Hello All - “You don’t know if you will live another minute,” said the Palestinian journalist reporting on-air from Gaza yesterday. We could hear explosions in the background. Her reporting had focused on the impact of the blockade on food, medicine, and fuel imposed on Gaza since the renewal of Israel’s war at the beginning of March. But now bombs were falling around her, interrupting the tale of mass starvation.
Against a video background of a mob of children screaming and begging for food, waving their pans and buckets at a UN food kitchen, the Gaza reporter described what it meant to have no fresh food, or no food of any kind that could be afforded, to have no clean water, and to have little medical help when a person became sick from drinking unclean water or going without food for several days.
These are scenes and reportage that seldom, if ever, are broadcast on American (or Israeli) media. Since the renewal of the war, Israel has killed more than 900 Gazans. The water desalinization plant has been destroyed. The World Food Program reports that it has only 2 weeks of food remaining. During the ceasefire, up to 800 trucks of supplies had entered Gaza each day. Now, nothing. We are watching a genocide in real time. What can be done? What can WE do? Speaking out against this genocide is a start. Let’s listen to the words of Kaveh Akbar, below.
What Will You Do?
By Kaveh Akbar, The Nation [March 28, 2025]
---- They are coming for us. I’m a US citizen, a writer with a good job that pays me more than I need to feed and house myself. I’m safer than many—most, probably—who look and pray like me. That relative safety feels in my guts like a moral imperative. To what? To leverage the delta between my moral outrage and the disappeared’s terror, the bombed’s delirium, the starved’s desperate hunger, into action. And to say it plain, I am scared. That the administration and its acolytes will target me specifically. It doesn’t feel that irrational. I’ve signed petitions, written letters, often say the words “Gaza” and “genocide” and “fascist” into hot mics. The administration’s algorithms of intimidation and terror are working. This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I. [Read More]
(Video) Remembering Hossam Shabat: Gaza Journalist Killed by Israel Was Placed on “Hit List” Before His Death
From Democracy Now! [March 25, 2025]
---- On Monday, Israeli strikes killed two Palestinian journalists: Al Jazeera’s Hossam Shabat, who was 23 years old, and Palestine Today’s Mohammed Mansour, who was killed in his apartment alongside his wife. This brings the total number of journalists that Israel has killed in Gaza over the past year and a half to 206. Just before his death, Shabat had shared news of Mansour’s killing on social media and filed an article with Drop Site News describing Israel’s scorched-earth campaign in his hometown of Beit Hanoun. His editor Sharif Abdel Kouddous remembers Shabat as a “warm and funny person,” dedicated to his job and his community. In recent months, he had been under increasing surveillance by the Israeli military, which labeled him a terrorist and placed him on a “hit list.” Despite being “targeted and openly hunted,” Shabat “continued nevertheless to cover the genocide of his people.” [See the Program] - ALSO OF INTEREST – To read “Hossam Shabat’s Last Article,” from Drop Site News [March 24, 2025] go here.
NEWS NOTES
What can we do? The question on everyone’s mind. As a useful pump primer, check out this video, “National Teach-In: Noncooperation with Trump,” with Aviva Chomsky, Norman Solomon, et al., [March 28, 2025] [See the Program]
Last week, the peace & justice organization Code Pink was repeatedly attack by the Trump people, “claiming we are funded by or take orders from foreign governments or groups like Hamas.” Code Pink calls these “false accusations,” and goes on to say “because we are loud and effective, they are attacking and trying to silence us with smears and intimidation. We do not believe they will stop at us.” But we ALL have been warned and must be ready to help.
Bernie Sanders, now joined by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is on a Fight Oligarchy Tour, drawing huge audiences in Red State districts like Nevada and Arizona. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones magazine joined the tour and now brings us this terrific 8-minute video.
JOIN US ON APRIL 5TH IN HASTINGS – “HANDS OFF!”
Next Saturday, April 5th, there will be almost 1,000 rallies and events across the USA to protest the Trump/Musk attacks on our rights, our institutions, and our lives. One of these events will be here in Hastings, at the VFW Plaza, at noon. We expect several hundred people to attend. Please join us! Our rally will include an “open mic,” so that all can speak who wish to do so, as well as speeches from community leaders, some live music, and a short march. We have hopes of some media coverage. When the Trump/Musk people are destroying institutions that protect our health and welfare, when Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and much else are under the gun, we will stand up and say, “Stop the Cuts!”
But we join Code Pink and others in pointing out that the Hands-Off checklist does not include war and peace. Let’s include some posters such as “Hands Off Gaza,” “Hands Off Greenland,” and “Hands Off Canada.” Here Medea Benjamin questions why Hands Off includes NATO in the list of things to be protected, not cut. Peace is precious – hands off!
