Today several million people in more than 2,000 locations across the USA rallied to the slogan of “No Kings!” The rising crescendo of opposition to our authoritarian president and the people he speaks for is described in some essays linked below. What I think is especially important are the observations framing these protests as one of a converging anti-fascist front, a decentralized but clearly focused mass movement of a very broad spectrum of conscientious citizens who simply won’t take it any more. Our own local event, in Yonkers, drew as many as 1,000 people to line a major road with signs and chants, eliciting support and honks from those driving by. In a nutshell, as Trump escalates so do we, and we are many, they are few.
But where is the resistance to the genocide in Gaza and now the Israeli-instigated war on Iran? None of the half-dozen nationally organized events of the last 6 months have included (from their leadership) criticism of the US military budget, Israel’s war on Gaza, or US military adventurism abroad. In a sense, we have a rapidly growing anti-fascist movement that has a consensus of silence re: US support for the atrocities and war crimes against Palestinians. Can this be changed?
It is possible that Israel’s illegal and highly dangerous attack on Iran may change this. For decades, the Israel represented by Prime Minister Netanyahu has held the goal of engaging the United States in a war against Iran. Now the moment of vindication may have arrived. At the United Nations, the Iranian delegated repeated at length what Iran has broadcast over the last few months: that Iran will assume that any Israeli military action against Iran is supported and enabled by the United States, and thus US military installations and “interests” in the region will be “legitimate targets” for Iranian retaliation.
That this is a problem for the USA is illustrated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s lengthy protestations that the United States had no role in Israel’s decision to go to war or in the implementation of the attack. Of course nobody believes this. Trump himself alludes to knowing that the attack was coming. This, of course, raises questions about the US-Iran negotiations about the latter’s nuclear program, originally set to have its 6th meeting tomorrow. Were these negotiations intended simply to lull Iranian fears of an Israeli attack, believing that as long as they were cooperating with the United States (“the negotiations are going well,” reiterated Trump on many occasion), no attack would be launched. Several analysts think so (for example). Or was the Israeli attack intended to thwart what seemed to them (and to Trump) negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program that might lead to success? Several other analysts think so (for example).
Interesting questions, yes, but the rubber will hit the road if/when Iran attacks a US asset or military base in the Middle East, or if/when the United States assists Israel in defending against Iranian missile barrages headed toward Tel Aviv. The alternative – the United States demanding/ordering that Israel end its war – may be devoutly to be wished, but seems something unlikely that an American president (Biden, Trump) would do.
And so it may be that the growing anti-fascist front in the USA will have to decide whether foreign-military policy, and more pointedly US-Israeli military collaboration, becomes a target of the Resistance or continues to be an elephant-in-the-room to be ignored. We should know soon.
ISRAEL ATTACKS IRAN
The Illegal Attack on Iran
By Vijay Prashad, Counterpunch [June 13, 2025]
---- Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945). Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is therefore a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran. Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons…. Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons programme. [Read More]
Israel's Unprovoked Bombing of Iran Violates International Law. Full Stop.
