- What happens when the course of least resistance meets judicial opposition? The executive has three possible responses: compliance, evasion, or outright defiance. Only the first is lawful. But there is an important difference between evasion and defiance. It is one thing to shoplift surreptitiously and another to walk into a store and openly take its merchandise, brazenly asserting that no law can stop you. Evasion acknowledges that the law exists and seeks to elude capture; defiance simply denies the force of law altogether. Thus far, despite loose rhetoric outside court, Trump has stopped short of asserting in court that he has the authority to defy a judicial order. But evasion and defiance are on a continuum. Trump’s administration has already engaged in shockingly irresponsible conduct designed to evade court rulings, and he is coming closer and closer to the constitutional redline of defying them outright. [Read More]
War on Terror Brain Rot Brought Us to This Point
By Rebecca Gordon, The Nation [May 2, 2025]
----It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted. … We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Chile in Our Hearts
By Steven Volk, The Nation [April 29, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing after the Coup, by John Dinges. The story we know about what happened in Chile in September 1973 we know primarily through the film “Missing.” It turns out there is more to know.]
---- Costa-Gavras’s movie Missing reminded viewers of the brutal military coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. Missing’s compelling narrative focused on the deaths of two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, in the days following the coup, and raised a series of highly troubling questions about Washington’s role in their murders and the demise of democracy in Chile. By 1982, with Missing’s release, the charge that Nixon and Kissinger actively sought to undermine Allende, perhaps orchestrating the coup itself, had been investigated for years. … My wife and I lived in Chile in 1972–73, were friends with Frank and Charlie (he will always be “Charlie” to many of us), and worked with them in the Fuente de Información Norteamericana (FIN), a group that translated and distributed articles supportive of Allende’s Popular Unity government. I played a part in the frantic search for both men after they were detained and went missing in the days following the coup. That pursuit ultimately led me to the discovery of Frank’s body in the Santiago morgue, and many angry confrontations with US consular officials. [Read More]
How the creation of the ‘New Antisemitism’ was used to shield Israel and attack the Left
By Sean L. Malloy, Mondoweiss [April 28, 2025]
---- This article briefly examines the pre-history of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and how a combination of domestic and international challenges to Zionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a concerted effort to redefine antisemitism in a way that prioritized the defense of Israel while identifying the political Left as the primary antagonist. It positions the IHRA definition not as a grassroots response to antisemitism, but rather as a coordinated, institutional form of counterinsurgency aimed at snuffing out transnational solidarity with Palestine. … I would suggest that the primary motivation behind the advent of the “new antisemitism” formulation had little to do with the Arab–Israeli conflict and was instead a response to transnational, grassroots organizing that sought to link anticolonial liberation movements across the globe with activists in the United States and Western Europe. … This history makes clear that this revised definition of antisemitism focused on Israel and Zionism did not arise organically from Jewish communities in the United States or elsewhere. Rather, both the IHRA definition and its precursor in the form of the “new antisemitism” were the results of a coordinated campaign by Zionist groups and the Israeli government to stamp out attacks on Israel from the Left as well as to discredit efforts to link global anticolonial movements across borders. [Read More]
