Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 15, 2024
Hello All – The 79th session of the UN's General Assembly, which includes almost all nations of the world (193), opened on Tuesday. While it is the Security Council, consisting of 5 permanent members and ten rotating members, that has most of the power, the General Assembly is a forum for discussion and resolutions, and is gaining in importance as the Security Council is often deadlocked by the veto-power of the 5 permanent members.
A new feature of the General Assembly this year is the addition of Palestine. While the USA has blocked full membership for Palestine, a UN resolution last May allows Palestine to participate as a non-voting member, including the right to submit proposals and amendments. The Palestinians have now introduced a resolution which will be voted on this week, "demanding that Israel be forced to implement the decisions of the International Court of Justice." Further, the resolution
Calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories within six months, dismantling the illegal Jewish settlements, and facilitating the return of Palestinians to their land. The resolution also calls for imposing sanctions on senior Israeli officials, blocking weapons sales to Israel if they might be used in Palestinian areas, and preventing any more foreign embassies from being established in occupied Jerusalem.
While a General Assembly resolution is unenforceable without action from the Security Council, Israel is mobilizing the US and its allies in an attempt to minimize the damage such a resolution would cost it. In light of the fact that the General Assembly voted full membership for Palestine by a vote of 143 to 9, with 25 abstentions, Palestine's resolution this week is likely to pass overwhelmingly.
Israel's relation to the UN is now one of intense hostility. A recent resolution in Israel's legislature (Knesset) declared the UN to be a "terrorist organization." Last week's bombing of a UN school in Gaza sheltering 12,000 displaced Palestinians killed 18 people, including 6 UN staff workers. It was the 5th time the school was attacked; in Gaza Israel has bombed 120 UN buildings, killing 220 UN staff members. It is shameful that our government fails to take action to protect the United Nations, including what's left of international law, choosing instead to give Israel a blank check for lawlessness and murder.
Illuminating the Week that Was
(Video) What is the purpose of Israel's repeated attacks on UNRWA?
from Aljazeera ["Inside Story"] [September 12, 2024] – 30 minutes
---- Two Israeli air strikes on a school in Gaza killed at least 18 Palestinians, including six people working for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA has been repeatedly attacked by Israel during its war. So why is the agency so important to Palestinians – and why does Israel want to destroy it? [See the Program]
An Uncommitted Cofounder Explains the Movement's Strategy
Alex N. Press interviews Abbas Alawieh, Jacobin Magazine [September 2024]
---- At this moment, we're still trying to engage with the Harris campaign in the hopes of continuing to raise our request for a change in the policy that she'll support, because we think that it's not only unsustainable, but immoral and illegal for her to continue supporting a policy that sends weapons to kill civilians and harm people we love. We're hoping that she will update her policy so it can be in line with what we know the majority of Democratic voters want, which is a stop to the unconditional flow of weapons to Netanyahu's government. … We have to understand that it's really not about the election. It's about how we ensure that our movement continues growing rather than have our power undermined. We have a responsibility to our siblings there to grow our movement rather than undermine it, and that has to include charity in our analysis about what living under Donald Trump's America would mean for our antiwar efforts. [Read More]
Israel's lie about a U.S. activist's murder has exposed the Biden-Harris double standard on Palestine
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [September 12, 2024]
---- Both Biden and Harris affirmed Israel's absurd story that a trained sniper accidentally fired a shot that ricocheted off a rock and managed to hit Aysenur with a kill shot to the head that ended her life in minutes. It is a cartoonish narrative of a magic bullet that wouldn't be remotely credible in a movie script. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported the conclusions of their investigation into Aysenur's murder, and they established that she was some 200 yards away from the Israeli forces when she was murdered some 20-30 minutes after the protest had ended. This contradicted Israel's lie that Aysenur was shot accidentally during a "violent riot." Eyewitnesses immediately verified that there was no violence at the protest and that it had ended long before Aysenur's murder. [Read More]
The Presidential Debate
(Video) Democracy Now! reviews the presidential debate
September 11, 2024
[FB – Segments include focus on issues – immigration, election denial & protection, economic issue, and abortion rights.] [See the Program]
Some dissenting views – While Harris dominated the debate, and Trump appeared totally unhinged, some commentators often linked the CFOW newsletter were critical of Harris's positions on a range of issues. Check out "Kamala Harris Accepted Trump's Racist Lie That Immigration Is Bad," by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [September 11 2024] [Link]; "Undebatable: What Harris and Trump Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza," by Norman Solomon [September 11, 2024] [Link]: and "Kamala Harris Doesn't Need to Backtrack on Fracking," by Amber X. Chen, The Nation [September 12, 2024] [Link].
