So President Trump has gone ahead and bombed Iran. Less than 24 hours into the news cycle, the images of triumph and might are already starting to get old. The news media has moved on from lying reports about the awfulness of Iran’s nuclear program, and the number of hours/days/months that Iran is away from launching a nuclear weapon on someone, to considerations of what will happen next? War? Peace? Surrender? New negotiations? The excitement rolls on
In a video posted an hour ago, commentator Peter Beinart raises some issues not addressed by the mainstream media (linked below). He focuses on consequences, not only in terms of whether or not Iran will attack US soldiers and bases in the Middle East, but also the consequences of violating international law and norms, about doing something because you can get away with it, about the lessons that other nations will learn about the perils of not having a nuclear weapon, and thus being vulnerable to attack by countries that do.
Beinart alludes to some moral issues, or “norms,” that I would like to stress here. Can we imagine our mainstream news media raising questions about bombing because killing people is immoral? Can we imagine a mainstream news program assembling a panel of religious or church leaders to address the morality of US military action? Is the killing by starvation of people in Gaza worse than, the same as, or not as bad as killing people by bombing them? I do not need to go on – the idea that the leaders of our heavily religious country, with a political class swearing allegiance to God and Jesus every chance they get, being interrogated by our mainstream media about the morality of the actions they are taking and the votes they are casting is absurd. It can’t happen. The question of the morality of killing can’t be raised in polite or official society.
Beinart also alludes to the illegality, or un-Constitutionality, of Trump’s bombing. Congress has the power to declare war, not the President. There was no pressing emergency that would prevent a discussion and vote by Congress. Moreover, the USA is a member of the United Nations, whose charter prohibits the use of force unauthorized by the UN unless it is a question of immediate self-defense. There is no question that the US was in violation of this principle. Will the media raise the question of legality, of the UN Charter, in interviews with or about Trump and his team? Of course not. The US claims for a “Rules Base Order” is Washington-speak for “My way or the highway.” Again, as Beinhart maintains, the rejection of international law and the UN prohibition on the use of force will be a lesson learned by other nations. For the USA, this taboo is broken again and again, with impunity. What should be an Article of Impeachment is unlikely to be raised by our media or our congressional representatives. When Washington preaches about international law, the world snickers.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING OUR NEW WAR
(Video) The Media is Asking the Wrong Questions about Trump’s Attack on Iran
From Peter Beinart [June 22, 2025] – 9 minutes
---- Even if it sets back Tehran’s nuclear program. Even if Iran doesn’t seriously retaliate. It’s still incredibly dangerous, and wrong. [See the Program]
‘Die Once, Mourn Once’ [Iran]
By Amir Ahmadi Arian, New York Review of Books [June 19, 2025]
---- In the first hours of Israel’s war on Iran, my friends and family in the country gave voice to a deep exhaustion and despair. Since the first hour of the war I’ve been speaking with my friends and family in Iran, as I always do when something erupts there, trying to align my understanding with theirs. My friends are mostly middle- and lower-class journalists and writers. All have suffered the violence of the state in some form or fashion over the course of their careers. Most of my eight uncles, seven aunts, and fifty-six first cousins are still in Iran; politically they range from staunch regime supporters to devoted monarchists, a microcosm of the country’s fractured public opinion. This time, during the first few hours of the war, I had trouble understanding them. This crowd, usually unable to find any common ground, was suddenly united in a chorus of fatalism. They all agreed, echoing my father’s sentiment, that they’d come to the ends of their ropes. [Read More]
Nuclear Options
By Tariq Ali, New Left Review [June 17, 2025]
---- The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’ The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace. [Read More]
(Video) Another Iraq? Military Expert Warns U.S. Has No Real Plan If It joins Israel’s War on Iran
From Democracy Now! [June 20, 2025]
---- As Israeli warplanes continue to pummel Tehran and other parts of the country, President Trump has given mixed messages on whether the U.S. will join Israel’s war on Iran. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a message on Thursday that Trump will decide on direct U.S. involvement in the next two weeks. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after Trump met with his former advisor Steve Bannon, who has publicly warned against war with Iran. The U.S. is reportedly considering dropping “bunker buster” bombs on underground Iranian nuclear facilities. “It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said it’s going to be a cakewalk,” says William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. [See the Program]
NEWS NOTES
“There is not a single demographic in the United States whose majority is not opposed to American involvement in Israel’s war of aggression against Iran, according to a new poll published by YouGov and the Economist. Perhaps most crucially, this includes voters who backed Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection.” [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 afternoon 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!
