What’s the difference between 10,000 people being killed in air strikes and a bunch of missiles taking out an oil processing facility for a few days?
The answer is no laughing matter.
The difference is that only the one which threatens the markets will “not be tolerated” by the Trump administration.
For more than four years, the people of Yemen have been relentlessly bombed back to the Dark Ages by a Saudi Arabia-led coalition, reckless, to put it charitably, about where its aircraft drop their payloads.
Forty-seven fishermen here, 137 funeral mourners there, a 20-strong wedding party and, in one year alone, 443 children.
Four hundred and forty three children.
Forty-four of these children were on a bus on a summer school trip into Saada when their vehicle was hit by a stray missile in August 2018.
A video taken by one of the boys showed them laughing and playing on the bus shortly before it was hit.
When, a week later, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo found himself meeting the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, no mention was made of the day the children died.
Their deaths were not deemed important enough for America’s top diplomat to bring up with the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, whose planes were responsible.
Fast forward a year, to the missile strikes on Saudi oil fields last weekend, attributed by many to Iran or its proxies.
At the time it was said that 18 drones and seven missiles had knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production and the world should brace itself for soaring fuel prices in the wake of an anticipated fall in supplies.
The loss of 5.7 million barrels a day—about fifty percent of Saudi’s output and five percent of the world’s daily production—was said to have caused the “biggest oil disruption in history.”
Sure enough, Monday saw the biggest hike in the price of oil for a decade, 14 per cent, and a miserable future for travellers was predicted with rises in air fares of 15 per cent expected.
Step forward the same Mike Pompeo to declare the drone-strikes an “unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply” and an “act of war.”
“The Iranian regime’s threatening behaviour will not be tolerated,” he stormed.
Not one person dead, no one injured. Not even a scratch. And, lo and behold, by Wednesday the Saudi energy minister was saying that half the oil production which had been knocked out had been recovered.
Not only that, but production capacity at the plants would be fully restored by the end of the month.
Global crisis handsomely averted, in other words.
Now, I’m not going pretend that an attack on the Saudi-Aramco oil refineries should not be condemned. Of course it should.
But what’s shameful and depressing is how the prospect of the world’s energy market being thrown into disarray for a few days counts for so much more than a four-year war which has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The knock-on effects of the conflict have left millions, including 85,000 children, facing disease and on the brink of starvation.
Where is America’s condemnation of that? Where is the outrage? What is the world coming to when a wobble on the oil markets is deemed so much more important than thousands of men, women and children being killed as they innocently go about their daily lives?
And yet these are the priorities of leaders in the West as demonstrated by their use of words, by what they choose to condemn and what they’re happy to let pass.
An analysis of debris from the school bus site showed that the 227kg laser-guided bomb used in the attack was made by Lockheed Martin and sold to Saudi Arabia as part of billions of dollars of US weapons exports.
That is one reason that Pompeo would not criticise the Saudis and why, just a few months later, President Trump, by his own admission, was so soft on the Riyadh leadership in the wake of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
But while America, to safeguard jobs and political capital at home, continues arming Saudi Arabia with weapons that are used to killed children, there will be people prepared to say what Pompeo should have said.
Even it’s a lone protestor, Bryce Druzin, 34, who spray painted the word ‘Yemen’ in blood red across Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, alongside the date of the slaughter.
Human life should always matter more than the price of oil.
Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
US-run ‘SDF’ continues to kidnap Syrian children to make them ‘soldiers.’
In Syria news briefs today, two children were injured in another landmine blast; a child fleeing from US ‘SDF’ criminal militia was shot to death; Reconciliation continues; an increase in olive production is expected.
Two children were injured by shrapnel from another exploding landmine left behind by terrorists in al Swaiaa, Deir Ezzor. They are expected to recover. Despite the UN Mine Action Service has signed an MoU to assist the Syrian government more than a year ago, terrorists’ buried landmines continue to kill and maim.
Also on 21 August, Syria continued with its Reconciliation program. In Homs, 115 men had their legal statuses settled, upon turning themselves in, and handing over their weapons, so they could “return to their normal lives.”
Syria’s Ministry of Agriculture announced the expectation of olive and olive oil production to be increased this year. Since last year, when crops were decreased because farmlands were injured by terrorists, the Ministry has engaged in rehabilitation and ongoing maintenance to return to normal production. The expected output is 830,000 tons of olives, and 150 tons of olive oil.
The vilest of news from Syria, on 21 August, will never be reported in NATO media. The US-run ‘SDF‘ murdered a Syrian child who attempted to escape kidnapping. Three of his family members were also shot by these separatist-terrorists, trying to protect him.
The murdered child was 13 years old Osama Obeid, who lived in the village of al-Gharb in Hasaka. The ‘SDF‘ stormtroopers have been raiding homes in Hasaka countryside, to kidnap young men and children to incarcerate them in “coercive recruitment camps” — brainwash centers to force Syrian children to become armed terrorists.
The YPG precursor to the ‘SDF’ criminals promised to end their war criminal activity of creating ‘child soldiers,’ back in 2014. NATO media swooned, then, and swooned again late June, when an ‘SDF commander’ was invited to the UN to sign an agreement to end the destruction of children’s psyches.
How utterly shameless that that which should be considered normal among civilized human beings should be lauded, instead.
Another UN breach of its own charter? Signing an agreement with an agent of the US in Syria.
Colonial media normalizing the existence of armed terrorists in Syria.
NATO media supporting the US-sponsored ‘SDF’ against Syria has a two-pronged effect: The ability to subsequently ignore more war crimes, and to feed into the wretched western colonial mindset, attracting the Lilliputian serfs to support the attempted destruction of the sovereignty of Syria.
