According to Ahmed Addaghashi, a professor at Sanaa University, the Houthis began as a theological movement that preached toleranceand peace that held a considerably broad-minded educational and cultural vision.[15]

Western sources report that BY established school clubs and summer camps[13]:98 in order to "promote a Zaidi revival" in Saada.[14] By 1994–1995, 15–20,000 students had attended BY summer camps.[13]:99

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, BY-affiliated youth began chanting anti-American and anti-Jewishslogans in the Saleh Mosque in Sana'a after Friday prayers. This led to confrontations with the government, and 800 BY supporters were arrested in Sana'a in 2004. President Ali Abdullah Saleh then invited Hussein al-Houthi to a meeting in Sana'a, but Hussein declined. On 18 June 2004 Saleh sent government forces to arrest Hussein.[16] Hussein responded by launching an insurgency against the government, but was killed on 10 September 2004.[17] The insurgency continued intermittently until a ceasefire agreement was reached in 2010.[18]

The Houthis participated in the 2011 Yemeni Revolution, as well as the ensuing National Dialogue Conference (NDC). However, they rejected the provisions of the November 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council deal, which included immunity for former president Saleh and the establishment of a coalition government.[19]

read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthis

Another Week, Another War: The Iron Logic of America's Middle East Madness

Chris Floyd

Another week, another war. And yet another American alliance with the forces of Islamic extremism. Washington is clearly the guiding force between the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen -- a move that will almost certainly lead to a protracted and ruinous conflict, spilling over many borders and, as usual, creating fertile ground for more extremism. In other words, America's war profiteers and military imperialists have given themselves another rich seam of loot and power. And in Yemen, as in Syria, the Yanks are fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with their old allies, al Qaeda, once again.

As usual, some of the best analysis of the latest berserk spasm of Potomac fever comes from the redoubtable As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab." Here's an excerpt from one of his trenchant observations of the situation:

This war is also an American war: it is a gift from the US to the GCC countries who didn't like US policies in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.  The Saudi regime is now pursuing the Israeli option: that it will now be more clearly aligned with the Israeli interests in the region and that it will also be aggressive and violent in pursuing regime interests. … On every issue in Arab politics, the Saudi regime is aligned with Israel. Make no mistake about it: Israel is the secret member of the GCC coalition bombing Yemen. 

In the 1960s, the Saudi regime ignited a war in Yemen to thwart a progressive and republican alternative to the reactionary immamate regime (and Israel supplied weapons to the Saudi side in that war).  In this war, the GCC countries are supporting a corrupt and reactionary puppet regime created by Saudi Arabia and the US.  Saudi Arabia never allowed Yemen to enjoy independence. It saw in itself the legitimate heir to the British imperial power in peninsula. The Houthis (with whom I share absolutely nothing) are a bunch of reactionaries but were created due to the very policies and war pursued by the Saudi regime in Yemen and their then puppet, Ali Abdullah Salih.  South Yemen had the only Marxist state in the Arab wold and the experiment was sabotaged by the reactionary House of Saud. 

Read more: http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/2492-another-week-another-war-the-iron-logic-of-america-s-middle-east-madness.html

The Secretary of Defense offered a justification for U.S. support for the war on Yemen. It is nonsensical:

OK, well, with respect to the — the first part, the United States has indicated that we want to support our longstanding partner Saudi Arabia in defending its own borders [bold mine-DL]. And in conducting activities to restore stability in Yemen [bold mine-DL], we are providing them with intelligence information, surveillance and reconnaissance information to assist them in their operations.

The Saudis can pretend that their bombing campaign is aimed at “restoring stability” if they want, but there is no good reason for our government to endorse this obvious falsehood. Attacking Yemen certainly isn’t going to make it more stable. Outside intervention in Yemen’s internal conflict is much more likely to prolong and intensify the fighting, displace and kill many more people, and make it even harder to reach a political settlement. Few things could be more damaging or destabilizing than bombing an impoverished country and cutting its people off from basic necessities.