The singer known as Sly Stone died this week. In the late 1960s and after, “Sly and the Family Stone” pioneered a new style and new sound that captured the moment of strife and discontent in the USA. Looking back, we see a fringe of “the Movement” that changed our country. Here are two of the group’s most popular songs - "Everyday People" (1969) and "Stand" (1969). This week Rolling Stone put up a memoir - “Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs” – which you can read/listen to here. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
5 Lessons From the Real Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
By Jeanne Theoharis, The Nation [June 19, 2025]
---- With protests mounting across the country to stop ICE and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, many pundits invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement on the “right ways” to protest. And yet, most distort the substance of what King did and believed. Here are five lessons on the actual King for this Juneteenth: … The civil rights movement provides crucial lessons on how we move forward today: We don’t know what will work but need to act anyway; everyone, everyone has a role to play; and our tactics, just like King’s, will be cast as unreasonable, violent, and self-defeating—but we keep going anyway. But that’s only if learn the actual history of Martin Luther King Jr. and not some caricature. [Read More]
(Video) Rhiannon Giddens on Pulitzer-Winning Opera “Omar” About Enslaved Muslim Scholar Omar ibn Said
From Democracy Now! [June 19, 2025]
As part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we feature our interview with pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST is this Democracy Now! Segment about Giddens’ video/song, “Another Wasted Life” [Link]. From Democracy Now! - “The song was inspired by Kalief Browder, a Bronx resident who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22 after being detained at Rikers Island jail for nearly three years, after being falsely accused at the age of 16 of stealing a backpack. He was held in solitary confinement for two years and was repeatedly assaulted by guards and other prisoners.” The song/video was performed by 22 people who were wrongly incarcerated. In making the song/video, Giddens worked in partnership with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.
Smartphones are once again setting the agenda for justice as the Latino community documents ICE actions
By Allissa V. Richardson, The Conversation [June 18, 2025]
---- It has been five years since May 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. Five years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood outside Cup Foods, raised her phone and bore witness to nine minutes and 29 seconds that would galvanize a global movement against racial injustice. Frazier’s video didn’t just show what happened. It insisted the world stop and see. Today, that legacy continues in the hands of a different community, facing different threats but wielding the same tools. Across the United States, Latino organizers are raising their phones, not to go viral but to go on record. They livestream Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, film family separations and document protests outside detention centers. Their footage is not merely content. It is evidence, warning – and resistance. [Read More]
WAR WITH IRAN?
Top Things You Still Think You Know About Iran that are Not True
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [June 21, 2025]
Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US
Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of “no first strike.” This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.
Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.
Reality: Iran’s military budget in recent years has expanded from $10 billion a year around $15 billion annually, making it 25th in the world for such expenditures and putting it in the same range as Singapore and Uruguay. Algeria and Turkiye spend more, and Israel spends twice as much. Even if the war causes Iran to double its spending, it would still only match the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and would not reach the level of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Iran is a country of 92 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to some of these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. [And many more examples.] [Read More]
US Weighs Deeper Involvement in Israel’s Illegal Attacks Against Iran
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [June 20, 2025]
---- As Donald Trump threatens to further enmesh the U.S. in Israel’s war against Iran with direct strikes, legal experts warn that Israel’s attacks violate international law, and that U.S. attacks would also violate constitutional and statutory law. … Direct U.S. military involvement in Israel’s aggression against Iran would violate both the Declare War Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution, as well as international law. In Article 1, section 8, clause 11, the Constitution reserves to Congress, and only Congress, the power to declare war. U.S. involvement in Israel’s attacks on Iran violates the War Powers Resolution, which Congress enacted in 1973 to reclaim its constitutional authority to send U.S. troops into combat after the disastrous Vietnam War. The War Powers Resolution allows the president to introduce U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities only in three situations: where Congress has declared war; if there is an attack on U.S. territory, possessions, or armed forces; or when Congress has given authorization. None of these apply now. [Read More]
Self-Proclaimed “Peacemaker” Drags U.S. Into Another War
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [June 21 2025]
---- American warplanes bombed three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday night, bringing the U.S. military directly into Israel’s war with Iran. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” President Donald Trump incongruously wrote in a social media post announcing the attacks. Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and has cast himself as a “peacemaker.” In his second inaugural address, he pledged to “measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Trump also regularly claims to have opposed the Iraq War from its outset. (He actually supported it.) … The aim of the attacks, American and Israeli officials have said, is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. The U.S. intelligence community says that threat is not, however, real. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
(Video) Why is Israel killing so many Palestinians seeking food in Gaza?
From Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [June 18, 2025] – 28 minutes
---- As Israel attacks Iran, its genocide in Gaza has shown no signs of easing. At least 70 Palestinians were killed in a single day at a food distribution site run by a controversial US- and Israeli-backed group in Khan Younis, this week. All other aid channels are blocked - including medical supplies. So, what's the impact of this latest Israeli strategy? [See the Program]
The war with Iran shifts focus away from the ongoing killing in the Gaza Strip
[FB – Israel’s leading humanitarian rights group, B’Tsalem, sent out a report yesterday that describes what has been happening in Gaza recently. The B’Tsalem website is very useful to keep track of Israel’s atrocities towards Palestinians.]
Dear friends,
For a week now, the entire world has witnessed another sad, frightening, and infuriating escalation in the wake of Israel’s decision to attack Iran and open another front. This decision has already cost hundreds of lives in Iran and Israel and threatens to drag the world into another devastating war with unforeseeable consequences. Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation, which inherently involves human rights abuses, proves time and again that it speaks only the language of violence and force. Israel is exploiting the fog of war and the international community’s focus on Iran to continue, even escalate, its war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. … The combination of deliberate mass starvation and a manipulative strategy meant to move the population according to the army’s occupation plans is proving to be a death trap for Gaza’s residents, as every day, the Israeli military kills masses of starving, desperate people. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Climate Costs of War
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [June 20, 2025]
---- Scientific analyses have consistently concluded that military operations in general—transporting troops, testing weapons, maintaining bases (the United States has more than 700 worldwide)—and modern war in particular are the most carbon-intensive activities on Earth. The gargantuan amounts of oil and other fossil fuels used to fly planes, launch missiles, drive tanks, propel ships, and power supply vehicles emit staggering amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide. That’s partly because the fuel efficiency of most war equipment is vanishingly small. “We’re talking gallons per mile, not miles per gallon,” Neta C. Crawford, a professor at the University of Oxford and author of The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, told a Covering Climate Now press briefing last year. Emissions also spike when adversaries attack one another’s fossil-fuel infrastructure, as Israel, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine have reportedly done. [Read More]
Nuclear Winter Is a Climate Issue
By Norman Solomon, The Nation [June 19, 2025]
---- It would be the most severe and abrupt disruption to global ecological systems. Yet in many mainstream climate narratives, it’s rarely discussed. … A 2022 study estimated that “more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.” Detonating just a small percentage of the world’s nuclear weapons (which are now in the possession of nine countries) would cause “nuclear winter.” Writing in Scientific American last month after nuclear-armed India and Pakistan almost went to war, Rutgers University environmental sciences professors Alan Robock and Lili Xia explained: “A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom Despite the Best Efforts of ICE’s Intelligence Unit
By Shawn Musgrave, Znet [June 21, 2025]
---- Khalil’s case is just the latest instance in which federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards. One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to this effort: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, HSI has turned its surveillance apparatus on a different kind of target: noncitizens on college campuses with critical views of Israel. [Read More]
The Supreme Court’s Blindness to Transgender Reality
By M. Gessen, New York Times [June 19, 2025]
---- Speaking of the world: Moving through it is awkward, because you are a teenager. Being trans can make it more awkward still. Like when you are in a public place — including your school — and you need to use the bathroom. If you want to consider transitioning medically, you have to discuss the most intimate details of your life with doctors and involve your parents. I am asking you to imagine what it’s like to be a transgender teenager because that is exactly what the majority of the Supreme Court justices refused to do when they ruled in United States v. Skrmetti on Wednesday, upholding a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for minors. The plaintiffs in the case are three trans teenagers from Tennessee, their parents and a doctor, but there is scarcely a reference to them in the majority or concurring opinions. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Harming Young People”: Chase Strangio on SCOTUS Trans Healthcare Ban, from Democracy Now! [June 20, 2025] [Link]; and “The Supreme Court’s Anti-Trans Decision Will Live in Infamy,” by Elie Mystal, The Nation [June 18, 2025] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The Future of Sanctuary