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.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Mondays from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please make out your check to "Frank Brodhead," write "CFOW" on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
The reward for stalwart newsletter readers this week are "The Sounds of Northeast Africa, an hour-long program from New Sounds. (h/t JG) Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Living the Nakba
By Tareq Baconi, New York Review of Books [October 3, 2024 issue]
---- For Sabri Jiryis and Aziz Shehadeh, that initial episode of ethnic cleansing would shape the course of their lives, their political organizing, and their intellectual labor. Both of them treated the law as their entry point into political engagement. In the confused aftermath of the Nakba, Aziz sprang into action, fighting for justice for Palestinians in the West Bank. More than two decades his junior, Sabri eventually launched his political work from within Israel, challenging the military regime that had been imposed on the Palestinians who stayed. After the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, three years later, both men continued their political work, each in his own way contributing to the Palestinian revolution against Israeli domination. Both of them likewise grieved as the Nakba continued to break their homes apart. Palestinians have long argued that the Nakba is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession. Since Zionists started colonizing Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, our social fabric as Palestinians has been torn apart, our land occupied, our archives and communal knowledge erased, our loved ones murdered, exiled, or incarcerated, and our people dispersed from their homeland. [Read More]
White People Have Never Forgiven Haitians for Claiming Their Freedom
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [September 13, 2024]
---- The people pushing these falsehoods [eating pet cats and dogs] long ago abandoned any tether to facts or reality. The very online, white-wing MAGA movement has found another group of dark-skinned people to hurt. Today, it's Haitians; yesterday it was Venezuelans, and tomorrow it will be some other group of Black or brown people…. Haitians committed the greatest sin possible in the modern world: We took our freedom back from the white man. Haiti is the birthplace of the only successful slave-led revolt in the "New" or "Western" world. Like everywhere else in this hemisphere, enslaved Haitians asked for their freedom, agitated for it, and were willing to negotiate terms with the enslavers for their emancipation. Unlike everywhere else, when those negotiations and political dealings resulted in nothing more than the continuation of permanent chattel slavery, Haitians stopped talking and started rebelling—and by 1804 had liberated themselves from their suddenly-not-so-superior captors. White people have never forgiven us for being free. The French demanded "reparations" from the Haitians for taking their property—that property being the formerly enslaved Haitians themselves—as the price for their freedom. And the Americans, under the presidency of inveterate slaver Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize Haiti or its independence, and imposed a trade embargo on the fledgling nation. Remember that the next time someone calls Jefferson a lover of liberty: That man didn't just enslave and rape Africans brought here against their will; he tried his best to snuff out the embers of freedom burning on his doorstep. [Read More] Also of interest is "JD Vance's Slanders Are Far From the Worst Thing the US Has Done to Haitians," by Amy Wilentz, The Nation [September 11, 2024] [Link]
(Video) "By the Fire We Carry": Cherokee Author Rebecca Nagle on the Ongoing Fight for Tribal Sovereignty
From Democracy Now! [September 12, 2024]
---- We're joined by award-winning Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle, whose new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, has just been released. By taking a look at the more than a century-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, Nagle investigates the development and future of tribal law since the beginning of colonial relations between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, from the Trail of Tears to the "war on terror." "A lot of times we treat Native American history like this distant chapter and the legal terrain it created as some sort of siloed backwater of American law, but actually it's foundational," she says. [See the Program]
The Organizers Are Jewish. The Cause Is Palestinian. This College Won't Be Hosting.
By M. Gessen, New York Times [September 14, 2024]
---- On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it's a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible. … It all put me in mind of an observation Hannah Arendt made in her 1967 essay "Truth and Politics" about facts that "are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not — namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon." [Read More]
The War on Gaza
For Israeli Protesters, Palestine Might as Well Not Exist
By Ori Goldberg, The Nation [September 9, 2024]
---- The political balance in Israel is subtly shifting. For 11 months, most people here have accepted the argument that Israel's two goals for its genocidal campaign in Gaza are not just commensurate but also complementary. These goals were "destroying Hamas" (all sorts of qualifiers were later added to this phrase; none stuck) and "returning the hostages." Our government insisted that the ever-expanding Gaza assault was hastening the return of the hostages. Hamas would learn our might and fear our anger. Once that happened, they would surrender, return the hostages and everything would be over in 10 minutes. The death of six Israeli hostages at the end of August allowed the penny to drop for many Israelis. … The tragedy made it plain that "military pressure" from Israel was getting the hostages killed, not getting them back. Their deaths were entirely preventable, wholly disturbing, and frustrating. Many Israelis suddenly realized that the languishing of the hostages was a strategic failure, a resounding defeat. So, over the last two weeks, they have taken to the streets, including this past weekend. Still, one thing has not shifted. Among hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Israelis, one would be hard-pressed to find more than several hundred calling for an actual end to the Gaza campaign. [Read More]
Palestine: From Shifting the Discourse to Changing US Policy
By Max Elbaum, Convergence [September 5, 2024]
