Hello All – Last night Israel launched an attack on Iran. It appears that the attack was focused on military targets and did little damage, killing four soldiers but no civilians. Assessments this morning concluded that the attack may not lead to a further escalation of the Iran-Israel conflict, at least temporarily reducing the danger of a devastating regional war. But we have been warned. The Middle East is a powder keg and Israel is playing with matches.
Many analysts conclude that the constrained level of Israel’s attack was due to pressure from the Biden administration. Caught between its “support for Israel” and its fear of a regional war that would suck in the United States, the US pushed for an attack that avoided Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities. In this it appears successful, and it may be that Iran will end this round of the tit-for-tat attacks that threatened to escalate into a wider war.
US media reported this morning that Israel’s attack was “in retaliation” for Iran’s attack on Israel on October 1. Not included in most reports was the Iranian claim that its attack was “in retaliation” for the July 31 assassination of the Hamas leader while in Iran, and other earlier attacks killing Iranians in Syria, etc. This is the nature of war escalation, where military attacks are “defensive” and “in retaliation” for prior enemy attacks. Rinse and repeat. A slippery slope.
Viewing the bigger picture, it is clear that all roads to peace lead back to ending the war in Gaza. Attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and Yemen, supported by Iran and Syria, are in solidarity with besieged Gaza. Ending the war against Gaza would probably bring a close to these war responses. The US must redouble its efforts to force Israel into a ceasefire. Tragically, this possibility seems to be pushed down the road until after the election, and possibly far beyond that. But without a ceasefire, catastrophe looms.
ILLUMINATING THE WEEK GONE BY
(Video) “Collateral Damage”: Hundreds of Patients Trapped in North Gaza as Israel Intensifies Siege
From Democracy Now! [October 21, 2024]
---- Over 100 Palestinians have been killed in northern Gaza — where Israel is currently laying a major siege — by Israeli attacks since the start of the weekend. More than 350 patients are believed to be trapped inside the three remaining partially operational hospitals in northern Gaza: the Indonesian, Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals. Dr. Ayaz Pathan, an emergency medicine physician who recently worked at the Indonesian and Nasser hospitals, describes the conditions he witnessed. [See the Program]
(Video) “The Gaza I Know Is Gone”: Israel’s Rampage Continues as Survivors Struggle for Food, Water, Safety
From Democracy Now! [October 22, 2024]
---- Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 over the past two days, according to Palestinian health officials. This comes as Israel continues to carry out a brutal siege on northern Gaza, which has been described as a “surrender or starve” policy of ethnic cleansing. As the military demands that tens of thousands of Palestinians leave the north, senior government ministers are pushing for new Jewish settlements in Gaza. Meanwhile, images and video have emerged from northern Gaza showing Israeli forces separating Palestinian men from their families and taking them away. Almost all aid has been cut off to the region, with hospitals under siege and barely able to function. [See the Program] For more on Israel’s ethnic cleansing efforts, read this editorial from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Is Israel Really Implementing a Plan of Siege and Starvation in Gaza?” [Link].
Israel’s Limited Strikes on Iran show the Enormous Constraints faced by Netanyahu
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [October 26, 2024]
---- The limited strikes on Iran carried out by Israeli fighter-jets early on Saturday morning Tehran time above all demonstrated the constraints under which even this extremist Israeli government has to operate. The bombings are said to have been limited to military targets, including missile manufacturing facilities. … For the moment, however, all-out war seems to have been averted. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
New York’s Proposed Equal Rights Amendment Is the Most Inclusive Yet
By Nikole Rajgor, The Nation [October 22, 2024]
---- With less than two weeks until Election Day, fear of a national abortion ban is rampant. Currently, abortion before 26 weeks of pregnancy is legal in New York, but with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a potential second Trump administration could nevertheless jeopardize reproductive access in the state. For New Yorkers, “Proposal 1” is also on the ballot, which would create an amendment to the state Constitution, otherwise known as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), that makes discrimination unconstitutional on the basis of several characteristics, such as gender identity, disability, age, and sex. [Read More]
Will the US pressure Israel to allow foreign journalists into Gaza?