The Saudi war also obviously has nothing to do with defending its own borders. It is common for aggressors to claim self-defense for their unnecessary attacks on others, but this is a transparent lie that a government tells when it is engaged in doing something that it cannot honestly defend. Thus a reckless and destabilizing intervention is recast as a defensive operation intended to “restore stability” to a country that is already much worse off because of the intervention. If a government with a non-U.S. patron were doing the same thing, our government would presumably be denouncing the campaign as needlessly destructive and cruel. As it is, our officials are recycling preposterous propaganda lines to defend the indefensible.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-u-s-endorses-saudi-propaganda-for-the-war-on-yemen/

His [Pfaff's] final book, The Irony of Manifest Destiny, published five years ago, was a tour de force, an analysis of American foreign policy informed by philosophy and religious history: profound but never pedantic, with bold generalizations or sardonic polemics on nearly every page. I doubt there are a dozen Americans qualified to review it. No one else could have written it, not George Kennan nor Andrew Bacevich, two foreign policy analysts he admired. The book covers ground from the Calvinism of the Puritan founders to the secularized eschatology latent in the attitudes of Woodrow Wilson and John Foster Dulles. For Pfaff, the American belief in knowing the direction of history (towards democracy and unrestrained market capitalism, of course) coupled with readiness to use massive violence to bring history to its desired end was as potentially tragic as those other secularized eschatological movements of the 20th century, fascism and Bolshevism. The neoconservatives may have provided sparks and an accelerant, but they had ample kindling to work with.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-noninterventionist-correspondent/

The Saudi-led war on Yemen is about to get much worse:

The Ekhbariya TV said the Saudi-led coalition has declared the rebel stronghold of Saada a war zone and said all of its territory would from now on be considered a “military target,” urging all civilians to leave by 7 p.m. local time on Friday.

This ultimatum comes in response to Houthi attacks on Saudi territory, which is itself retaliation for Saudis’ bombing of Yemen for the last six weeks. The “warning” that the Saudis have given is effectively useless for the civilians in this area, since there couldn’t possibly be enough time for a mass evacuation. Regardless, the countrywide fuel shortage caused by the Saudi-led campaign would make it all but impossible to relocate hundreds of thousands of people in a timely fashion. The Saudis are just creating an excuse in advance for the large numbers of civilians their new attacks are very likely to kill. The Saudis and their allies don’t get to decide that noncombatants are legitimate targets. If they go ahead and treat the entire area as a military target, they will be committing serious crimes. The war on Yemen has been a disgraceful and reckless intervention from the start, and it is about to become even more appalling.

"An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America," said President Jimmy Carter, "and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

While US support for the oil-rich Gulf still provides the general backdrop to today's Middle East - the neo-conservative ideological climax in the early 2000s cynically reprised the Truman Doctrine's illusory language of humanitarian intervention.

The best example of this was the 2003 invasion of Iraq; it is now well documented that the most likely reason for intervention was not humanitarian instinct, but to prevent Saddam Hussein from savagely attacking global oil prices. Still, newspaper columnists, think-tankers and politicians lauded the plan, some honestly deceived. Like Lawrence, they were naive.

Humanitarian rationale

ISIL is a similar story. There is, of course, a humanitarian rationale, to save ethnic minority groups from hell-bound murderers. And there's no doubt that someone (but not necessarily the imperious West) should save them. Yet when you unpick the "humanitarian need" arguments presented by the US last summer, and enthusiastically echoed by the establishment media, the cleverly constructed illusion becomes clear.

Much of the government's messaging to justify the new military action was focused around the 40,000 Yazidis surrounded on Mount Sinjar by ISIL, and facing "imminent genocide". What the US public weren't widely told is that even as the threat of imminent Yazidi genocide was being bandied about by Washington, a broadly successful rescue mission had already been mounted by Kurdish fighters. The public were told that if Americans didn't intervene, Yazidis would die. This was a lie.

What the US public also weren't told was that 400km southwest of Sinjar, 15,000 Shia Turkmen were also completely surrounded by ISIL, in the city of Amerli - and had been since June. Like the Yazidis, the Shia were considered sub-human apostates by ISIL.

Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/lawrence-naivete-lives-150517131050384.html

See also:  Bush and Cheney cooked the books...

HAJJA, Yemen — The airstrike slammed into Al-Sham water-bottling plant at the end of the night shift, killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading home.

Standing among the strewn bottles, smoldering boxes and pulverized machines a few days after the airstrike here, the owner, Ibrahim al-Razoom, searched in vain for any possible reason that warplanes from a Saudi-led military coalition would have attacked the place.

Nothing in the ruins suggested the factory was used for making bombs, as a coalition spokesman had claimed. And it was far from any military facility that would explain the strike as a tragic mistake: For miles around, there was nothing but desert scrub.

“It never occurred to me that this would be hit,” Mr. Razoom said.

