The Freedom Flotilla carrying aid to Gaza is now in its final approach. Launched on June 1st from Sicily, the “Madleen” carries a crew of 12 and is now off the coast of Egypt. It will reach Gaza – or be intercepted by Israeli military force – within hours. The world watches – and you can too on this Aljazeera page. For a useful overview of the Madleen’s journey, recommended is “The Freedom Flotilla: Bravely Breaking the Siege Against Gaza,” from Foreign Policy in Focus [Link].
According to one of the crew, European Member of Parliament Rima Hassan (French), “The Israeli military plans to intercept and seize the ship by deploying missile boats and elite Shayetet 13 naval commandos.” (Shayetet 13 is the Israeli Navy’s primary special commando unit, often compared to the US Navy Seals and known for its secretive, high-risk raids)..
There have been many attempts by peace activists to break Israel’s blockade and bring food and humanitarian supplies to Gaza over many years, none of them successful. The most notable example of Israel’s cruelty was the May 31, 2010 attack on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, during which 10 people were killed, including a US-Turkish dual citizen.
So the “boat to Gaza” is a brave undertaking, and the risks to the crew are serious. Among the crew members is Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was interviewed last week by Democracy Now! While she was in the middle of the Mediterranean. Hear what she had to say.
While Israel blockades Gaza, the mainstream media in the USA blockades the work of peace activists in attempting to bring food and medicine to the 2 million people suffering and starving. Little or nothing has appeared about the Madleen in mainstream media, and the plight of people suffering from Israel’s US-supported war is drowned out by the tsunami of noise about Trump, Trump, Trump. Please pay attention and honor the valiant crew of the boat to Gaza.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING LAST WEEK’S NEWS
(Video) US stands utterly isolated at the UN Security Council over Israel
From Aljazeera [June 4, 2025] – 28 minutes
---- Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara highlights the growing isolation of the United States at the UN over its stance on Gaza. He emphasizes the contrast between Washington’s support for Israel and mounting global criticism, including from close allies like the UK. Bishara suggests the US has acted as a dam blocking ceasefire resolutions since October 23, but that barrier is beginning to crack. With rising international and domestic pressure, he sees a swelling current of opposition that may soon challenge US policy at the Security Council. [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Why did the US block a resolution demanding an end to Israel’s war on Gaza?” from Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [June 5, 2025] [Link]
A Grim Poll Showed Most Jewish Israelis Support Expelling Gazans. It's Brutal – and It's True
By Dahlia Scheindlin, Haaretz [Israel] [June 3, 2025]
---- A new survey showing that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Gazans was met with disbelief among those who stubbornly believe that the extremists are outliers. But these trends are as consistent as they are shocking. ...Every so often something forces Israelis to confront the terrible things their society has done. This can happen anywhere. The Israeli historian Elazar Barkan wrote a whole comparative study about how countries acknowledge their historic guilt. But it's ironic that in the midst of the most brutal action Israel has ever perpetrated, it was a public opinion survey that sparked such a reckoning. ...Within days I began receiving anguished inquiries about the results. Friends, colleagues, peace activists, journalists and strangers wrote in from Australia to Uruguay to down the block, asking if it could possibly be true that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support "the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?" No less than 54 percent of Jewish respondents were "very" supportive. [Read More]
When Will Western Support for Israeli Genocide Finally Crack?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [June 5, 2025]
---- The U.S., U.K., Canadian, and other governments remain deeply complicit in Israel's atrocities and violations of international law. But the rhetoric is shifting and protest movement is growing louder…. After 20 months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5th? On May 30th, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing. “We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.” [Read More]
“NO KINGS DAY” EVENTS – IN YONKERS & ELSEWHERE
On Saturday, June 14th, more than 1,000 rallies, demonstrations, and marches will take place across the USA to protest the dictatorial government of DJTrump. “No Kings.” – The national leadership says: “NO KINGS is a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption from Trump and his allies. We’ve watched as they’ve cracked down on free speech, detained people for their political views, threatened to deport American citizens, and defied the courts. They’ve done this all while continuing to serve and enrich their billionaire allies.”