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!
It has been too long since we’ve last seen the fabulous Nicholas Brothers and their great tap-dancing. Here is a sequence I like, Chattanoga Choo-Choo, from the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade,” with Dorothy Dandridge. And here is their amazing sequence from “Stormy Weather” (1943). Don’t try this at home. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS & ARTICLES
The First 50 Days: “Perversifying” the Misdeeds of the Past
By Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch [March 26, 2025]
---- Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done — through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort — left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law. And — lo and behold! — now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as — if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours — the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country. While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy. [Read More]
The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine
By Adam Entous, The New York Times [March 29, 2025]
---- This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies. A New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field. One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said. [Read More]
(Video) Elon Musk’s Family History in South Africa Reveals Ties to Apartheid & Neo-Nazi Movements
From Democracy Now! [March 27, 2025]
---- Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life,” said McGreal. “If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call.” [See the Program]
Radical Change Isn’t Free [Children of the Black Panthers]
By Ed Pilkington, The Guardian [UK] [March 25, 2025]
---- Fred Hampton Jr was days away from taking his first breath when his father was assassinated. Still in his mother’s womb, he would have sensed the shots fired by police into his parents’ bedroom at the back of 2337 Monroe Street, Chicago. … Now 55, Fred Hampton Jr self-identifies as “chairman” in his own right. Not of the Black Panther Party, but of the Panther cubs – the children of the movement. As he put it: “I am a Black Panther cub by birth, as well as by battle.” The Guardian has talked to nine Panther cubs across the US over the past two years. All have shared intimate stories about their exceptional childhoods, born to parents who challenged America’s white establishment in a bid for what they saw as Black self-determination. They talked about being witness to a seminal period of Black history, from the late 1960s onwards. And they also articulated a painful truth: that radical change does not come for free. It commands a price that so often is paid by the children of the revolution. Hampton Jr has a particularly poignant way of encapsulating the emotional roller-coaster of his 55 years on Earth. “This is a blessing and a burden,” he said. “There is heat that comes with this. I don’t regret it. I’m not crying the blues.” [Read More]
Mr. Block and Franklin Rosemont
By Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch [March 28, 2025]
---- [Rosemont] didn’t like misery at all and, he loved the marvellous. We have such a book of Franklin Rosemont’s writing, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2025). It’s totally splendid like a jewelry box of pearls, rubies, saphires, and diamonds. Some for special occasions, ceremonial, intimate, beautiful, and some world-changing providing a great clearing of the air letting us see clearly or a thaw of the ice a releasing forgotten tales from the campfires or kitchen tables. It has thirty-five chapters divided in seven parts, namely, Americana and Chicagoana, Comics and Animation, Music and Dance, Labor History, Play and Humor, Ecology, and Reminiscence. Its playful original prose is infectious. …. Is there a question about what he stood for? Here is his credo as concise and comprehensive a definition of woke as you could possibly find outside your sleeping bag. “In poetry as in life I am for freedom and against slavery: for the Indians against the European invaders and the American explorers; for the black insurrections against the white-power structure; for guerrillas against colonial administrators and imperialist armies; for youth against cops, curfews, school, and conscription; for wildcat strikers against bosses and union bureaucrats; for poetry against literature, philosophy, and religion; for mad love against civilized repression and bourgeois marriage; and for the surrealist revolution against complacency, hypocrisy, cowardice, stupidity, exploitation, and oppression.” [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?
By Rashid Khalidi, The Guardian [UK] [March25, 2025]
---- It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to. While partisans of the Israeli-American mass slaughter in Gaza may have been offended by their protests, large numbers of the students whose rights of free speech have been infringed upon via draconian punishments were themselves Jewish. … This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17-month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland. These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by the New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university. [Read More]
(Video) Hip-Hop Star Macklemore on New Film “The Encampments” & Why He Speaks Out Against Israel’s War on Gaza
---- We’re joined by the four-time Grammy-winning musician Macklemore, a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights and critic of U.S. foreign policy. He serves as executive producer for the new documentary The Encampments, which follows last year’s student occupations of college campuses to protest U.S. backing of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. He tells Democracy Now! why he got involved with the film and the roots of his own activism, including the making of his song “Hind’s Hall,” named after the Columbia student occupation of the campus building Hamilton Hall, which itself was named in honor of the 5-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab. Rajab made headlines last year when audio of her pleading for help from emergency services in Gaza was released shortly before she was discovered killed by Israeli forces. “We are in urgent, dire times that require us as human beings coming together and fighting against fascism, fighting against genocide, and the only way to do that is by opening up the heart and realizing that collective liberation is the only solution,” Macklemore says. [See the Program] [FB – “The Encampments” is playing at The Angelika in the East Village through Thursday. For a trailer and the schedule, go here.]