Of the many perils Yemen’s civilians have faced during the last six months of war, with starvation looming and their cities crumbling under heavy weapons, none have been as deadly as the coalition airstrikes. What began as a Saudi-led aerial campaign against the Houthis, the rebel militia movement that forced Yemen’s government from power, has become so broad and vicious that critics accuse the coalition of collectively punishing people living in areas under Houthi control.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/middleeast/airstrikes-hit-civilians-yemen-war.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

If I was a religious person, I would suggest that the crane that fell on the great Mosque in Mecca was a warming from Allah to the Saudis: "Stop your shenanigans against the rest of the world... Make peace with the Houthis... Stop financing ISIS..."

"They do not care about the heritage, and they do not care about health and safety," he told AFP.

Alawi is an outspoken critic of redevelopment at the Muslim holy sites, which he says is wiping away tangible links to the Prophet Muhammad.

But an engineer for the Saudi Binladin Group, the developer, told AFP news agency the crane had been installed in "an extremely professional way" and that there had been no technical problems.

"It was an act of God," he said.

On Friday, August 10th, CNN headlined “Saudi-led strike kills dozens of children on school field trip in Yemen” and reported as if the United States doesn’t have any important role to play in targeting and supplying the bombs and missiles for what the news-report refers to as “the Saudi-led coalition.” 

It even says at 0:15 in the video, “Saudi Arabia, through air strikes, leads the coalition, including the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Sudan” and doesn’t even mention there the main party, other than the royal Saud family — the U.S. Government itself — which provides not only detailed authorization of each target but also the weapons and the training on how they’re used. The accompanying printed CNN news-article says nothing at all about the U.S. Government’s involvement until the very end of the article, where a U.S. propagandist is quoted:

After the strike, the United States, which largely supports the coalition’s campaign, issued a statement.

“US military support to our partners mitigates noncombatant casualties,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Rebecca Rebarich, according to the statement.

“Our support to the coalition consists of aerial refueling and intelligence support to assist our partners in securing their borders from cross-border attacks from the Houthis. Our noncombat support focuses on improving coalition processes and procedures, especially regarding compliance with the law of armed conflict and best practices for reducing the risk of civilian casualties,” the statement said.

Here are more photos and videos of the air-strike’s victims, as posted to twitter by opponents of the Saudi, and UAE, and American dictatorships.

The CNN report alleges that the war in Yemen is between “the internationally recognized government in Yemen and against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.”

However, on 3 February 2018 the Washington Post had headlined “Yemen’s war is so out of control, allies are turning on one another” and reported by burying, within their article, clear evidence that that from CNN is a rabidly deceptive representation of the reality — a lie. Here are the relevant excerpts:

The three-year-old Yemen conflict has largely been cast as a war that pits an internationally recognized government against Iranian-backed rebels who ousted it. … Said April Longley Alley, a senior Yemen analyst for the International Crisis Group, “The narrative of a ‘legitimate government’ fighting the ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’ obscures a complex local reality, and it hinders efforts to achieve peace.”

[The Sauds’ chosen leader of Yemen] Hadi … has presided mostly from the Saudi capital, Riyadh…Alley added, “Now what we see is the UAE and [Saudi Arabia] scrambling to paper over differences between the two so that they can maintain, at least while the war with the Houthis continues, the myth of a unified front under an internationally recognized government.”

“The Emirates [the 7 Emirs who collectively own UAE] has ambitions in the south, and one of its most important ambitions is [grabbing] the port of Aden,” said Hassan Aljalal, a Yemeni journalist.

Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi researcher at the University of Exeter, said … “where did the money go?” … The coalition, he added, also needed to put more pressure on the government to “deliver for the people.”

That Washington Post article mentioned nothing, at all, about the U.S. Government’s role invading Yemen.

The owner of the Washington Post is Jeff Bezos, who also is the main owner of Amazon, whose web services division is the supplier of cloud computing services for the U.S. federal Government, which division — serving the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc., instead of consumers — is the only consistently profitable division of Amazon, and thus the key to Bezos’s having a net worth that’s already approximately 10% as large as is the Saudi King’s net worth.

In the United States, conflict-of-interest laws don’t pertain to the ‘news’media. However, a landmark 26 June 2017 ruling by the state of California’s Supreme Court, in the case of People v. Superior Court (Sahlolbei), could lead to a transformation of America into a democracy (which it isn’t currently), and that would mean ending the U.S. empire, including NATO, which has no democratic but only an imperial reason for existing after the end in 1991 of the Soviet Union and of its communism and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirroring America’s NATO military alliance.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/14/yemen-fake-news-in-americas-mainstre...