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [June 13, 2025]
---- The government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday launched a war on Iran, bombing sites related to the latter’s civilian nuclear refinement program at Natanz and Fordow but also targeting Tehran apartment buildings where senior regime military figures were present. If Israeli fighter jets struck unenriched uranium stockpiles, they will have thrown radioactive dust into the air, which may cause lung cancer in the affected population. If they struck enriched uranium, that would be like a dirty bomb. Israel itself has several hundred atomic bombs and is the reason for the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, but Tel Aviv and Washington ignore this stockpile of warheads when they denounce Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program (and now try to destroy it), even though Iran does not have a bomb and no major Western intelligence agency thinks they have militarized their program. [Read More]
One Certainty About Israel’s Attack on Iran? We in the US Must Try to Stop It
By Phyllis Bennis and Khury Petersen-Smith, Common Dreams [June 13, 2025]
---- Israel’s attack on Iran opens a huge danger—a predictable pattern of escalation ushering in a new phase of the long-standing crises roiling the Middle East region. Certainly Israel has a long history of attacking Iran—including bombing raids; assassinations of political and military leaders as well as nuclear scientists; cyberattacks; assaults on Iranian allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond—and Iran has on occasion struck back. But although it is too soon to know exactly how this will play out, this latest assault holds the prospect of full-scale war between the two strongest military forces in the region, one of them backed by the strongest military power in the world. The specific role of the United States in the first hours and days of Israel’s war against Iran remains uncertain; we don’t know if U.S. forces were directly involved, whether or how much the Israelis relied on U.S. intelligence or other immediate assistance in carrying out the assaults on Tehran and other cities across Iran. What we do know is that Israel has always been able to count on continuing U.S. backing—economic, political, diplomatic as well as military—whether or not any particular White House administration supported or disagreed with any particular military attack, and whether or not that support involved direct U.S. military participation. [Read More]
NO KINGS DAY IN THE USA
As We Protest, We Build Solidarity': Millions Expected at 2,000+ 'No Kings' Rallies Nationwide
By Eloise Goldsmith, Common Dreams [June 13, 2025]
---- Organizers expect millions of people to turn out for nationwide "No Kings" protests on Saturday in order to register their disapproval of the intensifying authoritarianism of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has planned a military parade in Washington, D.C. on the same day, also his 79th birthday. Organizers behind the "No Kings" movement say that actions are planned in some 2,000 cities and towns throughout the country. [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 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
THE RESISTANCE GROWS STRONGER
American Spring? How nonviolent protest in the US is accelerating
By Erica Chenoweth, et. al., Waging Nonviolence [June 12, 2025]
---- On streets and highway passes, at intersections and in parks, millions of Americans continue to turn out to protest against the Trump administration and its policies. The media spotlight is currently focused on the ongoing protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles, and the Trump administration’s militarized response to them. In our research at the Crowd Counting Consortium, we do not yet have a full picture of the number and range of protests that have occurred in June. However, we do know that protests against ICE raids have been intensifying around the country for months, alongside protests opposing perceived power-grabs by the Trump administration. And we know that the movement’s tactics have been extraordinarily peaceful. … In fact, protests in the U.S. have been quite robust since Trump took office the second time. Our ongoing research on protests in the United States reveals that within the first two weeks of the second Trump administration, protest activity surpassed that of 2017. By the end of March 2025, there had been three times as many protests as had taken place in 2017. Protest has been surging since, with large boosts coming from major, multi-location actions in April and May. Two notable surges of protest came on the nationwide Hands Offs protests on April 5 and No Kings protests on April 19. To date, we have tallied 1,145 protests on April 5, with events occurring in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Significantly, protest activity occurred throughout the country, including in rural and GOP-leaning towns. For April 19, we tallied 928 protests also occurring in all 50 states and D.C. And on May 1 and May 3, we tallied over 1,000 anti-Trump May Day protests. [Read More]
The Movement-Based Opposition in Action
By Jeremy Brecher, Strike! [June 11, 2025]