This insidious propaganda permits western media to ignore the murder of Osama Obeid, 13, who tried to escape kidnapping, as they have ignored the ‘SDF’ torching thousands of hectares of wheat and barley farmland in Syria, and as they have ignored the attempt of ‘ethnic cleansing‘ of Syrians in Qamishli.
Do an internet search, “Syria news,” and you will not find a single western medium to report on Tuesday’s murder of the Syrian child, nor anything except ongoing, anti-Syria war propaganda.
The time is past overdue for westerners to stop being colonial serfs, to stand upright, on hind legs, and to acknowledge that Syria continues to fight terrorism on behalf of humanity.
NB: Today is the anniversary of the Ghouta massacre, committed by the FSA moderate terrorists who admitted having received their chemical weapons from “Prince Bandar [who should have instructed the killers in their proper usage so as not to have slaughtered some of their own, also].”
Seven-year-old Tariq Zabania from Al-Khalil (Hebron) was killed on the spot when an Israeli Jewish settler ran his car over him on July 15. Little Tariq’s photograph, lying face down on the road, was circulated on social media. His untimely death is heartbreaking.
Tariq’s innocent blood must not go in vain. For this to happen, we are morally obliged to understand the nature of Jewish settler violence, which cannot be viewed in isolation from the inherent racism in Israeli society as a whole.
We are all often guilty of perpetuating the myth that militant Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories are a different and distinct category from other Israelis who live beyond the so-called “Green Line”.
Undoubtedly, the violent mentality that propels Israeli society, wherever it is located, is not governed by imaginary lines but by a racist ideology, of which disciples can be found everywhere in Israel, not just in the illegal Jewish colonies of the West Bank.
Israel is a sick society and its ailment is not confined to the 1967 Occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
While Palestinians are imprisoned behind walls, fences and enclosed regions, Israelis are a different kind of prisoners, too. “A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness,” wrote the late anti-Apartheid hero and long-time prisoner, Nelson Mandela.
It is this racism and bigotry that makes Tariq invisible to most Israelis. For most Israelis, Palestinian children do not exist as real human beings, deserving of a dignified life of freedom. This callousness is a defining quality, common among all sectors of Israeli society – right, left and center.
Tariq Zabania
An example is the terrorist attack carried out by Jewish settlers against the Palestinian Dawabshe family in the village of Duma, in the northern West Bank in July 2015, resulting in the death of Riham and Sa’ed, along with their 18-months old son, Ali. The only member of the family spared that horrific death was Ahmad, 4, who was severely burned.
This cruelty was further accentuated in the episodes that followed this criminal incident. Later that year, Israeli wedding guests were caught on tape while dancing with knives, chanting in celebration of the death of the Palestinian baby.
Three years later, as the Dawabshe family members were leaving an Israeli court, accompanied by Arab parliamentarians, they were greeted by a crowd of Israelis chanting “Where is Ali? Ali’s dead” and “Ali’s on the grill”.
The passing of time only cemented Israelis’ hatred of a little child whose only crime was his Palestinian identity.
The only survivor, Ahmad, was punished thrice: when he lost his whole family; with his severe burns and when he was denied compensation. The then Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, simply resolved that the boy was not a “terror victim.” Case closed.
Although the Dawabshes were killed by Jewish settlers, the Israeli court, army and political system all conspired to ensure the protection of the killers from any accountability.
This was no different in the case of Israeli soldier Elor Azaria, who, on March 24, 2016, killed an unconscious Palestinian man in Hebron. In his defense, Azaria insisted that he was following army manual instructions in dealing with alleged attackers, while top Israeli government officials came out in droves to support him.
When Azaria was triumphantly released following only nine months in jail, he was hailed by many Israelis as a hero. Possibly, he will have a successful career in politics should he decide to pursue that route. In fact, he was courted by Israeli politicians to help them garner more votes in April’s general elections.
Condemning solely Jewish settlers while sparing the rest of Israeli society is equivalent to political whitewashing, one that presents Israel as a healthy society prior to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This view presents Jewish settlements as a cancerous disease that is eating up at the otherwise proud and noble achievements of early Zionists.
It is convenient to classify Jewish settlers as rightwing extremists and to link them with Israel’s ruling right-wing political parties. But history proves otherwise.
Ahmad Dawabsheh, the sole survivor of an Israeli settler arson attack in Duma is dressed at Tel HaShomer Hospital, July 22, 2016. Tsafrir Abayov | AP
It was Israel’s Labor Party that created the settlement projects originally, soon after the colonization of the West Bank. Some of Israel’s largest, and most militant colonial enterprises, in occupied East Jerusalem – Ramat Eshkol, Gilo, Ramot and Armon Hanatziv – are all the creation of the Labor Party, not the Likud.
Neither is the ‘settler’ a new phenomenon. Historically, the early settlers who preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948 were idealized as true Zionists, celebrated as “cultural heroes” – the Jewish redeemers, who eventually ethnically cleansed historic Palestine from its native inhabitants.
“The original Labor movement,” wrote Amotz Asa-El in The Jerusalem Post, “never thought settling beyond the Green Line was illegal, much less immoral.” If there was any debate in Israel regarding settlements, it was never truly concerned with the issue of legitimacy or legality, but practicality: whether these colonial projects can be sustained or defended.
Protecting the settlements is now the overriding task of the Israeli occupation army. The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, which monitors the conduct of the Israeli army and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, explained the nature of this relationship in a report published in November 2017.
“Israeli security forces not only allow settlers to harm Palestinians and their property as a matter of course – they often provide the perpetrators escort and back-up. In some cases, they even join in on the attack,” B’Tselem wrote.
Another Israeli organization, Yesh Din, concluded in a report published earlier that 85% of cases involving settler violence against Palestinians are never pursued by law. Of the remaining cases, only 1.9% led to a conviction, which is likely to be inconsequential
Jewish settler violence should not be analyzed separately from the violence meted out by the Israeli army but seen within the larger context of the violent Zionist ideology that governs Israeli society entirely.