The president seems fine with keeping the Middle East awash in US arms, one of many strikes against this $23B UAE deal.

by Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

The Biden administration’s recent announcement giving a green light to a massive $23 billion weapons sale to the United Arab Emirates makes a mockery of its commitment to put human rights at the forefront of its foreign policy. The Emirates’ disastrous roles in Yemen and Libya, along with its vicious human rights record at home, should disqualify it from acquiring advanced weapons.

The deal was negotiated under the Trump administration and came to light less than a week after Donald Trump announced the normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, known as the Abraham Accords. While the public was regaled with Trump’s supposedly brilliant peace initiative, the secret clause that sweetened the deal was leaked: The U.S. would sell billions of dollars of weapons to the Gulf state — 50 F-35 fighter jets, 18 Reaper drones, and various missiles, bombs and munitions. The UAE and Israel have never been at war and had maintained unofficial ties for years, but the “peace accord” allowed the Trump administration to circumvent a policy that requires the United States to guarantee Israel’s military superiority in the region. The administration also framed the sale as necessary for the UAE to counter the threat posed by Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, ever the king of political drama, initially feigned outrage that another Middle East country besides Israel would possess the high-tech F-35s, but it was soon revealed that the Prime Minister had been in the know from the start and had approved the deal with his own caveat: Israel would get additional U.S. weapons to “balance” those going to the UAE.

Congressional opponents of the arms deal responded by introducing a bipartisan resolution of disapproval to block the sale. Surprisingly, hawkish Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led the resolution with Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rand Paul (R-K.Y.). They cited concerns about the timing as a rushed end-run around Congress, the UAE’s troubling involvement in Yemen and Libya, and the UAE’s military relationships with Russia and China. Though their legislation was voted down, when Joe Biden came into office, the State Department put this sale, as well as a weapons deal Trump had negotiated with Saudi Arabia, on hold. Human rights groups were encouraged that the Biden review might lead to a quashing of the deal but, apparently, geopolitical pressures, the hawks in the administration, and pressure from the weapons lobby have won the day. 

The companies that stand to gain hefty profits from this sale includeLockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Atomics and Northrop Grumman. Lockheed Martin will get $10.4 billion selling 50 of its F-35s. According to The New York Times, Raytheon, the biggest supplier of the bombs, lobbied the Trump administration for the deal. Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was a lobbyist for Raytheon and Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is a former Raytheon board member. 

The UAE’s role in Yemen should have been enough to quash the deal. For the past six years, a U.S.-supported coalition led by Saudi Arabia has been waging a war in Yemen so brutal that according to David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, this war-torn nation is “hell on earth” where one Yemeni child dies every 75 seconds.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press accused the UAE of operating secret prisons in Yemen where prisoners were subjected to horrific forms of torture. Former inmates describe cramped conditions covered in feces, being beaten, sexually assaulted, and trussed up on a “grill.” “We could hear the screams,” said a former detainee held for six months at the Rayan airport. “The entire place is gripped by fear. Almost everyone is sick, the rest are near death. Anyone who complains heads directly to the torture chamber,” said one former detainee.

In addition to its direct involvement, the UAE supported local proxies — around 90,000 fighters — providing them with direct training, capacity building, logistics assistance, and salaries. It also brought in mercenaries from as far away as Colombia, and weapons sold to the UAE ended up in the hands of al Qaeda-linked militias inside Yemen.

Complaints have been filed in courts in the UK, Turkey, and the U.S. alleging that UAE mercenaries in Yemen committed human rights abuses and war crimes. They also allege that the UAE joined the Saudis in enforcing a naval blockade that has kept fuel, food, and medicines from people in need, committing over 30 fighter jets to carry out airstrikes and naval ships to enforce the coalition’s blockade. 

Anxious to get out of a losing war that has been so bad for its image, the Emirates held a ceremony on February 9, 2020, to mark the end of their involvement in the Yemen war, moving from a “military-first strategy to a peace-first strategy.” But humanitarian groups on the ground tell us that the UAE maintains a presence in Socotra, Mukallah, and a small presence in Aden. In addition, it offers financial and military support to a variety of armed groups and political movements that have had a destabilizing influence throughout the country, particularly in the South. 

In Libya, the UAE has contributed to massive destruction with its support for General Khalifa Haftar in his unsuccessful fight against the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. The U.N. found the UAE to be violating the U.N. Security Council arms embargo on Libya by supplying combat equipment to Haftar’s militia, a group known for its human rights abuses. A 2020 U.S. Department of Defense report accusedthe UAE of funding and supporting Russian mercenaries in Libya and a January 2021 report by the Panel of Experts on Sudan found that the UAE has had “direct relations” with armed groups from Sudan’s Darfur region fighting in Libya. 

