The Constitutional crisis generated by the lawlessness of Trump/Musk, and the world economic crisis caused by Trump’s tariffs have served to obscure Gaza’s on-going genocide. Both the Constitutional crisis and the threatened collapse of the world capitalist system certainly deserve all the news coverage and informed discussion that they can get. Yet the intended starvation of Gaza’s two million people and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, universities, journalists, housing stock, and UN relief organizations cannot be allowed to move to the back-burner of our over-burdened attention and consciousness.
At the end of the day, Gaza’s crisis is also an American crisis. Over decades, our elected leaders have supported Israel in its project of seizing Palestinian land and forcing Palestinians to leave their country or live in misery. Our government’s support for this project of “cleansing” includes billions of dollars a year in military equipment and the blocking of any UN criticism or action to end Israel’s oppression and killing of Palestinians. And since October 7, 2023 the USA has supported the war on Gaza far beyond any requirement of Israeli self-defense, now supporting even Israel’s plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza and to seize much of the West Bank.
For the last six weeks Israel’s genocide has targeted Gaza’s civilian population, intending to starve them. As Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz reports:
“For more than six weeks, no shipments of food, medicine, tents or any other form of aid have entered the Strip. It's not Hamas members who are paying the price, but rather hundreds of thousands of children, mothers, the elderly and the poor. According to a survey conducted by humanitarian agencies in Gaza, 3,696 children were hospitalized in March alone due to severe malnutrition. The UN World Food Programme has been forced to shut down all the bakeries it ran throughout the Strip, and most residents now rely on a single daily meal provided by UN-run kitchens. Most of Gaza's population has no access to fresh food, including meat, dairy products, eggs, vegetables or fruit. The severe hunger crisis is compounded by a lack of clean water, widespread tent-dwelling, the collapse of sewage and waste collection systems, the destruction of the healthcare system and more. These are all cumulative risk factors.”
It is obvious that this should be unacceptable to any civilized society, yet the refusal of the global elites – leaders, parliaments, etc. – to take any effective action to stop Israel speaks for itself. In our righteous clamor to defeat Trump/Musk and save whatever amount of democracy that we can, let’s not forget to raise our voices against the WORLD’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
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 weeks Rewards for stalwart readers offers the most recent CD from one of my favorites, New Orleans-style music from Tuba Skinny. On the Band Camp platform and thus no ads, listen to it here. And for a warm-up, perhaps you will also like Tuba Skinny’s “What's the Matter with the Mill?" featuring Erica Lewis. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Darfur Genocide Never Ended
By Emtithal Mahmoud, New York Times [April 20, 202]
[FB - Ms. Mahmoud is a Sudanese American poet and community organizer.]
---- Another chapter of horror has been unfolding in Sudan’s Darfur region, my home. On April 13, the Rapid Support Forces, an armed group backed by the United Arab Emirates, seized the Zamzam camp — a sanctuary and the largest camp for displaced people in Sudan. As a refugee and survivor of genocide, I’ve been glued to my phone, watching grainy videos of the atrocities and trying from afar to help evacuate survivors and get them food, water and medicine and tracking who is dead or alive. For two years, the R.S.F. has been locked in a war with the Sudanese Armed Forces, Sudan’s official military, backed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Russia. The capital, Khartoum, after being subjected to months of looting and sexual violence under R.S.F. occupation, is back under the Sudanese Armed Forces’ control, but in North Darfur, my hometown, El Fasher, is on the brink of falling to the paramilitary. [Read More]. ALSO OF INTEREST - “After two years of war in Sudan, the world can no longer plead ignorance,” by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization [April 16, 2025] [Link]
The Rise of End Times Fascism
By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Guardian [UK] [April 13, 2025]
---- The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island. … Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power. … If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse. … To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. [Read More]
The Literary Note
By Paul Buhle, Counterpunch [April 18, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of Steve Stern’s new book, A Fool’s Kabbalah: A Novel.]