CFOW will join with local groups Safeguarding Democracy, the Yonkers Branch of the NAACP, and Indivisible CD16/15 to hold an event in Yonkers on Warburton Ave, at the Hudson Fulton Memorial Park (Warburton & Odell Avenues) starting at noon and going to 2 p.m. To learn more and to REGISTER for the event, go here.. The Plan is for form a line of protesters with signs and flags on the sidewalk along Warburton Ave. There are some benches, but bringing a chair might be a good idea.
NO KINGS DAY will be a peoples’ reply to Trump’s Flag Day, Army Day, and His Birthday parade in Washington DC. The cost of this extravaganza may top $50 million.
The parade even has its own hit song. And the whole family will enjoy the new & very popular Trump music video, "Taco, Taco, Taco.” Join the fun on June 14th!
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
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Letter from Gaza: The Nakba We Are Living Through
By Hamza M.Salha, Drop Site News [June 2, 2025]
---- The genocide in Gaza is fast approaching 20 months since it began. My family and I have been displaced from our home in the Jabaliya refugee camp several times, but this is the first time we were forced to leave the north and flee south to Deir al-Balah, from where I am writing to you. Living in Jabaliya had become impossible. By stripping us of our health and money, ongoing displacement has forced changes on us: from being a proud family to one that lives in humiliation. We were pushed south last month, during Israel’s fourth invasion of Jabaliya in mid-May. In preparation for yet another ground invasion, the Israeli military started pounding Jabaliya with airstrikes, leveling buildings to the ground. Israeli troops began advancing from the north and the east, getting closer every day. [Read More]
Robert Jay Lifton: Connoisseur of Hope
By James Carroll, Provincetown Independent [January 31, 2024] [h/t JG]
[FB – This is a review, sort of, of Robert Lifton’s Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal From Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Read on!]
---- In his 13th book, the celebrated psychiatrist forges meaning from catastrophe. … Karl Marx famously said, “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.” But what if interpreting the world is precisely the way to change it? Ordinarily, that question might seem impossibly abstract, but not this year, with its unprecedented challenges to democracy, peace, the health of the planet, and our hopes for children everywhere — including our own children and grandchildren. How, indeed — with all of that — do we change the world? [Read More]
(Video) As U.S. Vetoes U.N. Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Kathy Kelly & Veterans Enter 3rd Week of Hunger Strike
From Democracy Now! [June 5, 2025]
---- A group of veterans and their allies have entered their third week of a “Fast for Gaza” outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The group is calling for an end to arms sales to Israel and of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. We hear from multiple hunger strikers on their decisions to join the planned 40-day action and why they are pressuring the U.N. in particular. “We wake up each morning, and we don’t worry about whether or not our children have been buried under rubble overnight. We’re not drinking poisoned water. We’re not surrounded by rubble. We’re not dealing with the horrible traumas that people in Palestine and Gaza are dealing with,” says peace activist Kathy Kelly, who started her hunger strike two weeks ago. “What would make us stop? Well, certainly, if there were a permanent, unconditional, immediate ceasefire.” [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Prisons of Gaza and Home – Fast for Gaza, Day 14,” by Kathy Kelly [June 5, 2025] [Link].