From Aljazeera
---- Dozens of US House Democrats urge US President Joe Biden to push Israel for independent media access to Gaza. Israel has severely restricted international journalists from entering Gaza as its military has carried out its assault on the Palestinian territory for more than a year. Politicians in the United States are questioning the decision to block access to foreign media outlets.[Read More]
CFOW CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Monday, October 28 (and every Monday) – A “Black Lives Matter” vigil is held near the Greystone (NW Yonkers) from 5:30 to 6 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell.
Sunday, October 27th – UN Day. A program, “Why the World Needs the UN and the UN Needs US” will be held at Manhattanville University (Reid Castle) in Purchase from 2 to 4 pm. To attend in person, register here (free). To attend by Zoom, register here. Details of the event: Principal Speakers: Kanni Wignaraja, Assistant Secretary General & Regional Director Asia-Pacific, UN Development Programme, and Laurel Rapp, Deputy Director, Policy Planning Staff, Liaison with the United Nations, US Department of State; SDG Honorees: The Afya Foundation, GEMS Program, Feeding Westchester, Yonkers Partners in Education
Saturday, November 2nd – RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison) will screen the award-winning film “The Interview” at the Ossining Public Library, 53 Croton Ave. in Ossining, starting at 1 pm. The film-screening will be followed by a panel discussion. The program organizers write: “The goal of the event is to create space for people directly impacted by incarceration to be seen and heard as well as educate the community on the realities of the harm of the parole system on our communities and families.” RSVP required: Go to this link to RSVP.
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!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart readers celebrate the career of musician and activist Barbara Dane, who died last week at the age of 97. About this segment of Democracy Now!, the producers write: “In the 1950s, Dane became a popular blues singer and performed with many leading musicians of the time, including Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and others. She eventually largely dropped out of the commercial music world to focus on social justice, becoming involved in the civil rights movement, as well as the GI resistance movement during the Vietnam War.” Some songs I think you’ll like include "I Don't Want your Millions, Mister"; "We Shall Not Be Moved"; and “Resistance Hymn". Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) Naomi Klein: Israel Has Weaponized October 7 Trauma to Justify Its Genocide in Gaza
From Democracy Now! [October 22, 2024]
---- More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. “Though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7, this is a preexisting agenda,” says Klein, whose latest essay for The Guardian explores how Israel “has made trauma a weapon of war.” [See the Program]
After Nasrallah
Adam Shatz, London Review of Books [October 21, 2024]
---- Netanyahu’s American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval. Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with Iran. For Biden, the killing of Nasrallah provided a ‘measure of justice’ for Hizbullah’s victims, from the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut to the present. … Among his supporters in Lebanon, and for many outside the West, Nasrallah will be remembered differently: not as a ‘terrorist’, but as a political leader and a symbol of defiance to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. [Read More]
“Will You Bring My Dad and Give Me My Hand Back?” War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch [October 22, 2024]
---- “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America’s war in Vietnam. “She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with,” recalled Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. [Read More]
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
By Elisabeth Zerofsky Oct. 23, 2024
[FB – 50 years ago, historian Robert Paxton changed our understanding of fascism and its rise in Europe by showing that, contrary to the French national myth of stalwart resistance to fascism and the German occupation, France was predominately a nation of collaborators or people who stood on the sidelines. Needless to say, this was not welcome news to the traditional/new ruling class in France.]
---- Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.” [Read Moe]
ELECTION 2024
The Empire Is Going Down
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [October 22, 2024]
---- It’s as yet unclear whether American voters will decline The Donald, but what is increasingly clear — there can’t be a doubt on the subject — is that he himself is on the decline in a typically wild and mad sort of way. And yet he might indeed still be elected to lead (even if that hardly seems the right word anymore) this country. And what exactly does that tell us about this all-American world of ours? All too much, I fear. Above all, that it’s increasingly anything but all-American. … Donald Trump is living, breathing evidence that this country is none too slowly coming apart at the seams. I mean, when in our history could you count on the fact that, if one candidate for president loses the upcoming election, he (and yes, it distinctly is a he) will undoubtedly claim that it’s been stolen from him and that he actually won? And his followers, significant numbers of them armed to the teeth, will agree with him and do who knows what (but nothing good). And of course, were he instead to win, four years later you can count on one thing: in some sense, this country is likely to be politically unrecognizable. [Read More]
What (Really) Happens if Trump Wins? [Trump and Hitler]
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American [October 22, 2024]
---- On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.” … In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution. By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it. [Read More]. Also of interest is “Mainstream Media Was Afraid to Compare Trump to Hitler. Now the Press Has No Excuse,” by James Risen, The Intercept [October 25 2024] [Link].
Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon May Doom Kamala Harris’s White House Chances
By Abby Ellis, Informed Comment [October 26 2024,]
---- Until now, the story of Michigan’s role in the election has centered on Arab Americans’ profound discontent with the Democratic Party over Israel’s relentless devastation of Gaza. The war has left deep emotional wounds. Israel’s recent military incursion into Lebanon feels like another twist of the knife, intensifying the sense of betrayal and alienation of one of the most critical voting constituencies in the country. Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the presidency will plummet if she loses Michigan, and current polling shows she and Donald Trump are neck and neck there. In addition to about 9,000 Palestinian Americans, Michigan is home to roughly 82,000 Lebanese Americans — more than any other state. … Our grief isn’t confined to war-torn enclaves but extends to suburban golf courses and family group chats. Right now, it feels like every casualty in Lebanon is costing Harris a vote. The grief breeds disillusionment and solidarity with our compatriots abroad and threatens to transform into silence at the ballot box. [Read More]
Also of interest – “How Harris Can Win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania… and the Presidency,” by John Nichols, The Nation [October 25, 2024] [Link]; and “Kamala Harris Does Not Deserve The Nation’s Endorsement,” by the Fall 2024 Nation Interns, The Nation [October 25, 2024] [Link].
THE WAR ON GAZA
(Video) “We Have Lost All Credibility”: Hala Rharrit on Quitting State Dept. & Ending U.S. Complicity in Gaza
From Democracy Now! October 23, 2024
---- As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel. We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza. Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.” [See the Program]
Israel Is Killing Whole Families in Gaza—With Weapons Made in America
By James Bamford, The Nation [October 21, 2024]
---- Twelve days later, the Israeli military finally withdrew, and the seven decomposing bodies of the family, including Hind, were discovered. The investigation found a total of 335 bullet holes, from a tank-mounted machine gun, in the car. About 50 meters away was the twisted and demolished wreckage of the ambulance, along with the bodies of the two paramedics, also victims of an Israeli tank. The medical personnel in the ambulance had been killed by the tank’s powerful cannon—another in the long list of Israel’s war crimes. Among the debris was a fragment from a 120-mm artillery shell clearly labeled M830A1, along with a serial number. It’s a shell designed to destroy tanks, not ambulances. That label and serial number traced back to the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, located in Middletown, population 336. The area’s largest employer, the massive Ammunition Plant is housed on 19,011 acres and operated by the defense contractor American Ordnance, LLC, a subsidiary of Day & Zimmerman. The plant is just one of numerous defense contractors across the country feeding Israel with its bombs, bullets, and shells to bring death and destruction to more than 41,000 Palestinians—mostly innocent women and children like Hind and her family—and medical workers like the ambulance paramedics. [Read More]
The West Bank
Israeli Military Joins In on Settlers’ War to Displace Palestinian Bedouins
By Dalia Hatuqa, The Intercept [October 20 2024]
---- It was early on a mid-September day when a group of Israeli settlers arrived at a small Palestinian Bedouin school in the occupied West Bank. In short order, they stormed the building. Armed and emboldened, the settlers threw rocks, broke windows, and injured several students and teachers. Children scrambled for safety while their teachers tried to shield them. When the Israeli military arrived, however, it wasn’t to intervene and stop the attack. Instead, the soldiers had come only to arrest the school’s headmaster, who had been taken to a hospital for his injuries. In the past year, another, less-remarked-upon war against the Palestinians has intensified in the West Bank. Settler violence surged and the military has responded with increasing, and more brazen, complicity. [Read More]
THE WAR IN LEBANON
“Goodbye Lebanon”
By Ralph Nader, Counterpunch [October 21, 2024]
[FB – Ralph Nader, America’s leading consumer advocate, is the son of Lebanese immigrants.]
---- Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands – whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque – and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.” [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Pro-Palestine Students Face Expulsion for Using a Bullhorn
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [October 22 2024]
---- At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, 11 students stand accused by the administration of assaulting college staff during Palestine solidarity protests in the last year. Yet there wasn’t any pushing, grabbing, nor any kind of harmful touching. The alleged assaults occurred, according to internal disciplinary charges, because some of the students used a bullhorn to amplify chants and slogans calling for the school to divest from Israel’s military-industrial complex. The students, in other words, could face expulsion on assault charges for making a noise and amplifying it using, perhaps second only to the placard, the most standard of protest equipment. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Puerto Rico Could Be About to Elect Its First Pro-Independence Governor
By Alberto Medina, Medium [October 24, 2024]
---- Something unprecedented is happening in Puerto Rico which, like the U.S., will hold its general election on November 5th. For the first time ever, the island could elect a governor who favors Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. That could herald the beginning of the end for a 125-year-old colonial relationship. … The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) had always run a distant third, garnering single-digit support. But times have changed in the last decade, as Puerto Rico has been battered by both natural disasters and man-made crises. [Read More]
Errol Morris’s Reminder of Trump’s Sadistic Border Policy
By Eileen Jones, Jacobin Magazine [October 2024]
---- The new documentary by Errol Morris called Separated, which is considered a likely Academy Awards contender for Best Documentary, was made with the plan to share it with the public before the election. The main point of the film is to remind people of the cruel fiasco that was the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy during his presidency: forcibly separating parents from children as a deterrent to illegal immigration along the southern border of the United States. Trump makes clear in an interview clip shown in the documentary that he intends to revive the sadistic policy if he’s reelected. And the mess his administration made is still with us. According to Separated, an estimated four-thousand-plus families were traumatized for life by the way children were removed and incarcerated. Even toddlers were sometimes held in literal cages for months at a time before the policy was overturned because of the public outcry and eventual legal action. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Story of Sakinah Ahad Shannon, an Early Hero of Abortion Liberation
By Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone, The Nation [October 1, 2024]
---- Jane, also sometimes called The Service, was the colloquial name for the underground Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Founded in 1969, it consisted of a group of women who connected people seeking abortions to providers. Until it disbanded in 1973, Jane helped more than 11,000 women get abortions at a time when the procedure was illegal in most of the states. … Sakinah was aware of the risks. She had heard about women using coat hangers to cause abortions and then dying in Cook County Hospital’s septic ward because of an infection. So after double-checking that her friend wanted her to call Jane—her friend replied that she trusted Sakinah with her life and her babies’ lives and therefore trusted her on this—Sakinah, who is Black, had one warning to pass on: “I want you to know it’s Caucasian women.” [Read More]
Charles Ives at Election Time
By David Yearsley, Counterpunch [October 25, 2024]
---- The iconoclastic American composer become cultural monument Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the midst of his second term as president. Ives’s father George, the formative and lasting influence on his son’s musical development, led what was reputed to be the best band in the Union army during the Civil War. I don’t know if Grant ever heard George Ives’s band. If he had, the general would have perceived only noise. Many in the American musical establishment would later declare themselves similarly offended by what their healthy ears perceived as Ives’s idiosyncratic music that pursued many modernist techniques even before they were adopted by the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. [Read More]