---- The literature about Eastern Europe, including the Jews of Eastern Europe from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent decades. Out of this swirling mass of fiction and mostly non-fiction comes a fine novel, not really “Marc Chagall on LSD” as a blurber suggests on the cover, but remarkable enough in itself. One major theme of the emerging scholarship, perhaps one of the most surprising in several ways, is the deepening contextualization of the Jewish experience. In recent years, for instance, rich histories have been written about the (Jewish) Bund, with a following of tens or hundreds of thousands in the middle 1930s, at a time when Zionism remained marginal, attracting only modest interest. This is already far from the Hollywood, or for that matter the Israeli version of modern Jewish history. But there are larger themes as well. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Greenland Deserves Solidarity, Too,” by Nicky Reid, Counterpunch [April 18, 2025] [Link]; and “Trump’s Deranged Land Grabs Would Make Sense to Big Brother,” by Alfred McCoy, The Nation [April 17, 2025] [Link].
THE WAR IN GAZA
Emptying Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein)
From The Chris Hedges Report [April 18, 2025]
---- Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandoned their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda. Finkelstein makes clear the gravity of Israel’s unprecedented actions: “If you take any metric—number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed—if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.” [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “UN Expert: Israel Has “Decimated” Gaza Health System, Leaving “Zero” Options,” by Sharon Zhang, Truthout [April 17, 2025] [Link]; “(Video) Can Israel continue bombing Gaza’s health services?,” from Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [Link] and “‘Evacuate everywhere’: UN says humanitarian conditions in Gaza are now the worst they have been in last 18 months,” by Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [April 16, 2025] [Link].
WAR WITH IRAN?
Behind the US-Iran talks: five points of convergence between Trump and Khamenei By Seyed Hossein Mousavian, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [April 16, 2025]
[FB – Seyed Hossein Mousavian was involved as a representative of the Iranian government in nuclear negotiations with the US a decade ago, and is the author of The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir.]
---- Washington and Tehran will face many challenges in reaching an agreement, including pressure from warmongers in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran and proposals of unrealistic ideas such as Netanyahu’s suggestion of a “Libya-style” dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. But despite the multiple challenges negotiators face, at the heart of these discussions are five key points of convergence between Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and US President Donald Trump, both of whom have indicated an interest in de-escalating tensions and avoiding war. … One of the most striking points of agreement between Khamenei and Trump is their mutual opposition to the development of nuclear weapons by Iran. Despite the longstanding tensions and ideological differences between Tehran and Washington, both leaders agree that Iran should not pursue a nuclear bomb. In line with his longstanding stance, Khamenei has repeatedly declared that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and that acquiring nuclear weapons would go against Islamic principles. Trump has also said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons and should reach a “verified nuclear peace agreement.” [Read More]
Trump Waved Off Israeli Strike After Divisions Emerged in His Administration
By Julian E. Barnes, et al., New York Times [April 16, 2025]
---- Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program, according to administration officials and others briefed on the discussions. Mr. Trump made his decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran’s ability to build a bomb, at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically. The debate highlighted fault lines between historically hawkish American cabinet officials and other aides more skeptical that a military assault on Iran could destroy the country’s nuclear ambitions and avoid a larger war. It resulted in a rough consensus, for now, against military action, with Iran signaling a willingness to negotiate. Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May. They were prepared to carry them out, and at times were optimistic that the United States would sign off. The goal of the proposals, according to officials briefed on them, was to set back Tehran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more. Almost all of the plans would have required U.S. help not just to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, but also to ensure that an Israeli attack was successful, making the United States a central part of the attack itself. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
(Video) Mohsen Mahdawi’s Abduction “Should Terrify” Us, Says VT Rep. Balint, Whose Grandfather Was Killed in Holocaust
From Democracy Now! [April 16, 2025]