Reading, Writing, and Redbaiting: When McCarthy stalked the groves of academe.
By Alan Wald, Boston Review [October 1, 1986]
[FB – This is a review of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, by
Ellen Schrecker]
---- Ellen Schrecker’s new book provides strong evidence that [David] Caute was justified in calling the witch-hunt phenomenon “The Great Fear.” It demonstrates that there was a blacklist in academia as comprehensive as the more famous one in the entertainment industry. And it strengthens Caute’s charge that there was complicity on the part of Cold War liberals with the witch hunt. … Using American colleges and universities as a case study, Schrecker convincingly shows that anything short of militant rejection of the witch hunt only served as grist for the rationalization-producing mills that enabled administrators to persecute faculty for their views in the name of “academic freedom.” At each step most universities slavishly followed the national trends, quickly and shamelessly abandoning any legitimate claim to being havens for dissent. Central to her argument is the claim that the ideology and even certain features of the apparatus of the future witch hunt in academia were already in place long before McCarthy launched his campaign, and before university trustees and administrators felt forced to capitulate to outside pressure. [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
Why Israel’s plans to forcibly depopulate Gaza won’t work
By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [March 26, 2025]
---- The Israeli war cabinet approved the creation of a special agency to organize the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza on Sunday. It was in line with the announced plan of U.S. President Donald Trump to expel Palestinians from the Strip, even though the U.S. has since backed down from it. Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the cabinet was briefed on the “international dimensions” of creating the special agency and that Israel’s Defense Ministry under Israel Katz would oversee the creation and implementation of the expulsion plans. … The idea of establishing a special body to transfer Palestinians from Gaza is not new. In 1971, Israel started a plan to “thin out” Gaza’s population by contacting Palestinians and offering to transfer them to Egypt — and threatening to demolish their homes if they refused. But this time, Israel’s attempt is different; it is explicit, public, and enjoys the full support of the U.S. More importantly, this time is willing to go all the way to accomplish its displacement agenda. But it also won’t work in eliminating Palestinian resistance, even if Gaza is ethnically cleansed. [Read More]
Amid Gaza Protests: – Top 5 Ways Israeli PM Netanyahu kept Hamas in Power
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [March 29, 2025]
---- Demonstrations against Hamas broke out this week in Gaza, beginning in Beit Lahia on Tuesday, and continuing on Wednesday there and in Shuja’iyyah in the north of Gaza, where people set tires on fire. They chanted for the end of the war, but then began shouting slogans against Hamas and especially its late leader, Yahya al-Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that kicked off a year and a half of Israeli total war on Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. … Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of the desperation of the people he had bombed relentlessly -- and deprived of homes, water, food, hospitals and medicine — to maintain that their desperation vindicated his repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute and the United Nations Charter. But he and the Israeli government bear their own responsibility for the longevity of Hamas … If the PLO had been put in power in Hamas instead, there would have been no October 7. Even if, after Oct. 7, the PLO had been sent in to Gaza, Netanyahu wouldn’t have had a pretext to level it and kill some 300,000 people — the likely death toll deriving from the current total war as its health effect unfold in coming years. Netanyahu has been conducting the vastest land grab in modern history in Palestine, and keeping Gaza under Hamas was key to it. Now he has a pretext, and the willing help of the Trump administration, to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of its Palestinians entirely. It was never about Israeli security. It was about Greater Israel. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israel’s war on Gaza was never about Hamas,” by Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [March 29, 2025] [Link]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Top Seven Things People Get Wrong About the Ukraine-Russia War
By Arnold Oliver, Informed Comment [March 26, 2025]
----- As the Russo-Ukraine war drags into its third year, peace talks are finally underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. All parties to the conflict are busy trying to control the narrative. While we do not exonerate Russia from its very bad behavior, others have behaved badly as well. Let us briefly describe some of the major claims being made in the West, why they are wrong, and assist you in creating your own narrative. First Error: Prior to Trump, the United States was committed to helping Ukraine defeat Russia. This is not correct. For the past three years the US limited the arms sent to Ukraine, in both quantity and type, as well as how they could be used. And the US tried to ensure that NATO did the same thing. Perhaps fearing a wider war that could involve nuclear weapons, the US never provided the arms to make a Ukrainian victory possible. In fact, the US never pledged to help restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. If victory was not in the cards, then what was the goal of US support for Ukraine? As former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin remarked in an unguarded moment, the goal was to weaken Russia. Ukraine became a convenient proxy to achieve that end. Sorry about all that blood. [And 6 more “errors.”] [Read More]
WAR WITH YEMEN?