---- The emerging movement-based opposition is a convergence of people and organizations dedicated to ending the power of MAGA and Trump. It has been manifested in national days of action like Hands Off! MaydayStrong, 50501, and the upcoming No Kings Day. It can be seen in the coordinated action of hundreds of local and national organizations, ranging from Indivisible and MoveOn to the ACLU to the recently self-organized 50501, to dozens of major national and local unions. It is embodied in thousands of local and sectoral action groups and coalitions with many different affiliations or none at all. This commentary identifies potential growth points in the movement-based opposition, explores how to nurture and expand them, and indicates what they might achieve. These organizations and actions, however varied they may be, are gradually emerging as aspects of one movement-based opposition. Like a growing plant or animal, the movement-based opposition needs not only to grow in size, but to develop new capacities and the structures to realize them. And it needs to feel and project an identity not just as a collection of separate constituencies and organizations, but also as a coordinated converging whole. The movement-based opposition is more than just a lobby or a political faction. It is one part of a rising by society against the MAGA attack. That defense of society includes those courts, civil society institutions, and political forces who decide to participate. Along with these broader forces of social self-defense, the movement-based opposition can weaken and eventually eliminate the MAGA assault. It needs to paint a portrait of itself that reveals itself as more than an occasional demonstration, but rather as a continuous contesting of MAGA power. [Read More]
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
(Video) “The Beginning of Fascism”: Rep. Delia Ramirez Says Trump’s Immigrant Crackdown Is Crushing Democracy
From Democracy Now! [June 12, 2025]
---- As immigrant rights protests spread to Chicago, we speak with Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants and married to a DACA recipient and recently called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. She responds to President Trump’s threat to deploy troops in more major cities to quell protests. “What you are seeing is the beginning of fascism,” says Ramirez, who represents parts of Chicago. “For fascists, they select a public enemy. And today, it’s an immigrant. … Tomorrow, it’s anyone they find undesirable.” [See the Program]
Donald Trump Is Running the Military Like a Warlord
By Jeet Heer, The Nation [June 13, 2025]
---- “No Kings” has become a potent rallying cry in Donald Trump’s second term. On Saturday, protesters in hundreds of American cities will gather under the “No Kings” banner to offer a counter-message to the president who is using the coincidence of Flag Day falling on his birthday to throw a massive military parade to satisfy his ego. The appeal of “No Kings” as a message is obvious: It both invokes the noble small-r republican spirit of the American Revolution and rebukes Trump’s autocratic pretensions. But while “No Kings” is a resonant and popular, it might be more analytically accurate to say “No Warlords.” After all, kings base their power on some claim (however spurious) to tradition-sanctioned legitimacy. Trump’s abuse of power is cruder than that, based on nothing more than his assertion that as president he should be able to order around anyone in the government (including law enforcement and the military) without checks from the judiciary or Congress. This is not kingly power—which even under its absolutist form was bound by tradition and concessions to powerful nobles—but something closer to the governance of a warlord, a ruler whose every command must be executed. [Read More]
America’s Off-Shore Concentration Camps
By Chris Hedges [June 12, 2025]
---- Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells. … Totalitarian regimes survive by eternally battling mortal, existential threats. Once one threat is eradicated, they invent another. They mock the rule of law. Judges, until they are purged, may decry this lawlessness, but they have no mechanism to enforce their rulings. The Department of Justice, turned over to the Trump sycophant Pam Bondi, is, as in all autocracies, designed to block enforcement, not facilitate it. There are no legal impediments left to protect us. We know where this is going. We have seen it before. And it is not good. [Read More]
ISRAEL’S WAR ON PALESTINE
(Video) Ex-U.S. Diplomat Joins March to Gaza, Says Biden Official Matthew Miller Has “Blood on His Hands”
From Democracy Now! [June 12, 2025]
---- Activists from around the world are arriving in Egypt ahead of the Global March to Gaza, set to launch June 15, when thousands plan to march to the Rafah border to call for an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and its blockade of the territory. Dozens who flew to Cairo for the march have reportedly been detained, interrogated and deported by Egyptian security forces, but organizers say the event will proceed as planned. Former U.S. diplomat Hala Rharrit, who is taking part in the march, spoke with Democracy Now! earlier this week and said she could not turn a “blind eye” to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. “What type of world are we going to be allowing our children to grow up in, if we stand by while an entire civilian population is forcibly starved?” Rharrit asks. [See the Program]
Don’t Fund the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: It’s a Genocidal Smokescreen
By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [June 9, 2025]
---- Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief. This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission. … The starvation in Gaza is not a logistical failure. It is Israel’s political choice. And GHF is not a lifeline. It is a lie. It is complicity. It is diabolical. And U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to fund it. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
See How Marine Heat Waves Are Spreading Across the Globe
By Delger Erdenesanaa, New York Times [June 9, 2025]