This violence can only end with the end of the racist ideology that rationalizes murder, like that of little Tariq Zabania.
Feature photo | Jewish settlers point their guns at unarmed Palestinians protesting the confiscation of their land by the Jewish settlers in the West Bank village Burin, near Nablus, Aug. 7, 2009. Majdi Mohammed | AP
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
SourceA child suffering from malnutrition caused by the Saudi aggression lies on a bed at a treatment center in al-Sabeen Maternal Hospital in the Yemeni capital Sana’a on June 22, 2019. (Photo by AFP)
The United Nations has for the third year put Saudi Arabia and its allies in their military campaign against Yemen on the world body’s blacklist of child killers,
According to a report by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in 2018, the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen killed or injured 729 children, nearly half the total child casualties of the year.
The UN chief’s report, which was presented to the Security Council on Friday, also states that Palestinian casualties caused by the Israeli regime, mainly its military, hit a four-year high in 2018.
The report shows that 59 Palestinian children were killed – 56 by Israeli forces – and another 2,756 were injured last year.
Guterres urged “Israel to immediately put in place preventive and protective measures to end the excessive use of force”.
“I condemn the increasing number of child casualties, which are often a result of attacks in densely populated areas and against civilian objects, including schools and hospitals,” Guterres said in the report, produced by UN Children and Armed Conflict envoy Virginia Gamba and issued in Guterres’ name.
The report does not subject those listed to action; however, it shames parties to conflicts in the hope of pushing them to stop killing children.
Diplomats say Saudi Arabia and Israel both have exerted pressure in recent years in a bid to stay off the list, but no to avail.
In reaction to the Friday report, Saudi Ambassador to the UN Abdadllah Al-Mouallimi claimed that “every child’s life is precious” to Riyadh, and questioned the sourcing and accuracy of the report, describing the numbers as “exaggerated.”
His claims come as over 80,000 Yemeni children under five years have died as a result of severe malnutrition caused by the Saudi-led coalition’s aggression against the people of Yemen, Guterres cited a report as saying earlier this year.
The war that began in March 2015 has so far killed thousands of Yemeni women and children and destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure.
The Yemeni Health Ministry announced in a report on Friday that one Yemeni child is dying of malnutrition every 10 minutes. The report, cited by al-Mayadeen TV, said malnutrition has affected 2.3 million children in Yemen during the past five years.
It also pointed to the outbreak of cholera as a result of the Saudi-led coalition’s aggression, saying that children account for 40 percent of the 3,700 people diagnosed with the disease in the war-torn country.
Another savage attack against Aleppo by terrorists supported by Erdogan, Qatar, US, EU — and now also officially by the Holy See — murder 3, injured 15, and destroyed cars and property, 24 July. Two of the martyrs are children. This carnage follows the terror attacks of Monday.
The Nusra faction of al Qaeda against Syria — Qatar’s faction of wahhabi savages — fired rockets into Aleppo from al Rashidin, causing death and destruction in al Hamadaniyah and Seif al Dawlah neighborhoods.
Sohayb Masri@Sohayb_Masri1
Video of armed terrorist groups targeting the “Hamdania” district of #Aleppo with rocket-propelled grenades
In April 2017 a deal brokered with Qatar by Iran to exchange imprisoned terrorists for civilian kidnap victims ended in a massacre of upwards of 130, and the kidnapping of dozens of Syrian children. Qatar subsequently offered security to OPCW investigators to enter Khan Sheikhoun, but they declined.
The Syrian Arab Army responded by destroying rocket launch pads and an undisclosed amount of human garbage.
It is unlikely Pope Francis has been able to send another diplomatic letter to President Assad at this time.
Also on 24 July, Syrian sappers inspecting liberated areas of Deir Ezzor discovered an underground cache in al Mayadeen Bayida desert area, of more than 1,000 (one thousand) mortars left behind by retreating terrorists.
96% of Syrian territory is under the control of the Armed Forces and the national government. One and a half million of those who had to leave the country due to the war, have now returned and begin normal life and the colossal task of reconstruction in a nation devastated by shrapnel, both from the terrorists of the so-called Islamic State and Al Nusra Front, and from the US air force that still continues bombing operations and maintains troops at illegal bases in the Arab state.
That is the situation until this March 15, the eighth anniversary of an externally imposed war.
Preliminary accounts of the injuries caused there indicate that more than 360 000 people have died and several million have been displaced or have had to emigrate. An estimated 1 106 children died in 2018 alone, according to UNICEF data.
A report from the UN agency said: “People believe that the conflict is ending, but many children remain as exposed to danger as at any time in the past eight years”.
Material losses in excess of $400 billion and a reconstruction of the country, which, according to the UN, will need $250 billion, is part of the Arab nation’s landscape today.
But the international community must be aware that there are two wars against Syria: that of the terrorists of the Islamic State and Al Nusra Front, supported by the United States with money and weapons, and the bombing of U.S. planes that continue to cause deaths of hundreds of civilians, mostly children and women, as well as major material destruction.
On the eve of the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war, units of the Syrian Army discovered and exposed before the world the most varied armaments that have been seized and that have the label of origin of the United States and Israel.
This week also saw the deaths of 50 Syrian civilians in a new massacre by U.S. fighters in the Deir Ezzor region.
In late January, the U.S. Department of Defense admitted that some 1,190 civilians lost their lives in coalition attacks in Syria and Iraq over the past three and a half years; however, human rights bodies report a much higher number.
It is curious that, while Trump talks about the triumph of his forces against the “terrorists”, the only territories where the few remaining pockets are grouped together are located in areas protected by US military and aviation bases, which illegally entered Syrian territory.