Bombing Yemen: Signalgate Deserves to Be a Major Scandal
By Phyllis Bennis, The Nation [March 27, 2025]
---- The violation of intelligence rules was a really big deal. One or two heads might roll—or maybe it’ll soon be overtaken by an even bigger incompetence scandal. But the biggest threat—that has already resulted in real lives lost—is being ignored. And that is the threat to the lives of Yemeni people—who, how many, how many were children, we still don’t know—being killed by US bombs across the poorest nation in the Arab world. The US bombing of Yemen—always referred to as “bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger—had begun under the Biden administration in January 2024. Like Israel’s bombing of Gaza, US bombs, drones, missile strikes sometimes managed to kill someone who was part of the Houthi military wing—officially known as Ansar Allah—or destroyed some piece of military equipment. But, like Israel’s assault on Gaza, the US bombing of Yemen took place across the country—in major cities including the capital Sanaa, the port city of Hodeidah and numerous other towns, where ordinary Yemenis live. And those US bombs killed those ordinary Yemenis. [Link].
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Trump Says He Wll Continue Bombing Yemen for a ‘Long Time’” by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [March 27, 2025] [Link]; and “The Real Yemen Scandal Has Zero to Do With Jeffrey Goldberg,” by Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine [March 2025] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan
By Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, The Guardian [UK] [March 23, 2025]
---- Something unprecedented – and deeply unsettling – is unfolding: under the guise of a legal redefinition of antisemitism, the basic architecture of American public life is being radically transformed. What appears, at first glance, to be a technical change in terminology has become a powerful instrument for political control, solidifying executive power to enforce a narrow, state-sanctioned definition of Judaism. In the name of combating antisemitism, this effort threatens to reshape American public life – and with it, the pillars of American liberalism. But despite what some will have you believe, two things are clear: first, this campaign does not protect Jews – it endangers them; and second, this redefinition plays into a larger Christian nationalist project. … The increasingly aggressive use of “antisemitism” as a political instrument was never about Jewish safety. It has always been about power: consolidating a political order that merges religion, nationalism and authoritarianism under the veneer of minority protection. The threat is immediate and ongoing. Already, whole sectors of society – educators, students, artists, political activists and immigrants – are paying the price. And if this continues, we can expect the same logic to be applied across a wider range of policies: tightening ideological control, redefining constitutional norms and re-engineering public institutions in the image of an authoritarian state. [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
In Trump’s Dragnet [Immigrants]
By Julia Preston, New York Review of Books [March 30, 2025]
---- Many Americans who voted for Trump told reporters that they were dismayed by images of crowds of migrants coming across the southwest border and by the soaring costs of sheltering them for some northern cities and states. Those voters often said they expected him to focus on tightening border security and expelling criminals. But that is not what Trump is doing, nor is it what he ever said he planned to do. Instead he is waging an intricately planned assault on every aspect of the immigration system, the broadest and most systematic government crackdown at least since World War II. Since his return to the White House, Trump has been constructing a nationwide enforcement regime to carry out a purge of millions of immigrants, whether or not they have any criminal history; indeed regardless of whether they have an official legal status or protection, even a permanent resident green card. Rather than prioritizing enforcement at the border, he is expanding border enforcement—with its special provisions that reduce due process—across the country. Places deep in the interior are becoming borderlands where virtually any immigrant is subject to suspicion, identity checks, and possibly swift removal. To increase the population vulnerable to his deportations, Trump is seeking to strip hundreds of thousands of immigrants of lawful protections they were granted under Biden or earlier administrations. He is also launching an effort, based on a little-used immigrant registration statute, to identify and criminalize millions of undocumented immigrants, including the large majority of them who have lived in the country for years and never been convicted of a crime. [Read More]
Labor Unions Rise As America’s Defiant Shield Against Trump’s Authoritarianism
By Euan Gibb & Ethan T. Young, Public Service International [March 26, 2025]
---- As it becomes increasingly clear what a second Trump presidency means, America's labor movement has positioned itself as democracy's strongest, most important and best organized line of defense against a sweeping authoritarian agenda. The unions forming our workforce's backbone—from teachers to nurses, service workers to government employees—have transformed from worker advocates into the vanguard defenders of democracy, confronting the existential threat of Project 2025's plan to dismantle America's most important institutions. This coordinated assault targets democracy's foundations through three interlocking strategies: gutting the federal workforce using executive actions, privatizing essential social programs like Social Security and Medicare, and auctioning off critical services including the U.S. Postal Service to corporate interests. These moves represent more than policy changes—they constitute a wholesale transfer of public goods into private hands, deliberately eroding worker protection while restructuring government to serve elite interests. [Read More]