---- Eighty percent of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire and somewhere around 63% support conditioning weapons aid to Israel. But the Biden administration is still sending the bombs that Israel uses to kill children. The Lancet, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, estimates that the death toll from Israel's assault on Gaza as of June 2024 would approach 186,000, 7–9% of Gaza's total population. The equivalent figure for the US would be 27 million people dead. … Such are the reminders of how far we still need to go to end US complicity with the genocide taking place in Gaza. [Read More]
(Video) "A Horrifying Undercount": Ralph Nader Says True Gaza Death Toll Could Be Many Times Higher
From Democracy Now! [September 10, 2024]
---- Former presidential candidate and celebrated consumer advocate Ralph Nader discusses Israel's war on Gaza, the U.S. presidential election and more. Nader's latest article, "Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount," can be read in the Capitol Hill Citizen, which he also founded. The official death toll in Gaza has been suspended at around 40,000 for months, as Israel's devastation of the territory makes it increasingly difficult to properly recover and identify the dead. Nader says that the true cost in Palestinian lives could already be "well over 300,000," and that "if the true count was known, it would devastate the mythology that the Biden administration and Congress are furthering, that the Israeli government does not purposely target civilian populations." [See the Program]
The West Bank
'It's My Duty': What Brings These Activists to a Palestinian Town in the Jordan Valley
By Linda Dayan, Haaretz [Israel] [September 8, 2024]
---- On the ride to al-Auja, a Palestinian town north of Jericho, about fifty Israeli peace activists jotted down their names, phone numbers and ID numbers on a sheet of paper. It was the last Saturday of August and they were about to begin a protest march against settler violence with 150 other activists, both Israeli and Palestinian. … The impetus for the protest was the ongoing attempts by Israeli settlers to prevent the area's residents from accessing the al-Auja stream, which flows between the dusty banks of the Jordan Valley. It is a source of water for the community as well as a rare place of respite, and has been a site of settler provocation since October 7. … Missing from the march, however, were the Palestinian residents of al-Auja themselves, who had been encouraged not to join in out of fear that protesting could make them targets for reprisals if local settlers recognized them. [Read More] Also of interest is "Israel's Crackdown on the West Bank Has Already Killed an American Citizen," by James Bamford, The Nation [September 13, 2024] [Link].
The War at Home
After Gaza, 'election madness' is not the same on US campuses
By Nazia Kazi, Aljazeera [September 13, 2024]
[FB – Nazia Kazk is Professor of Anthropology at Stockton University in New Jersey]
---- Today's political climate gives a lie to the promise of "never again". As the highest seats of power bankroll the greatest crime, young learners are profoundly alienated. For critical educators, this moment poses both a remarkable challenge and a teachable moment. … On the other hand, we are given the chance to teach that rich history often left out of our curricula – one that shows how time and again, substantive change was not achieved at the ballot box, but by organized and educated masses making uncompromising demands from the ruling class. It is a chance to teach how the ballot box has, contrary to the common wisdom, become a disciplining tool, a bone thrown to an agitated public to quell its unrest, to push the facade of civic participation. It is a chance to undertake with our students a study of the confounding anti-democratic measures enshrined in American politics. [Read More] Also of interest: "'Theatrics of Danger," by Claudia Gohn ("As new semester dawns, campus protesters in US face heightened restrictions") Aljazeera [September 12, 2024] [Link].
War with China?
Trying to Outflank the GOP on China Is a Mistake
By Jake Werner, The Nation [September 12, 2024]
---- In their debate Tuesday night, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris each sought to cast their opponent as a lackey of China. Bipartisan one-upmanship pushing conflict in the world's most important geopolitical relationships was a fitting scene to land on "China Week," House Speaker Mike Johnson's bid to cast a mishmash of China-related bills as a concerted effort to "win" a confrontation with China. "China poses the greatest threat to global peace," says Johnson, so "Congress must keep our focus on countering China with every tool at our disposal." … Many politicians treat China bashing as a cheap way to gain political advantage that will cause no lasting damage. But the stakes are far greater now than they were three decades ago. With China much more powerful and the global system significantly less capacious, the United States and China are at risk of falling into a permanent state of hostility. Should that come to pass, it would indefinitely marginalize progressive priorities in both foreign and domestic policy. Another path is possible—one that would create a foundation for healthy US–China relations without sacrificing progressive values—but it would require Democrats to begin charting their own course rather than mimicking that of their political opponents. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
The Political Economy of Saving the Planet
By Robert Pollin and Talia Baroncelli, The Analysis News [September 13, 2024]
---- The issue of banning (or not banning) fracking has been at the forefront of the 2024 presidential debates between former President Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Fracking, a technique that involves horizontal drilling to extract gas and oil from shale rock, risks methane leaks and other environmental hazards. Professor Bob Pollin, economist and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), lays out the elements of a Global Green New Deal to avert climate catastrophe and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Can we frack and still reach this goal? [Read More]
Our History
60 Years After Lyndon Johnson's 'Daisy Ad,' the Silence on Nuclear War Is Dangerous
By Norman Solomon, Anaatiwara.com [September 10, 2024]
---- One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching "Monday Night at the Movies" on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man's somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion. The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that "we must love each other, or we must die." … Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away. [Read More]