And although Trump had recently announced that his troops would leave the Arab nation, the opposite has happened. Even John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, told ABC News that “he hoped that the British and French allies would join Washington’s efforts”.
“Living under occupation and siege, imposed since I was born, inspired me and affected my paintings.”
Majd al-Madhoun, a young, 13-year old Palestinianartist, was shot for the second time by an Israeli soldier while protesting peacefully in the Great March of Return protest near the fence which separates Gaza from Israel. Majd’s first shot was in his leg. The second was a rubber bullet in his head. Majd has been hospitalized, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he loves to do the most.
“I posed no threat to Israeli forces,” Majd said. “I was only standing, looking at our occupied homeland and imagining that I was painting the trees over there.”
I go to every the protests every Friday and Monday and participate with my family and friends, calling for our basic right to live a decent life,”Majd added.
Majd is well-known among his colleagues and relatives for his inspiring art. He has participated in several local exhibitions inside the Gaza Strip.
“My wish is travel across the world and participate in international exhibitions,” he said.
The young artist painted a picture of RazanAl-Najjar, the iconic Palestinian medic shot dead by Israeli gunfire while treating the injured in the Great Return March. He also painted several pictures of Palestinian leaders and martyrs.
Source: Just World Educational
His grandfather discovered his talent when he was only five years old.
“Living under occupation and siege, imposed since I was born, inspired me and affected my paintings,” Majd said.
Since March 30, Palestinians have protested peacefully, every Friday, at the separation fence east and north of the Gaza Strip to break the blockade Israel has imposedon Gaza since 2006, and call for their right to return to their occupied homeland.
The also protest the naval blockade by demonstrating near the maritime fence every Monday.
According to Ministry of Health spokesperson Dr. Ashraf al-Qedra, around 219 Palestinians have been killed and over 20,000 injured with live ammunition.
Majd is not the only child shot during the Great Return March. Many others had their legs amputated. 12-year-old AbdurRahmanNofal is an example. He lost his leg when an Israeli sniper shot him with a live bullet. It’s been nine months, and Palestinians insist on continuing their peaceful marches until the Israeli blockade is lifted and the people of Gaza can live like the rest of the world.
*
Wafa Aludaini, a Gaza-based activist and journalist, is the manager of the 16th October Group.
Rebel Voice has repeatedly broached the subject of child abuse across the planet. It is our position on this site that there is nothing more abhorrent than the deliberate harming of a child, whether such abuse is physical, emotional, psychological or sexual. The newspapers and TV screens are filled with horrific stories of how the […]
In Yemen, people get up early in the morning because of war, death and famine…
Although Yemen occupies a large noticeable area on the world map, it can barely go noticed in the hearts and minds of the entire people.
{The example of those who spend their wealth in the way of Allah is like a seed [of grain] which grows seven spikes; in each spike is a hundred grains. And Allah multiplies [His reward] for whom He wills} – Holy Quran, Surat al-Baqarah, verse 261
It is not only Save the Children, Islamic Relief and other few charitable organizations that are helping Yemen and its inhabitants. There is a humble association in Lebanon that drew the country’s people’s attention to the tragedy happening in the forgotten spot of the world.
The Beirut-based Seven Spikes (7 Sanabel) association was founded in 2012.
According to its chief, Ms. Zahra Badreddine, the association tends to serve poor and needy people.
“Since one of our goals is to help those in need, as the Yemen crisis broke out, one volunteer within the association suggested that we help them. We publicized an advertisement to start raising funds for Yemen, and we provided the text with the official phone numbers of the association. People were suspicious in the beginning, even the close ones… they wondered how could we deliver such aid to the blockaded country. But they were also happy that there is side capable of delivering their donations. Money is transferred through special channels to the safe areas, where the amounts are used to buy necessary foods such as rice, sugar, other nutrients, in addition to medicines to the deprived families,” she explained.
We have delivered three batches of aid, and now we are fundraising for the fourth one. People donated gold coins during the third batch. And we, as an association, demanded to document the aid delivery in a video to assure donors that the help is destined to its people. And indeed, there was a report that documented the process with a banner raised in the targeted area with a thank you message to the association, Badreddine told al-Ahed News.
“Many people thanked us for opening them a door to help. They said that they are feeling the pain and suffering but don’t know how to help.”
She further elaborated that
“Due to the blockade, we couldn’t deliver food from here, we just send the money there and they take charge of buying food to those in need. An amount of $7000 helped feed 180 families.”
“We stressed that the donations target the most needy areas; those who are starving,” Badreddine concluded.
She closed her words by urging other associations and campaigns to open their hands and make every effort to help the Yemeni people.
And for those wishing to give a helping hand, the (7 Sanabel) association’s hotlines are as follows:
00 961 71021536
00 961 76835300
00 961 70678100
00 961 70653690
It is worth mentioning that the aid group restricted gathering the donations to its representatives, and for those found outside the capital city or even outside the country, the group is open to receive them via Online Money Transfer service [OMT].
Hereby, it is an invitation for all schools, universities and any other sides to take the initiative in solidarity Yemen.
Although the association’s capabilities only cover small areas, its people in charge harbor hopes that their initiative help widen the scale of aid given to the starving people, and lift the suffering there are struggling to end in the face of the years-long brutal war imposed on them.
In this respect, the latest UNICEF estimates reported that the total people in need are 22.2 million, 11.3 million of them are children.
In further details, the UN agency warned that Yemen has become one of the world’s largest and most complex humanitarian crises. Almost 80 per cent of the population is in dire need of humanitarian assistance. The war has led to the internal displacement of 2 million people, left over 1 million public sector workers without pay for two years, and undermined access to ports and airports, obstructing essential humanitarian and commercial deliveries.
