Hello All – Today, at the United Nations, several more countries are “recognizing” the state of Palestine – the UK, Canada, and Australia. France will do the same on Monday. In the face of the impending extermination of the Palestinian people, these merely symbolic acts are macabre. While the diplomats duck and cover, an endless stream of people move south along the coast road of Gaza. They are leaving their homes in Gaza City, now mostly destroyed, and walking 15-20 miles south, hoping to find shelter or a place to pitch their tents. The shadow of death hangs over them.
Israel says that some 400,000 people have begun their march to the south; about 500,000 people remain. Americans can watch this live-streamed on the Arab network Aljazeera English, or in bits and pieces on US TV. While they walk, behind them – or sometimes next to them – high-rise building are blown up, targeted by Israeli rockets or drones. Only the most wealthy can afford to hire a truck and move their things; for most of them, what they “have” is what they can carry. Small children walk too. Many families have no food.
This horrible scene plays out against the background of what international courts and many human rights organizations call a genocide – an effort to destroy a group (Palestinians) in whole or in part. Tens of thousands have been killed in the bombing. Now they are starting to starve, as little food is allowed into Gaza, and only this after months of blockade. The 9-year-old boy who died from starvation Friday was #439.
This week Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza City. It will be broadcast live on Arabic TV and occasionally in the USA. Last week, for the 6th time, the US vetoed a Resolution in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people rally around the world, protesting the US-Israel genocide. In the USA, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 75 percent of Democrats oppose sending more military aid to Israel for its war in Gaza and 77 percent think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yet still our representatives in Congress, bob and weave around the issue of Gaza’s genocide. Among them are those representing us in Westchester: Rep. George Latimer ((202) 225-2464, Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451, and Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542. Please give them a call. Give them an earful. Speak up for Palestine.
EDITORIAL ARTICLES
In Gaza, the So-called 'Evacuation of Civilians' Is a Trail of Bombs and Death
By Amira Hass, Haaretz [Israel] [September 17, 2025]
---- Every person in Gaza today – whether displaced, injured, or burying their children; searching for a free patch of ground to pitch a tent – is a survivor of previous invasions, strikes and wars. Every person in Gaza has known every kind of fear. But back then, perhaps there were still words to describe it. "Words are losing their meaning and can no longer convey what is happening," wrote an acquaintance from Gaza City, Abed Alkarim Ashour, on his Facebook page. He has been keeping a journal since the beginning of the war, writing little about himself, trying to describe the reality around him in restrained language. "The images are not enough. The reports are limited. The news flashes tell only a small part of the truth. To really understand what is happening, you must be here – even just for a few hours. Hear the roar of the planes above your head. Tremble with each explosion and choke on the thick dust and smoke. Only then will you understand that the suffering is heavier than language can bear. Here in Gaza, even the silence screams." [Read More]
(Video) “Shame on Humanity”: Gaza Doctor Pleads with World to Stop Israel’s Genocide
From Democracy Now! [September 15, 2025]
---- As Israel continues its campaign to erase Gaza City by systematically bombing residential buildings, schools, homes and tent encampments, we speak with Dr. Mohammed Saqr, the director of nursing at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza. He says medical workers, who are starving like the rest of the population, have nothing left to give amid hundreds of deaths and injuries each day. “We are psychologically unstable, because we see [the] execution of civilians on a daily basis,” says Saqr. “We have no beds. We have to put patients on the ground — no supplies, no instruments. And things will go worse when the Israeli evacuation orders [displace] the Gaza City [residents] to come here to Khan Younis concentration camp.” Saqr also describes the daily challenges of life in Gaza, saying he only owns a single pair of shoes that he shares with his five sons. “Please stop humiliating us. We are not animals,” he says. [See the Program]
Stopping the Genocide Requires an Armed Protective Force
By Stan Cox, Counterpunch [September 17, 2025]
---- The Palestinian people need a large international armed force to converge on Gaza by air, sea, and land, to join the resistance fighters in protecting the civilian population and putting an end to the genocide. And, as luck would have it, there’s a little-known, decades-old mechanism for doing just that: UN General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), adopted in 1950 under the title “Uniting for Peace.” Uniting for Peace authorizes the General Assembly to request that its member nations intervene in cases of military aggression when the Security Council fails to act (which the council always does when it comes to Israel, thanks to the US veto). By a two-thirds majority, the General Assembly (in which each member nation has one vote and there are no vetoes) can pass a resolution enabling the formation and deployment of a multinational military force to come to Gaza’s rescue. And that might just happen. Spurred by a clamor from global civil society, the UN may consider an armed-intervention resolution this month, during the 80th Session of the General Assembly in New York City. [Read More]
THE GAZA FREEDOM FLOTILLA
Global Sumud Flotilla Is On The Final Leg Of Voyage To Break Gaza Siege
By Ana Vracar, People’s Dispatch [September 18, 2025]
[FB – As of today, the Flotilla has journeyed past Sicily and is now headed toward Greece/Crete. To follow the Flotilla on a map-tracker, go here.]