---- Unusual heat waves have occurred in all of the major ocean basins around the planet in recent years. And some of these events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term: super marine heat waves. “The marine ecosystems where the super marine heat waves occur have never experienced such a high sea surface temperature in the past,” said Boyin Huang, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an email. … It’s clear that as the planet’s climate changes, the oceans are being fundamentally altered as they absorb excess heat trapped in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned/ … Last year, the warmest on record, sea levels rose faster than scientists expected. Research showed that most of that rise in sea levels came from ocean water expanding as it warms, which is known as thermal expansion, not from melting glaciers and ice sheets, which in past years were the biggest contributors to rising seas. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
As Trump Sets Military Against Civilians, Service Members Have Duty to Disobey
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [June 11, 2025]
---- On June 7, in an illegal and unnecessary end run around California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s authority to maintain order in his state, Trump issued an edict under 10 U.S.C. section 12406 to activate National Guard units for “the enforcement of Federal law and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.” “No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country,” notes Elizabeth Goitein, senior director at the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law.”… Pursuant to his unlawful edict, Trump federalized California’s National Guard and deployed 2,000 guard troops to L.A., later increasing that number by another 2,000. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, that would allow the Marines and National Guard to explicitly help ICE round up immigrants. But Section 12406 also mandates that federalizing the state National Guard “shall be issued through the governors of the States,” and Newsom did not consent to Trump’s deployment of the state National Guard. A president has not activated the National Guard over a governor’s objection since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the guard to protect civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery without the consent of Alabama Gov. George Wallace. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) From Travel Ban to Troops in Streets, Advocates Blast Trump’s Targeting of Immigrant Communities
From Democracy Now! [June 11, 2025]
---- Condemnation is growing of President Trump’s travel ban that went into effect Monday, banning citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and the Republic of Congo. It also imposes heightened restrictions on people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. President Trump is “destroying what this nation stands for,” says Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “Immigration in the U.S. is an American value.” Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, called on communities to “fight to make sure that people have the right to migrate.” The administration is “literally separating families,” says Jozef. [See the Program]
Solidarity Under Arrest: The Union Fight for Immigrant Workers in California
By Hayley Brown, Counterpunch [June 13, 2025]
---- Late last week, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California President David Huerta was arrested while serving as a community observer during a wave of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles. Huerta’s arrest was caught on camera in a harrowing video that shows officers shoving him to the ground; Huerta sustained multiple injuries and was later hospitalized. He has since been federally charged with felony conspiracy to impede an officer, despite numerous witnesses noting that he was there as an observer, which is perfectly legal. Police have a long history of reacting to shows of labor solidarity with violence, and their treatment of Huerta on Friday was no exception. In this case, the immigrant workers Huerta risked his safety to defend were being targeted for their political value as scapegoats. The Trump administration is using immigrant workers as a political distraction to keep working people from zeroing in on the real problem: the ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations who are concentrating power and hoarding resources while the social contract erodes for the working class. The raids are designed to instill fear, divide communities; this is a dynamic that the labor movement understands well, and Huerta’s actions suggest that they are prepared to counter it with worker solidarity. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
A Sweeping History of the Black Working Class
By Robert Greene II, The Nation [June 12, 2025]
---- Black Folk offers a unique take on a familiar history, in part because it includes the personal narratives of members of Kelley’s own family tree. Beginning with a chapter on an enslaved ancestor named Henry, a blacksmith, she then tells us about her great-grandfather, Solicitor Duncan, and her grandfather, John Dee. Through their stories, Kelley personalizes the history of three generations of Black working-class men as they went from slavery and sharecropping in the Deep South to trying to make a living in World War II–era Philadelphia. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Depression and New Deal era, Kelley details what remained continuous within Black working-class history and what did not. … As Kelley points out in her conclusion, what these activists had long recognized was that the plight of the Black working class was often shared by the working class as a whole. This simple truth was made plain during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump’s administration. Yet, as Kelley also notes in the final pages of her book: “The Trump-caused obsession with the white working class…has obscured the reality that the most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class in America is the Black working class.” It is this element of the American body politic that has, in the past, tended to offer the most hope in trying times. As the son of Black working-class people, I can say that this is true today too. [Read More]