The crisis has led to many problems among the following:
Growing food insecurity, poor water and sanitation, and the spread of preventable diseases threaten millions more. The caseload of outbreaks of Acute Watery Diarrhea (AWD)/cholera has reached over one million. The strain on an already weakened health system has been further compounded by the diphtheria outbreak in early 2018, with over 2,200 cases, so far
In addition, 16 million people lack access to safe water
Children are the primary victims: more than 6,000 have been verified as killed or maimed since the conflict began
Almost 394,000 children under 5 currently suffer from severe acute malnutrition [SAM] and require treatment
The damage and closure of schools and health facilities threaten children’s access to education and health services
Although the bony faces of Yemeni children can say it all, people should notice that famine is not caused by a shortage of food, it is rather caused by a shortage of sympathy and giving, and you cannot feel the hell they are suffering from unless you are in their shoes.
But if you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one. You would never become poor by giving a small amount of the entire blessings you enjoy.
And always remember that we can’t help everyone, but for sure everyone can help someone.
So, this platform is meant to open your eyes to the fact that any one of you can give a helping hand. Borders are not a barrier. When you want’ to make something happen, then you’ll definitely find a way to do.
Chest heaving and eyes fluttering, the 3-year-old boy lay silently on a hospital bed in the highland town of Hajjah, a bag of bones fighting for breath.
His father, Ali al-Hajaji, stood anxiously over him. Mr. Hajaji had already lost one son three weeks earlier to the epidemic of hunger sweeping across Yemen. Now he feared that a second was slipping away.
It wasn’t for a lack of food in the area: The stores outside the hospital gate were filled with goods and the markets were bustling. But Mr. Hajaji couldn’t afford any of it because prices were rising too fast.
“I can barely buy a piece of stale bread,” he said. “That’s why my children are dying before my eyes.”
The devastating war in Yemen has gotten more attention recently as outrage over the killing of a Saudi dissident in Istanbul has turned a spotlight on Saudi actions elsewhere. The harshest criticism of the Saudi-led war has focused on the airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians at weddings, funerals and on school buses, aided by American-supplied bombs and intelligence.
But aid experts and United Nations officials say a more insidious form of warfare is also being waged in Yemen, an economic war that is exacting a far greater toll on civilians and now risks tipping the country into a famine of catastrophic proportions.
Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi-led coalition and its Yemeni allies have imposed a raft of punitive economic measures aimed at undercutting the Ansarullah revolutionaries. But these actions — including periodic blockades, stringent import restrictions and withholding the salaries of about a million civil servants — have landed on the backs of civilians, laying the economy to waste and driving millions deeper into poverty.
Those measures have inflicted a slow-burn toll: infrastructure destroyed, jobs lost, a weakening currency and soaring prices. But in recent weeks the economic collapse has gathered pace at alarming speed, causing top United Nations officials to revise their predictions of famine.
“There is now a clear and present danger of an imminent and great, big famine engulfing Yemen,” Mark Lowcock, the undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council on Tuesday. Eight million Yemenis already depend on emergency food aid to survive, he said, a figure that could soon rise to 14 million, or half Yemen’s population.
“People think famine is just a lack of food,” said Alex de Waal, author of “Mass Starvation” which analyzes recent man-made famines. “But in Yemen it’s about a war on the economy.”
The signs are everywhere, cutting across boundaries of class, tribe and region. Unpaid university professors issue desperate appeals for help on social media. Doctors and teachers are forced to sell their gold, land or cars to feed their families. On the streets of the capital, Sana, an elderly woman begs for alms with a loudspeaker.
“Help me,” the woman, Zahra Bajali, calls out. “I have a sick husband. I have a house for rent. Help.”
And in the hushed hunger wards, ailing infants hover between life and death. Of nearly two million malnourished children in Yemen, 400,000 are considered critically ill — a figure projected to rise by one quarter in the coming months.
“We are being crushed,” said Dr. Mekkia Mahdi at the health clinic in Aslam, an impoverished northwestern town that has been swamped with refugees fleeing the fighting in Hudaydah, an embattled port city 90 miles to the south.
Flitting between the beds at her spartan clinic, she cajoled mothers, dispensed orders to medics and spoon-fed milk to sickly infants. For some it was too late: the night before, an 11-month old boy had died. He weighed five and a half pounds.
Looking around her, Dr. Mahdi could not fathom the Western obsession with the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.
“We’re surprised the Khashoggi case is getting so much attention while millions of Yemeni children are suffering,” she said. “Nobody gives a damn about them.”
She tugged on the flaccid skin of a drowsy 7-year-old girl with stick-like arms. “Look,” she said. “No meat. Only bones.”
The embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington did not respond to questions about the country’s policies in Yemen. But Saudi officials have defended their actions, citing rockets fired across their border by the Ansarullah…
The Saudis point out that they, along with the United Arab Emirates, are among the most “generous donors” to Yemen’s humanitarian relief effort. Last spring, the two allies pledged $1 billion in aid to Yemen. In January, Saudi Arabia deposited $2 billion in Yemen’s central bank to prop up its currency.
But those efforts have been overshadowed by the coalition’s attacks on Yemen’s economy, including the denial of salaries to civil servants, a partial blockade that has driven up food prices, and the printing of vast amounts of bank notes, which caused the currency to plunge.
And the offensive to capture Hudaydah, which started in June, has endangered the main lifeline for imports to northern Yemen, displaced 570,000 people and edged many more closer to starvation.
A famine here, Mr. Lowcock warned, would be “much bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives.”
When Ali Hajaji’s son fell ill with diarrhea and vomiting, the desperate father turned to extreme measures. Following the advice of village elders, he pushed the red-hot tip of a burning stick into Shaher’s chest, a folk remedy to drain the “black blood” from his son.
