Dear Progressive Reader,

Immeasurable violence continues in the war in Gaza following the horrific killings and violence in Israel on October 7.

As of this morning, more than 4,385 Palestinians have been killed and 13, 651 injured since the start of the war according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The death toll, they report, includes 1,756 children. A small amount of needed humanitarian aid has finally been allowed to enter the area in trucks. On Friday, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, visited the Rafah border crossing on the Egyptian side and called for the trucks to be let through. “It’s impossible to be at the Rafah crossing & not feel heartbroken. Behind these walls there are 2 million people in Gaza with no water, food, medicine, fuel. On this side, these trucks have what they need. We need to make them move—as soon as possible, as many as necessary,” Guterres wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Yesterday we received three new poems from our poetry editor Jules Gibbs by award-winning Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha. Two have been published on our website today; the third is scheduled to appear in the upcoming issue of The Progressive magazine. “I survived death three times in the past fourteen days,” Abu Toha tells Gibbs via email from the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza. “No place is safe, even for a seven-day-old baby in her mother’s lap. I can smell death everywhere I walk.”

Congressional Representatives, artists and actors, and many interfaith groups are calling for a ceasefire, protections for civilians, and humanitarian relief. As filmmaker Michael Moore points out in his weekly email newsletter, the majority of people in the United States believe there should be a ceasefire, an end to the supply of weapons, and an increase in humanitarian aid to the innocent people caught in the crossfire of this conflict.

On Thursday night, U.S. President Joe Biden took to the national airwaves to call for an increase in military assistance to both Israel and Ukraine. Biden may have inadvertently revealed the true nature of much of the agenda behind the weapons supply when he said, “Let me be clear about something. We send . . . equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that . . . is made in America. . . . today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy.” He made it quite clear that it is the weapons industry that is the real beneficiary of U.S. military aid to foreign conflicts. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said repeatedly more than a half century ago, “We can look all around and see how we find ourselves with mixed up priorities . . .we aren't winning the other war that we are supposed to be in, namely the war against poverty.”

In other news on our website this week, Amelia Rayno previews presidential elections in Argentina this weekend that feature a Trump-like candidate, Javier Milei; Jeff Abbott profiles the recent neoliberal winner of Ecuador’s elections; and Marc Rosenthal looks at the legacy of convicted (and later pardoned) Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, who has just been nominated by Biden for another influential government post. Plus, Eleanor Bader reports on a memorial commemorating the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York; Mike Ervin writes about the threats to the Americans with Disabilities Act from the current U.S. Supreme Court; and Alexandra Filindra discusses the political climate that led to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that is still present today. “The wave of threats and violence in politics should not be surprising. The institutional and cultural conditions that led to January 6 have not abated; if anything, the landscape has only become more permissive,” she notes.

Finally, Jake Whitney reviews the brand new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, by Martin Scorsese that opened this week. Scorsese, he says, “avoids turning the film into a white savior story by giving the Osage their proper due.” For this it is receiving praise, and hopefully will be followed by many more important revelations of the dark history of the United States and its treatment of Native people. Whitney ends his review by pointing out that investigative journalist Greg Palast will soon release a new documentary, Long Knife, that highlights the ongoing theft from the Osage people, led in great part by the rightwing billionaire Koch family.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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