A complaint filed in the U.S. District Court by the New York Center for Foreign Policy Affairs on behalf of victims of UAE actions in Libya contends that “widespread and publicly available evidence suggests that the weapons being sold will be used in direct contravention of world peace and U.S. security, as well as prior U.S. policy.” 

Another strike against the sale is that it is fueling the Middle East arms race. While the UAE is set to become the first Arab state to acquire F-35s, it will not be the last. Qatar has already asked to purchase them and Saudi Arabia will likely follow. Israel is expecting additional arms beyond the $3.8 billion they already receive annually from the U.S. in military assistance. The sale is also increasing tension with Iran at a time when the Biden administration is trying to get Iran not only to wind back its nuclear program but also to reduce its ballistic missiles and military activities in the region. Surely stepping up arms sales to a key Iranian adversary will be a disincentive for it to demilitarize.  

A final reason to oppose the deal is the UAE domestic situation. Prince Mohammed bin Zayed is a shrewd Middle East dictator who uses his country’s military and financial resources to thwart moves toward democracy and respect for human rights under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism. The UAE restricts freedom of expression and silences dissent. Homosexuality and apostasy are capital offenses in this Muslim country, and legal punishments still on the books include stoning, amputation, crucifixion and flogging. According to Amnesty International, in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the UAE continued to detain dozens of prisoners of conscience, including prominent human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor. The government keeps opponents under arbitrary detention and a number of prisoners remain incarcerated despite having completed their sentences. On April 15, 2021, a cross-party coalition of European parliamentarianscondemned the systematic crackdown on freedom of speech and expression, and called for the release of all prisoners of conscience, an end to torture and ill-treatment of these prisoners, and the protection of prisoners’ families from collective punishment.

Another group subject to all kinds of abuses are the millions of migrants who work in the Emirates under the kafala system, a type of visa sponsorship system that deprives workers of basic rights. 

Faced with domestic crises that include a pandemic, a battered economy and exploding racial tensions, President Biden understands the need to focus his attention on domestic issues and wind down U.S. military entanglements from the past two decades. His recent announcement that U.S. troops will leave Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, reflects this. 
But a $23 billion weapons sale to the UAE is a disastrous move in the opposite direction. It puts the U.S. squarely on the side of a serial human rights abuser and inflames a region already awash with way too many weapons. A new round of legislation by Senators Menendez and Feinstein is being introduced to put checks on the sale of the F-35s, but it is the entire sale that must be questioned. If Biden refuses to put domestic and human rights concerns ahead of the profits of weapons manufacturers, then Congress must step in and pass legislation to stop him.

Read more:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/04/22/why-is-biden-selling-weapons-to-a-country-that-helped-make-yemen-a-hell-hole/

Read from top

see also: 

According to the Yemen Press Agency (YPA), the flight departed from Riyan International Airport in Mukalla in southern Hadhramaut province, which is under the control of the UAE.

Internet connectivity was also severely disrupted across the Sayhut district in Al-Mahra following the arrival of US troops, allegedly due to the installation of “sophisticated surveillance devices.”

Earlier this month, Prime Minister of the National Salvation Government (NSG) Abdulaziz Saleh bin Habtoor warned that Washington is looking to control Yemen’s natural resources.

During a meeting between Bin Habtoor and the governors of Hadhramaut and Al-Mahra, the Yemeni premier emphasized that the US wants to exploit Yemen’s oil fields, as they did and continue to do in Syria.

“This is at the expense of the Yemeni people, impoverishing them, aggravating their humanitarian situation, and fueling the spirit of conflict between them,” Bin Habtoor said at the time.

A few days before this meeting, the governor of Al-Mahra revealed that US and British military trainers arrived to the province on vessels loaded with weapons and logistical equipment.

In a letter addressed to the US Congress last month, President Joe Biden confirmed that Washington deployed troops to Yemen to provide military support for the Saudi-led coalition.

“A number of American military personnel are deployed in Yemen,” the US president said, “to conduct operations against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, as well as provide military advice and information to the Saudi-led coalition.”

According to Biden’s letter, the US military will continue to work “closely” with “partner regional forces” in their operations against Ansarallah.

The US is notorious for its theft of oil in countries it illegally occupies, namely Syria, where it controls the northeast oil-rich Syrian regions with the help of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

US troops and SDF forces in Hasakah and Deir Ezzor governorates in Syria have been regularly smuggling Syrian oil out of the country to sell abroad.

READ MORE:

https://thecradle.co/Article/News/13642

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW..................