“People said burn him in the body and it will be OK,” Mr. Hajaji said. “When you have no money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”
The burns were a mark of the rudimentary nature of life in Juberia, a cluster of mud-walled houses perched on a rocky ridge. To reach it, you cross a landscape of sandy pastures, camels and beehives, strewn with giant, rust-colored boulders, where women in black cloaks and yellow straw boaters toil in the fields.
In the past, the men of the village worked as migrant laborers in Saudi Arabia, whose border is 80 miles away. They were often treated with disdain by their wealthy Saudi employers but they earned a wage. Mr. Hajaji worked on a suburban construction site in Mecca, the holy city visited by millions of Muslim pilgrims every year.
When the war broke out in 2015, the border closed.
The fighting never reached Juberia, but it still took a toll there.
Last year a young woman died of cholera, part of an epidemic that infected 1.1 million Yemenis. In April, a coalition airstrike hit a wedding party in the district, killing 33 people, including the bride. A local boy who went to fight for the Houthis was killed in an airstrike.
But for Mr. Hajaji, who had five sons under age 7, the deadliest blow was economic.
He watched in dismay as the riyal lost half its value in the past year, causing prices to soar. Suddenly, groceries cost twice as much as they had before the war. Other villagers sold their assets, such as camels or land, to get money for food.
But Mr. Hajaji, whose family lived in a one-room, mud-walled hut, had nothing to sell.
At first he relied on the generosity of neighbors. Then he pared back the family diet, until it consisted only of bread, tea and halas, a vine leaf that had always been a source of food but now occupied a central place in every meal.
Soon his first son to fall ill, Shaadi, was vomiting and had diarrhea, classic symptoms of malnutrition. Mr. Hajaji wanted to take the ailing 4-year-old to the hospital, but that was out of the question: fuel prices had risen by 50 percent over the previous year.
One morning in late September, Mr. Hajaji walked into his house to find Shaadi silent and immobile, with a yellow tinge to his skin. “I knew he was gone,” he said. He kissed his son on the forehead, bundled him up in his arms, and walked along a winding hill path to the village mosque.
That evening, after prayers, the village gathered to bury Shaadi. His grave, marked by a single broken rock, stood under a grove of Sidr trees that, in better times, were famous for their honey.
Shaadi was the first in the village to die from hunger.
A few weeks later, when Shaher took ill, Mr. Hajaji was determined to do something. When burning didn’t work, he carried his son down the stony path to a health clinic, which was ill-equipped for the task. Half of Yemen’s health facilities are closed because of the war.
So his family borrowed $16 for the journey to the hospital in Hajjah.
“All the big countries say they are fighting each other in Yemen,” Mr. Hajaji said. “But it feels to us like they are fighting the poor people.”
Yemen’s economic crisis was not some unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the fighting…
At the Sabeen hospital in Sana, Dr. Huda Rajumi treats the country’s most severely malnourished children. But her own family is suffering, too, as she falls out of Yemen’s vanishing middle class.
In the past year, she has received only a single month’s salary. Her husband, a retired soldier, is no longer getting his pension, and Dr. Rajumi has started to skimp on everyday pleasures, like fruit, meat and taxi rides, to make ends meet.
“We get by because people help each other out,” she said. “But it’s getting hard.”
Economic warfare takes other forms, too. In a recent paper, Martha Mundy, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, analyzed coalition airstrikes in Yemen, finding that their attacks on bridges, factories, fishing boats and even fields suggested that they aimed to destroy food production and distribution in Ansarullah-controlled areas.
Saudi Arabia’s tight control over all air and sea movements into northern Yemen has effectively made the area a prison for those who live there. In September, the World Health Organization brokered the establishment of a humanitarian air bridge to allow the sickest Yemenis — cancer patients and others with life-threatening conditions — to fly to Egypt.
Among those on the waiting list is Maimoona Naji, a 16-year-old girl with a melon-size tumor on her left leg. At a hostel in Sana, her father, Ali Naji, said they had obtained visas and money to travel to India for emergency treatment. Their hopes soared in September when his daughter was told she would be on the first plane out of Sana once the airlift started.
But the agreement has stalled, blocked by the Yemeni government, according to the senior Western official. Maimoona and dozens of other patients have been left stranded, the clock ticking on their illnesses.
“First they told us ‘next week, next week,’” said Mr. Naji, shuffling through reams of documents as tears welled up in his eyes. “Then they said no. Where is the humanity in that? What did we do to deserve this?”
Only two famines have been officially declared by the United Nations in the past 20 years, in Somalia and South Sudan. A United Nations-led assessment due in mid-November will determine how close Yemen is to becoming the third.
To stave it off, aid workers are not appealing for shipments of relief aid but for urgent measures to rescue the battered economy.
“This is an income famine,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Yemen. “The key to stopping it is to ensure that people have enough money to buy what they need to survive.”
The priority should be to stabilize the falling currency, she said, and to ensure that traders and shipping companies can import the food that Yemenis need.
Above all, she added, “the fighting has to stop.”
One hope for Yemenis is that the international fallout from the death of the Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, which has damaged Prince Mohammed’s international standing, might force him to relent in his unyielding prosecution of the war.
Peter Salisbury, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, said that was unlikely.
“I think the Saudis have learned what they can get away with in Yemen — that western tolerance for pretty bad behavior is quite high,” he said. “If the Khashoggi murder tells us anything, it’s just how reluctant people are to rein the Saudis in.”
More than five million children are at risk of famine in Yemen as the ongoing war causes food and fuel prices to soar across the country, charity Save the Children has warned.
Disruption to supplies coming through the embattled Red Sea port of Hodeida could “cause starvation on an unprecedented scale”, the British-based NGO said in a new report.
Save the Children said an extra one million children now risk falling into famine as prices of food and transportation rise, bringing the total to 5.2 million.
Any type of closure at the port “would put the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in immediate danger while pushing millions more into famine”, it added.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children International, said: “Millions of children don’t know when or if their next meal will come. In one hospital I visited in north Yemen, the babies were too weak to cry, their bodies exhausted by hunger.