---- The Global Sumud Flotilla has launched the final leg of its journey to Gaza, with at least 40 boats expected to converge in the Mediterranean after departing ports in Tunisia, Italy, and Greece. The fleet includes the Alma and the Family Boat, both of which suffered drone attacks earlier this month while docked at Sidi Bou Said. “As Israel escalates its ground invasion and the UN confirms genocide, our urgency is clear,” the coalition wrote on social media. “We remain steadfast and united: we sail to break the siege, to end the genocide, and to stand with Palestine.” As they departed after days of preparation, the boats were sent off by massive crowds. Ayoub Habraoui, from the Moroccan party Workers’ Democratic Way and the International People’s Assembly, reported that people poured into the port despite the late hour of departure, reaffirming their solidarity with Palestinians and the flotilla’s mission. … Conscious of the threats faced by the flotilla, foreign ministers from more than a dozen countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa, issued a joint statement supportive of the initiative. They expressed “concern about the security of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civil society initiative in which citizens of their countries are participating.” The statement also warned against attempts to obstruct the mission, declaring that those responsible would be held accountable for violations of international law. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
Twenty years ago, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq destroyed huge portions of Iraq’s archaeological heritage, libraries with ancient books, etc. Now Israel is doing the same thing in Gaza, the home of several ancient civilizations. Heartbreaking. Read “A Rush to Save Ancient Artifacts in Gaza Highlights All That Has Been Lost” from today’s New York Times to learn more. [Link].
An immigration court judge in Louisiana has ordered pro-Palestinian, Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the US, deported to Syria or Algeria. His lawyers will appeal. To learn about this legal, barbarous complexity, go here.
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 holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group 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 week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers are favorites missing for too long from these pages. First up is Frank Turner and "I Still Believe." Next we have The Real Tuesday Weld with "The Show Must Go On"; Ry Cooder with "Jesus is on the Mainline:' and Mavis Staples singing Stephen Foster’s "Hard Times Come Again No More." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURES ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Who Benefits from Kirk Murder?