Staying in Motion [The JVP National Meeting]
By Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents [May 28, 2025]
---- This ominous image, implicitly likening the organization to a fallen tree, was a striking note on which to close—a reminder of JVP’s alarming vulnerability to repression even at a moment of unprecedented influence. It cut a sharp contrast to the mood of the rest of the convening, which was by all accounts a show of force. The meeting drew over 2,000 attendees from 45 states, and featured distinguished speakers including politicians like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and activist intellectuals like Naomi Klein, Angela Davis, and Noura Erakat. After decades spent countering a charge of marginality from the Jewish establishment (and sometimes, subtly, from other corners of the Jewish left), JVP now appears to be the beating heart of an anti-Zionist Jewish movement that polling suggests claims anywhere from a fifth to a third of American Jews. Since October 7th, those disgusted by the Israeli genocide in Gaza have flocked to the organization, which has doubled in size over the past 19 months, claiming 32,000 dues-paying members from over 100 chapters across the country. High-profile arrestable actions from an October 2023 takeover of Grand Central Station to a March 2025 sit-in at Trump Tower have made their black or red t-shirts, with the block-letter slogans “Not In Our Name” and “Stop Arming Israel,” a potent symbol of American Jewish refusal. [Read More]
The Normalization of Evil: We Thought We Were Free
By Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report [June 4, 2025]
---- It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like. This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness. Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.” But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it. Let’s not forget…. [Read More]
ISRAEL’S WAR ON PALESTINE
(Video) “Death Traps”: U.S.-Israeli Aid Scheme Paused in Gaza After 100+ Palestinians Killed While Waiting for Food
From Democracy Now! [June 4, 2025]
---- Officials in Gaza say over 100 Palestinians have been killed during recent Israeli attacks on people waiting at aid sites. An additional 500 are wounded. Following the series of deadly attacks, the shadowy U.S.-Israeli humanitarian aid operation is shutting down for a day, and Israel’s military warned Palestinians that roads leading to the aid distribution centers will be considered “combat zones.” The United Nations has called for a prompt and impartial investigation into each of the attacks. The U.S.-Israeli aid system is “more about the humiliation and the control of the people” than feeding Palestinians, says Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s food security and livelihoods coordinator in Gaza, who joins us from Gaza City. [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Hidden Story: Israeli ‘Aid’ Is Part of Genocide Plan,” by Belén Fernández, [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting” – FAIR] [June 6, 2025] [Link]
Parents in Gaza Are Running Out of Ways to Feed Their Children: ‘All We Want Is a Loaf of Bread’
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, New York Times [June 7, 2025]
----A New York Times article last year described two families struggling to keep their malnourished children alive in Gaza. Now, as Israeli restrictions keep out most aid, that’s even harder. …It had made sense to Nour Barda and Heba al-Arqan in November 2023 to try for another baby when a temporary truce had just taken hold in Gaza. Mr. Barda’s father, who had only sons, kept asking when he might have a granddaughter at last. By the time Ms. al-Arqan found out she was pregnant last year, things in Gaza were much worse. When she gave birth to Shadia this April, there was so little to eat that Ms. al-Arqan, 25, had almost no milk to give. … But now she and her husband had two babies to keep alive at a time when Israel had blocked almost all aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months — 80 days of total siege beginning in March. Israel began to ease the blockade in May, but only a thin trickle of supplies has arrived. [Read More]
Over 2,700 Children under Five Diagnosed with Acute Malnutrition – UN
From Palestine Chronicle [June 5, 2025]
---- More than 2,700 children in Gaza, under the age of five, have been diagnosed with acute malnutrition, according to the UN. This figure, from the second half of May, reflects “a sharp deterioration” in the nutritional situation of children, the UN’s Nutrition Cluster said in the latest Humanitarian Situation Update posted on Thursday. … Preliminary analysis “indicates that out of 46,738 children under five years of age who were screened for malnutrition in the second half of May, 2,733 (5.8 per cent) were diagnosed with acute malnutrition.” “This is up from 4.7 per cent in the first half of May and almost triple the proportion of children diagnosed with malnutrition out of those screened in February 2025, during the ceasefire,” the report noted. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 1.4 Million, Study Finds
By Helene Cooper, New York Times [June 3, 2025]
---- Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on. The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million. Officials cautioned that casualty figures were difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. The study published on Tuesday relied on casualty figures from American and British government estimates, among other sources. … The center put the number of Russian troop deaths at close to 250,000 since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022. The study said that between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “The 2026 bill for the Ukraine war is already in the mail,” by Ian Proud, Responsible Statecraft [May 30, 2025] [Link].