“This war risks killing an entire generation of Yemen’s children who face multiple threats, from bombs to hunger to preventable diseases like cholera,” she added.
The United Nations has warned that any major fighting in Hodeida could halt food distributions to eight million Yemenis dependent on them for survival.
British charity ‘Save the Children’ has warned that 5 million children are at risk of famine in Yemen as the Saudi-led coalition continues its devastating war on the impoverished country.
On Tuesday, the coalition launched a campaign to control Yemen’s port of Hodeidah, according to state media in the United Arab Emirates, a partner in the coalition.
‘Save the Children’ has said that damage to the port or its temporary closure would increase food and fuel costs, putting 1 million more children at risk of famine.
‘Save the Children’ International CEO Helle Thorning-Schmidt said the “nutrition crisis… has serious implications” for the country’s young.
“Millions of children don’t know when or if their next meal will come. In one hospital I visited in north Yemen, the babies were too weak to cry, their bodies exhausted by hunger. This could be any hospital in Yemen,” Thorning-Schmidt said.
“What happens in Hodeidah has a direct impact on children and families right across Yemen. Even the smallest disruption to food, fuel and aid supplies through its vital port could mean death for hundreds of thousands of malnourished children unable to get the food they need to stay alive,” she said.
‘Vital lifeline’
The port is a “vital lifeline” for goods and aid for 80% of the country’s population, the organization estimates.
“Even the smallest disruption to food, fuel and aid supplies through its vital port could mean death for hundreds of thousands of malnourished children unable to get the food they need to stay alive,” said Tamer Kirolos, ‘Save the Children’s’ country director for Yemen.
“It could drive up the price of fuel — and as a result transport — to such an extent that families can’t even afford to take their sick children to hospital.”
The United Nations has said an assault on the port city could, in the worst scenario, could kill up to 250,000 people. Around 70% of humanitarian aid passes through the Red Sea port.
The military offensive in the province started in June but fighting stalled, especially in Hodeidah, as the UN tried to bring warring parties to the negotiating table.
The latest attempt was in Geneva earlier this month but the Houthis didn’t travel as all sides blamed each other for obstructing the peace talks.
‘I could see her bones’
‘Save the Children’ provided testimony from Yemenis struggling to provide for their families.
A woman identified by the pseudonym Manal said that her infant daughter turned skeletal after she suffered from malnutrition.
“When Suha was six months she became sick,” she told Save the Children, which also changed the name of her daughter.
“I could see her bones; I could not do anything for her. I had no money for transportation. I had to borrow some money to take Suha to the hospital far away from our village,” she said. “Most of the time we eat two meals a day. In the morning we eat bread with tea and for lunch it’s potatoes and tomatoes. Usually, I don’t eat. I keep it for my children.”
Epidemic looming
Famine is just one humanitarian crisis facing the country’s beleaguered civilians. Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the war-ravaged country is teetering on the brink of a third cholera epidemic.
Cases are increasing near the capital, Sanaa, and Hodeidah, where the recent Saudi-led assault has hindered WHO’s efforts to prevent the disease.
“We’ve had two major waves of cholera epidemics in recent years, and unfortunately the trend data that we’ve seen in the last days to weeks suggests that we may be on the cusp of the third major wave of cholera epidemics in Yemen,” Peter Salama, WHO deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response, told a UN briefing in Geneva, Switzerland.
More than 1.1 million suspected cholera cases have been recorded in Yemen since April 2017, according to the latest WHO figures, with more than 2,300 associated deaths.
Children killed in airstrikes
The Saudi-led coalition has also been involved in killing civilians, some of them children, including in a devastating attack on a school bus in August.
The bomb used in that attack was a 500-pound (227 kilogram) laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin, sold as part of a US State Department-sanctioned arms deal with Saudi Arabia, munitions experts told CNN.
Yemen has been since March 2015 under a brutal aggression by Saudi-led coalition, in a bid to restore power to fugitive former president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis have been injured and martyred in Saudi-led strikes, with the vast majority of them are civilians.
However, the allied forces of the Yemeni army and popular committees established by Ansarullah revolutionaries have been heroically confronting the aggression with all means, inflicting huge losses upon Saudi-led forces.
The Saudi-led coalition – which also includes UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan and Kuwait – has been also imposing a blockade on the impoverished country’s ports and airports as a part of the aggression.
In a remote pocket of northern Yemen, many families with starving children have nothing to eat but the leaves of a local vine, boiled into a sour, acidic green paste. International aid agencies have been caught off guard by the extent of the suffering there as parents and children waste away.The main health center in Aslam district was flooded with dozens of emaciated children during a recent visit by the Associated Press.
Excruciatingly thin toddlers, eyes bulging, sat in a plastic washtub used in a make-shift scale as nurses weighed them one by one. Their papery skin was stretched tight over pencil-like limbs and knobby knees. Nurses measured their forearms, just a few centimeters in diameter, marking the worst stages of malnutrition.
At least 20 children are known to have died of starvation already this year, more than three years into the country’s ruinous civil war, in the province that includes the district.
The real number is likely far higher, since few families report their children’s deaths when they die at home, officials say. In one nearby village, a 7-month-old girl, Zahra, cries and reaches with her bony arms for her mother to feed her. Her mother is undernourished herself and is often unable to breastfeed Zahra.
She can’t afford formula for her baby. “Since the day she was born, I have not had the money to buy her milk or buy her medicine,” the mother said. Zahra was recently treated at the heath center. Now at home, she’s dwindling away again.
With no money, her parents can’t afford to hire a car or motorbike take her back to the clinic. If they don’t, Zahra will die, said Mekkiya Mahdi, the health center chief.