By Lloyd D. Barba and Sergio M. González, Dissent Magazine [Spring 2025]
---- Over the last forty years, immigration and refugee justice activists have adopted and adapted the practice of sanctuary as a form of solidarity, sheltering undocumented individuals and families who have exhausted all legal recourse to remain in this country. What began as a faith-based movement has grown into an all-encompassing effort to transform cities, schools, and other public spaces into locations free from the specter of an ever-encroaching detention and deportation apparatus. The municipalities that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities”—a term first embraced by activists in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1980s—have adopted a number of different policies, the most important of which are noncooperation agreements, which limit how authorities within a given jurisdiction can work with federal immigration enforcement. … The re-election of Donald Trump has presented a wave of new obstacles for sanctuary activists. In just the first few weeks following his inauguration, Trump moved to make good on campaign promises to make life untenable for refugees, visa holders, and undocumented residents alike, signing executive orders that declared a national crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border, expanded the number of people who are deportable, and constrained the country’s asylum laws [Read More]
Community Defense Groups Take the Last Stand Against ICE in LA
By Claudia Villalona, The Intercept [June 21, 2025]
---- Across Los Angeles County, ICE’s operations played out differently. When combat-ready federal agents gathered in large numbers at staging areas in Paramount and Compton on June 8, protesters swiftly mobilized collective resistance efforts and emergency patrols. Agents responded to large crowds with tear gas, flash bangs, and so-called “less-lethal” weapons. Organizers maintain that this grassroots mobilization sabotaged enforcement operations, putting agents on the defensive and preventing them from conducting raids for the rest of the day. As ICE raids escalated across Los Angeles in early June, sending protesters into the streets and immigrant communities into hiding, the contrast between how the consequential weekend unfolded in different parts of the city was stark. Divergent outcomes in majority Latino areas further east with a long history of organizing and those largely disconnected from grassroots support highlighted the crucial role of community-led defense in the absence of meaningful government protection. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
(Video) Juneteenth Special: Historian Clint Smith on Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
From Democracy Now! [June 19, 2025]
---- We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. [See the Program]
The Vanishing Mr. Beame [NYC fiscal crisis 1974-77]
By Michael Greenberg, New York Review of Books [June 26, 2025 issue]
[FB – This is a review of the new documentary film, Drop Dead City. Now playing in NYC.]
---- Every four or eight years in New York City, on Inauguration Day, a mysterious transmutation takes place: the streets, the schools, the police, the weather, crime, and sometimes death itself suddenly belong to a new mayor, the way a book belongs to its author. Whether he is up to it or not, each mayor is vested with the very substance of the city during his time in office. … No mayor I know of embodied the city he presided over more thoroughly than Abraham Beame, who occupied Gracie Mansion during the city’s most dramatic postwar panic, 1974–1977. This is the fiftieth anniversary of New York’s descent into the abyss of near bankruptcy, the year of the indelible Daily News headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” (October 30, 1975). Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost have assembled an absorbing documentary anatomizing the drama that ended with New York narrowly avoiding default. Its tongue-in-cheek title is Drop Dead City. … With its riveting archival footage Drop Dead City evokes anew the sensational antiglamour of the Seventies. In the sweltering heat of summer, sanitation workers went on strike. An epidemic of landlord-funded arson ensued—the market value of the buildings was less than insurers would pay if they burned to the ground. Facing layoffs, members of police unions warned tourists to stay away lest they be robbed in their hotel rooms, mugged on the street, assaulted on the subway, or worse. The logo of their campaign—called “Fear City”—was a hooded skeletal face of death. The message was, We won’t protect you. [Read More]