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News [September 19, 2025]
---- So many questions arise since a sniper with demonstrated skill assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk in broad daylight on Sept. 10 — this as he addressed a crowd of several thousand no less. We have only our questions as of now, and history suggests these may be all we will ever have as to the who and why of this very public crime. But we damn well better get on with the business of posing them: Questions, the right ones, have a power all their own. Charlie Kirk’s murder abruptly confronts us with the disintegration of what little remains of any shared identity and purpose among Americans, with the force of ideology, the invisibility of power, how much may be left out or simply falsified when officials give accounts of politically momentous events and when media reproduce these accounts with no hint of questioning them. We find ourselves plunging well beyond the apple-pie authoritarianism that threatened a few years ago. No apple pie this time. To begin at the beginning, who is Tyler Robinson, the 22–year-old formally charged Sept. 16 with murdering Kirk with a single shot fired from a .30–06 Winchester at considerable range? Who — the much larger question for its implications — was Charlie Kirk, the 31–year-old wunderkind of America’s conservative movement? At this point we have no certain answers in either case. We have, instead, what appear to be fraudulent narratives that are messily under construction even as we speak. [Read More]
How Zohran Mamdani’s Video Team Reinvented the Visual Art of Political Conversation and Storytelling
By Robin Andersen, Counterpunch [September 19, 2025]
---- Drawing from sources as audacious as Bernie Sanders, to the savvy street-smarts of a New York City film production team, Mamdani has given voice to a new generation and forever changed the way progressives will win elections. He didn’t do it by himself. His policies, creativity and undeniable charisma were seamlessly fused in a new political art form so compelling that it catapulted the 33-year-old Muslim to a surprising 12-point primary victory over his main rival, former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, who just one month earlier, according to one poll, enjoyed a 24 point lead. From the beginning, Mamdani was a longshot, labeled a “Muslim socialist,” by Andrew Cuomo, but Zohran Mamdani’s momentum was building over social media and his creative, human-center media spoke a compelling language of compassion that was absolutely believable. [Read More]
Censorship Is a Structural Problem: Huge Corporate Power, Not Just a President, Is Muzzling Comedians
By Jeff Cohen, Znet [September 20, 2025]
---- As corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists, we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington. The problem didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It began long ago, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations. And, of course, those corporations were big political donors to both parties. Enormous mergers were approved. Anti-trust laws were ignored. Federal Communications Commission rules were changed, and caps on mega-ownership relaxed or eliminated. Today, a handful of amoral conglomerates control our information and media system – conglomerates that care a lot about profit-maximization and very little about free expression and the right to dissent, especially when expression and dissent interfere with their profits. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the process of conglomeration. It was sheer corruption – and Trumpian censorship is the result. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
What Kind of Life Awaits the Six Babies Born in Gaza This Weekend?
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [September 21, 2025]
---- Six newborns, at least two of whom were premature, lie crammed into a single crib at Gaza City's Al-Ahli Hospital, mere days before Rosh Hashanah. It would have been better had they not been born. These are harsh words, but they are realistic. … They are among the last children born in Gaza in the current Jewish year, and it is uncertain whether they even have two living parents. Childhood dreams, apart from a plate of thin soup, won't exist for the six infants in the heated crib. It's doubtful they'll know a single quiet, safe moment in their lives, amid the relentless bombings. It's doubtful they'll ever know a single moment of happiness. Where could such a moment even exist? In the detention camp in southern Gaza, where Israel will force them to crowd together? In the famine camps of South Sudan, where they are said to be expelled to? An old man, a newborn in Gaza – what remains for them in life? [Read More]
Israel is waging a holocaust in Gaza. Denazification is our only remedy
By Orly Noy, 972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [September 18, 2025]
---- Gaza City is engulfed in flames, as the Israeli army embarks on its long-threatened ground offensive after weeks of relentless bombardment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already facing an international arrest warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity, described this latest assault as an “intensified operation.” I urge you to watch the footage streaming out of Gaza, and see what this euphemism really means. Look into the eyes of people gripped by a terror unmatched even in the darkest moments of this two-year genocide. See the rows of ash-covered children lying on the blood-soaked floor of what was once a medical center — some barely alive, others wailing in pain and fear — as desperate hands try to comfort them or treat them with whatever medical supplies remain. Hear the screams of families fleeing with nowhere to run. Witness parents scouring the inferno for their children; limbs protruding from beneath the rubble; a paramedic cradling a motionless girl, pleading with her to open her eyes, in vain. What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation, executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis. [Read More]
Israel Gives Evacuation Orders Before a Bombing. Many Gazan Families Can’t Afford to Leave.
By Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, The Intercept [September 20 2025]
---- In Gaza, new beginnings never come without a price. Displacement by Israeli bombing and ground invasion forces families to leave behind entire lives: a familiar corner of home, the smell of morning coffee, a notebook holding stories of interrupted lives. These losses are emotional, ripping away the daily artifacts that help remind people who they are. They are also financial. The cost of Nozoh, or displacement, often exceeds what families can afford. Basic necessities become out of reach — or the cost of leaving itself is too high. When the Israeli military attacks residential areas in Gaza, the government’s press operation highlights evacuation orders that it has issued in the places to be bombed. Western mainstream media outlets repeat these claims, perpetuating the simplistic idea that any civilian residents have had ample opportunity to flee. Even if that were always true, it would overlook the complications families face during Nozoh — and how the financial burden can force them to stay in place, waiting for the shelling to start. A rough breakdown of minimal expenses for a family relocating from northern Gaza to the south illustrates the scale of the challenge. [Read More]
WAR WITH IRAN?
Europe uses Iran as pawn in transatlantic power play
By Trita Parsi, Responsible Statecraft [September 19, 2025]
---- The United Nations Security Council today will reinstate via “snapback” all of the U.N. sanctions formerly lifted under the 2015 Iran nuclear accord. This trigger comes from Germany, France, and the UK — the very powers that engineered the 2015 deal — and now they are extinguishing the final diplomatic exit ramp, consolidating a trajectory toward confrontation. As I suggested when the E3 first activated the snapback mechanism, this is no longer about Iran’s nuclear program; it is an EU stratagem to corral the U.S. into alignment over Ukraine. … That is why I have long doubted the efficacy of courageous efforts to forestall the snapback. If one party is resolutely determined to trigger it for its own ends, then nuclear concessions alone are unlikely to suffice. … The E3, for their part, intend to furnish Washington with snapback authority, hoping thereby to anchor a more hawkish U.S. policy toward Russia. Since Russia is more important to Europe than Iran, and since appeasing Israel is more important to Washington than avoiding confrontation with Iran, it appears that the substance of Iran’s compromise seems moot. … The real contest isn’t over Iran’s enrichment program, but between the U.S. and the EU over Russia, Ukraine, and the transatlantic relationship. Iran’s nuclear dossier appears just a pawn in the courts of the E3. [Read More]
WAR AGAINST VENEZUELA?
(Video) U.S. Acts as “Judge, Jury & Executioner” in Venezuelan Boat Strikes, Killing at Least 14
From Democracy Now! [September 16, 2025]
---- On Monday, President Trump announced the U.S. bombed a boat in international waters, killing three people. The attack was the second to target what the Trump administration claims are drug smugglers from Venezuela. A previous strike on another boat killed 11 people. In a third incident, the U.S. Navy raided a fishing boat in Venezuelan waters, detaining nine fishermen for eight hours. This escalating U.S. military action follows a secret directive that Trump signed approving the use of military force in Latin America and an ongoing buildup of U.S. military presence in the Caribbean. “We have a very clear example of political theater, an attempt at provocation, an ongoing effort at regime change, and the strategy of trying to use the military to interdict drug trafficking, which has failed incredibly in Mexico, Colombia, everywhere else the U.S. has applied it,” says Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas, who adds the Trump administration is “misleading the public in indicating that these were drug traffickers with no evidence whatsoever.” He says its attempt to manufacture a crisis in Venezuela is reminiscent of the lead-up to the U.S. war on Iraq. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Return of Drug War Imperialism,” by Edward Hunt, Foreign Policy in Focus [September 16, 2025] [Link]; “In Venezuela, Trump Is Engaged in Plain and Simple Murder,” by Chip Gibbons, Jacobin Magazine [September 2025] [Link]; and “Targeting Venezuela,” by Alan MacLeod, Mint Press News [September 21, 2025] [Link].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Magazine [September 16, 2025]
---- Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. They called it, blandly, the Paris Agreement, but it was obviously a climate-politics landmark: a nearly universal global pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and secure a more livable future for all. Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.” … A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. ... In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “‘China Is the Engine’ Driving Nations Away From Fossil Fuels, Report Says,” by Max Bearak, New York Times [September 8, 2025] [Link]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) Judith Butler on Gaza Genocide, the Right’s Assault on Trans People, Campus Censorship & More