---- The Trump administration is now seeking to deport Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is being held in a prison in northwest Vermont. He was detained by Homeland Security agents when he went to an immigration services center to take a civics test that is the final step in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen. Mahdawi moved to Vermont from the West Bank in 2014 and has been a legal permanent resident, or green card holder, since 2015. All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation are calling for Mahdawi’s release, including Congressmember Becca Balint. “This should terrify every single person living in this country, regardless of your citizenship status,” says Balint. “This is Trump creating his own army of brownshirts right here in our country.” [See the Program]
(Video) “Unquestionably Unconstitutional”: Harvard Law Prof Slams Cuts as School Rejects Trump Demands
From Democracy Now! [April 16, 2025]
---- Harvard University has pushed back as President Trump ramps up his attacks on higher education. After Harvard rejected demands by the Trump administration to eliminate all DEI initiatives and further crack down on Palestinian rights protests, including reporting international students to federal authorities, the Trump administration said it’s freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard. University President Alan Garber wrote in a letter to the school community on Monday, “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” “This is an effort to try to take over the ideological agenda of the country by taking over universities,” says Andrew Manuel Crespo, professor at Harvard Law School and general counsel of the Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors. [See the Program]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Small Island States Are Leading the Fight Against Climate Change
By Shafraz Rasheed, Foreign Policy in Focus [April 17, 2025]
---- Small Island Developing States (SIDS) face some of the most severe threats from climate change. Dispersed across the world’s oceans, these nations are among the first to confront rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and shifting ecological patterns. Despite their vulnerabilities, however, SIDS have emerged as global leaders in climate advocacy, championing ambitious commitments and urgent international action. SIDS, including nations like the Maldives, Fiji, Barbados, and other Caribbean and Pacific Island communities, bear the brunt of climate change despite contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions. Rising sea levels pose an existential threat, with some islands at risk of submersion due to coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion. ... Many SIDS lack sufficient resources for swift recovery, making international climate financing not just important but critical. Compounding these challenges is the rising concern of climate-induced displacement, as environmental degradation forces communities to confront the harsh reality of relocation and uncertain futures. [Read More]
More Women View Climate Change as Their Number One Political Issue
---A new report from the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), shared first with The 19th, finds that far more women than men are listing climate and environmental issues as their top priority in voting. The nonpartisan nonprofit, which focuses on tailoring get out the vote efforts to low-propensity voters who they’ve identified as likely to list climate and environmental issues as a top priority, found that women far outpace men on the issue. Overall 62 percent of these so-called climate voters are women, compared to 37 percent of men. The gender gap is largest among young people, Black and Indigenous voters. … There is evidence that climate change and pollution impact women more than men both in the United States and globally. This is because women make up a larger share of those living in poverty, with less resources to protect themselves, and the people they care for, from the impacts of climate change. Women of color in particular live disproportionately in low-income communities with greater climate risk. This could help explain why there is a bigger gender gap between women of color and their male counterparts. In the EVP findings there is a 35 percent gap between Black women and men climate voters, and a 29 percent gap between Indigenous women and men. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Trump’s War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New
By Saree Makdisi, The Nation [April 17, 2025]
---- As people across the nation look on, aghast, at the footage of vulnerable students of color being abducted in broad daylight by the masked gunmen of ICE, it’s important to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of what we’re living through. This moment has been compared to McCarthyism. But the Red Scare was sold (however fraudulently) to the American people as a way to protect the country and its government from the threat of communist infiltration. The campaign of brute intimidation ravaging campuses across the country is not being framed as a way of safeguarding the American government or political system; it is, rather, intended to protect a distant foreign regime and to shield it from criticism in the country whose taxpayers are increasingly unwilling to finance its system of apartheid and its program of genocidal violence. After all, not one of the students being pursued or detained today is accused of criticizing the United States or its system of government. Even now, in this gathering darkness, you can stand with a bullhorn in the middle of any American college campus, say what you want about Donald Trump or the American government, and not fear that you will be kidnapped by the state. Instead, what Trump’s targets are alleged to share is their criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their advocacy of universally acknowledged Palestinian rights. … What