WAR WITH IRAN?
Will Trump’s waffling lead to an escalation with Iran?
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [June 7, 2025]
---- The Reuters headline on Wednesday read, “Iran’s Khamenei dismisses U.S. nuclear proposal, vows to keep enriching uranium.” Reading that, anyone might believe that the region was gearing up for war and that talks between Washington and Tehran had collapsed. But on the very same day, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “U.S. Proposes Interim Step in Iran Nuclear Talks Allowing Some Enrichment.” This continued a stream of contradictory news stories that have been flying back and forth for days. … On the Iranian side, there is a clear position, even if the rhetoric sometimes veers into bombast. They are willing to submit to significantly intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that would verify that it is enriching uranium only to low levels for civilian needs. They are not willing to abandon uranium enrichment on Iranian soil completely, and they, quite reasonably, insist on clarity about the time frame and scope of the lifting of American and international sanctions that have crippled their economy. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
(Video) Mahmoud Khalil, Trapped in “Immigration Gulag” for Nearly 3 Months, Challenges Deportation Efforts
From Democracy Now! [June 5, 2025]
---- We get an update on the case of former Columbia University student protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil from Baher Azmy, a member of Khalil’s legal team at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Khalil has been detained in Louisiana for nearly three months, in what Azmy calls one of “our immigration gulags.” Khalil’s legal team is now challenging the State Department’s determination that his presence in the United States harms the country’s foreign policy interests. [See the Program]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Sleepwalking Through the Climate Emergency
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [June 5, 2025]
---- When cutting-edge reporting warned in 2018 that climate scientists feared the Amazon could flip from a humid rain forest into a dry savannah, it was shocking. Later, when updated science concluded that this potential flip was on the verge of actually happening, there was little news coverage outside the region. In 2020, when San Francisco’s skies turned orange with smoke from distant wildfires driven by record heat, that too was shocking, and it caused many newsrooms to lead their broadcasts and home pages with those unforgettable images. When more wildfires brought orange skies to New York three years later, they made headlines again, but without the same alarm; after all, we’d seen this before. The science is unequivocal: Our planetary house is on fire, and the flames are injuring more and more people every year, even as humanity fans those flames by burning ever more oil, gas, and coal. Yet most news coverage is sleepwalking through these developments as if they are simply the new normal. [Read More]
Upside-Down World: Climate Change and the Border-Industrial Complex in the Trump Era
By Todd Miller, Tom Dispatch [June 1, 2025]
---- Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe it out as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well: “Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 DHS Climate Action Plan stated that the department would “conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world (envisioned in movies like Mad Max) is coming to you directly from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican border. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) SCOTUS Ruling Lets Trump Strip Protections for 500K+ Immigrants
From Democracy Now! [June 3, 2025]
---- As the Trump administration vows to escalate its targeting of immigrants to 3,000 arrests a day, and the Supreme Court rules it can proceed with stripping some 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela of their legal status, we get an update from Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “It is the biggest mass delegalization in modern history of people who followed every single rule that the U.S. government asked of them,” says Jozef. “This has been a nightmare.” [See the Program]
New Book Details How U.S. Normalized Homelessness
By Randy Shaw, Beyond Chron [June 2, 2025]
---- Prior to 1982 the United States had no widespread visible homelessness since the Great Depression. Since 1982 homelessness has exploded. What happened? Why has the United States normalized nearly a million people living without homes even during economic boom times? Maria Foscarinis, a longtime activist and attorney representing the unhoused, answers this question in And Housing For All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America. Foscarinis details how the federal government’s failure to fund real solutions has allowed homelessness to not simply to persist but increase. Blaming federal policies, rather than the unhoused themselves, goes against the current political mood. But I also began combating homelessness in 1982 and found her analysis indisputable. Extreme cutbacks in government funding for affordable housing and mental health care that began under Nixon and worsened under Reagan have left far too many Americans unable to avoid homelessness. Four decades of rising homelessness has led many to seek alternative explanations. [Read More]