From Democracy Now! [September 15, 2025]
---- [More] of our conversation with professor and philosopher Judith Butler, whose name was recently shared by the University of California, Berkeley with the Trump administration in response to the administration’s sweeping crackdown on Palestinian solidarity activism. [See the Program]
The End of Equity
By Duncan Hosie, New York Review of Books [September 19, 2025]
---- Last week the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration sweeping new powers to profile low-wage Latino workers. In one unsigned paragraph, its Republican-appointed justices effectively sanctioned a dystopia now common across America: armed agents sweeping through parks, farms, churches, parking lots, bus stops, tow yards, and car washes, grabbing people based on physical appearance and spoken language, dragging them into unmarked cars and crowded basements, barring them from contacting family or lawyers, and detaining them until masked officers feel satisfied, based on subjective and shifting criteria, that they are citizens. … The vacuity and cruelty of Vasquez Perdomo are self-evident. “We should not,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.” Yet the order also revealed something deeper: the Court’s eagerness to discard centuries of the equitable tradition in Anglo-American law. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump Troop Deployment in U.S. Climbs to 35,000 Boots on the Ground
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [September 17, 2025]
---- The Trump administration has deployed roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States this year, according to exclusive figures provided to The Intercept by official military sources. That marks a 75 percent increase on the previous count offered by The Intercept in July. These occupation forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. The true number of federal troops deployed may be markedly higher. When asked directly, Northern Command, which oversees military operations in North America, said it has no running tally of how many troops have operated under Title 10. The Office of the Secretary of War has, for weeks, dodged questions about the total number, refusing to say if they even know it themselves. The increase of 15,000 troops since July could reflect better accounting, as opposed to a marked spike in Title 10 deployments over the last two months, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to efforts by the Department of War to conceal basic information about the forces. [Read More]
The Homelessness Crisis Under Trump Will Only Get Worse
By Mattea Kramer and Dr. Sean Fogler, The Nation [September 18, 2025]
---- The Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). The federal takeover of Washington, DC, rightfully attracted extensive media coverage, but an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” quietly issued on July 24, received remarkably little attention. Perhaps it didn’t make a splash because it wasn’t specifically about policing (or, for that matter, National Guarding), but more generally about how we should treat people who already exist on the outermost fringes of society, human beings who have long been reduced to labels like “addict” or “homeless.” Indeed, the Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). And if history is any guide, that may be exactly what most of us do. While the current moment may feel shocking in so many ways, the president’s order to end what he’s labeled “disorder” represents a further development of norms that have been in place for all too long. They are also norms that we have the power to change. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Second Amendment Was Created to Put Down Slave Revolts
By Thom Hartmann [September 19, 2025]
---- The founders’ true intent behind the right to bear arms wasn’t liberty—it was control, oppression, and the preservation of slavery. … One mass shooting after another, one accidental child death after another tears through this country on an almost daily basis. Once again, lawmakers hide behind “thoughts and prayers,” while clinging to an amendment that has been twisted beyond recognition. But to understand why the Second Amendment exists at all, we must strip away the myths and confront a brutal truth: it was not written to safeguard freedom, but to preserve slavery. The militias it enshrined were never about defending homes from tyrants abroad but about keeping human beings in chains at home. Until America reckons with this history, we will remain shackled to its bloody legacy. .. The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “state” instead of “country” (the framers knew the difference—see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave-patrol militias in the Southern states, an action necessary to get Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution. It had nothing to do with making sure mass murderers could shoot up public venues and schools. [Read More]