we are witnessing is thus not the return of McCarthyism but rather something entirely new. Plenty of governments have repressed free speech or academic freedom to protect themselves from criticism and dissent. But never before has a government repressed its citizens’ free speech and academic freedom in order to protect an entirely different country; never before have the rights of the citizens of a major metropolitan power been abrogated, or its leading institutions thrown into disorder, in order to safeguard the illegitimate and criminal policies of an insignificant client state thousands of miles away. … The reason that Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, Leqaa Kordia, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Rasha Alawieh, Mohsen Mahdawi, and others have been hunted down, rounded up, deported, forced into flight, or have gone into hiding, is because they are among the thousands of people whose names have appeared on one or another of the many blacklists assembled and maintained by the army of Zionist organizations—three dozen of which are gathered together in the Israel on Campus Coalition—that have been besieging our campuses since the 1990s with the sole intention of suppressing criticism of Zionism. [Read More]
They’re Coming For Us: Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide
By Joshua Frank, Counterpunch [April 18, 2025]
---- The U.S. government has stepped up its legislative efforts against non-profit media, viewing it as detrimental to its foreign policy goals. In November 2024, HR 9495, referred to as the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, was approved with a vote of 219-184. This legislation allows the Treasury Department to strip the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization it classifies as a “terrorist-supporting organization.” … The act would first target organizations that oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This legislation is not an isolated act but a continuation of the government’s crackdown on voices it finds uncomfortable–a ruthless campaign that dates back to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which laid the foundation for the PATRIOT Act, enacted after the 9/11 attacks. What we are experiencing now is an extension of these policies. The plan is to expand the government’s authority to curtail free speech. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Next Person in a Cell With No Charges Could Be You,” by Thom Hartmann, [April 15, 2025] [Read More]; and “How the Trump administration is using civil rights complaints over ‘antisemitism’ to end DEI and quash dissent on Palestine,” by Amira Jarmakani, Mondoweiss [April 17, 2025] [Link]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
You Only Get What You’re Organized To Take: The Power of the Poor in Trump’s America
By Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back, TomDispatch [April 16, 2025]
---- This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away — one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection — from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, ten million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. … This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Facing Trump’s America: In the Spirit of African American History and the Black Civil Rights Movement
By Douglas H. White, TomDispatch [April 18, 2025]
---- Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery. Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties were so long suppressed and denied. Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved. In their presence (as I well remember), you could feel their closeness to that terrible time in our history. When that Smithsonian news came out, I thought about the killings, rapes, lynchings, breeding, and selling of Black people that was, for several hundred years, so much a part of life in the United States of America and that was, if Donald Trump had anything to say about it, no longer to be part of the true history of the United States. I didn’t have to be reminded of who I was or my status as a Black American that day, or of the history he’d like to wipe out, because I lived in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and racism and Jim Crow were then in my face every day of my existence. So, let me tell Donald Trump a thing or two. [Read More]
The Warsaw ghetto Uprising Wasn’t Always Celebrated
By Joseph Mogul, Znet [April 20, 2025]
---- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the largest Jewish-led armed resistance to the Holocaust — prompted Nazi occupiers in Warsaw to raze the entire urban area. The open-air prison where 450,000 Jewish people had once dwelled suddenly ceased to exist. Today the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is universally commended in Poland and around the world as a bold act of resistance, but this was far from the case when it occurred. In the streets of Warsaw, many non-Jewish Poles rejoiced as their neighbors burned. On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, another population is burning. Israel’s ongoing genocide has devastated Gaza, damaging or destroying over 90 percent of its housing, displacing nearly two million Palestinians, and killing over sixty thousand, including around eighteen thousand children. Israelis have mostly expressed support for this calamity in a rhetorical landscape shockingly reminiscent of Warsaw 1943. … Memorials exist to shape the future. On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals that the world has failed to heed its lessons. When the dust settles in Gaza, what will we remember? [Read More]