“We are in the 21st century, but this is what the war did to us,” Mahdi said. After she tours villages and sees everyone living off the leaf paste, “I go home and I can’t put food in my mouth.”
The worsening hunger in Aslam is a sign of the gaps in an international aid system that is already overwhelmed and under pressure from local authorities. Yet outside aid is the only thing standing between Yemen’s people and widespread death from starvation.
The conditions in the district may also be an indication that the warnings humanitarian officials have sounded for months are coming true: In the face of unending war, hunger’s spread is outstripping efforts to keep people alive.
When AP approached U.N. agencies with questions about the situation in Aslam, they expressed alarm and surprise. In response to the AP’s questions, international and local aid groups launched an investigation into why food wasn’t getting to the families that need it the most, a top relief official said.
As a response in the meantime, the official said, relief agencies are sending over 10,000 food baskets to the district, and UNICEF Resident Representative Dr. Meritxell Relano said the organization is increasing its mobile teams in the district from three to four and providing transportation to health facilities.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of issues involved in operating in the war-ravaged country.
In first six months of this year, Al-Hajjah province, where Aslam is located, recorded 17,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition, higher than in any full year on record, said Walid al-Shamshan, head of the Health Ministry’s nutrition section in the province.
Malnourished children who were previously treated return to clinics in even worse condition – if they make it back at all.
“Deaths happen in remote villages where people can’t reach the health units,” Shamshan said.
“It’s a steady deterioration and it’s scary,” he said.
Yemen’s civil war has wrecked the impoverished country’s already fragile ability to feed its population.
The war pits Iran-backed rebels known as Houthis, who hold the north, against an Arab coalition, armed and backed by the United States. The coalition has sought to bomb the rebels into submission with an air campaign in support of Yemeni government forces.
Around 2.9 million women and children are acutely malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives only a step away from starvation.
The number of people nationwide who would starve if they didn’t receive aid grew by a quarter over the past year, now standing at 8.4 million of Yemen’s 29 million people, according to U.N. figures. That number is likely to soon jump by another 3.5 million because the currency is losing value, leaving growing numbers of people unable to afford food, the U.N. warned this month.
Aslam is one of the poorest districts in the country, with hundreds of small villages, some isolated in the high mountains in the Houthi heartland. Its population of 75,000 to 106,000 includes both local residents and accelerating numbers of displaced people who fled fighting elsewhere. In terms of hunger, Aslam isn’t alone.
Health officials say that other districts closer to war zones may not be getting food aid at all. But Aslam did see one of the province’s highest jumps in the number of reported children suffering from severe acute malnutrition: From 384 cases being treated in January, an additional 1,319 more came in over the next six months, according to local health records. That comes to around 15 percent of the district’s children.
“Aslam is just another picture of Somalia,” said Saleh al-Faqih, a worker in a mobile Health Ministry clinic, comparing it to the Horn of Africa nation often hit by famines.
Aslam’s main health center has no pediatricians, no electricity, no oxygen cylinders. At night, medics use flashlights because there is no fuel for generators. Fathers beg in the nearby market for 300 riyals – around 50 U.S. cents – to buy a diaper for their child going into the center.
Before the war, the center would see one or two malnourished children a month. In August alone, it received 99 cases, nearly half of them in the most severe stages, the center’s nutrition chief Khaled Hassan said. Even after treatment, children often deteriorate once again when they go home to villages with no food and contaminated water.
There appeared to be multiple reasons why aid was not reaching some of the starving, beyond the rapid increase in those in need.
The lion’s share of assistance goes to displaced people, while only 20 percent goes to the local community, said Azma Ali, a worker with the World Food Program. Agencies’ criteria give priority for help to the displaced and households without a breadwinner, even as local residents also struggle to find food.
Under heavy pressure from Houthi authorities, international agencies like WFP and UNICEF and their Yemeni partners are required to use lists of needy provided by local officials.
Critics accuse those officials of favoritism. That especially works against the local population in Aslam, where many belong to the “Muhammasheen,” Arabic for the “Marginalized,” a community of darker-skinned Yemenis shunned by the rest of society and left to work as garbage collectors, menial laborers or beggars.
The Marginalized have no weight with officials to ensure aid goes their way. One humanitarian coordinator in Al-Hajjah said local Houthi authorities distribute aid unfairly.
“The powerful hinder the work of the humanitarian agencies and deprive of aid those people who are in most need,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of problems with the authorities.
Some residents said local officials demand small bribes to get on food lists – the equivalent of around 15 U.S. cents, but still too much for many people here. U.N. agencies have insufficient capacity to oversee many distribution centers.
Food deliveries that do make it to Aslam come irregularly or are too small or are missing items, residents and aid workers said.
People in Aslam have become increasingly reliant on leaves from the local vine, known in Yemeni Arabic as “halas” or in English as Arabian Wax Leaf. It used to be eaten only occasionally but now it’s all many residents eat for every meal.
Mothers spend hours picking the leaves, then washing and boiling them. Too much of it causes diarrhea. The water it’s washed in – well water often tainted with sewage – is also a constant cause of diarrhea.
In the village of al-Mashrada, Zahra’s mother feeds her whole family with halas mush. She has seven other children, including two boys with mental disorders who are kept chained inside their shack so they don’t wander away.
The children’s father roams the town, looking for food.
Zahra’s mother said only “the big heads” – the better-off and well-connected – end up with international aid. “We only have God. We are poor and we have nothing.”
In 2016, I visited the centre depicted in the linked RT news report on the effect of western sanctions on children with cancer. At the time, the director told me they were trying to help 240 children, were underfunded and in debt, the people working there were volunteers, and (at that time) were facing constant power outages, as was the norm in Aleppo due to terrorists outside of Aleppo controlling the power plant.
Formerly, cancer patients in the north of Syria had excellent treatment at the Kindi Hospital, a massive complex that was respected throughout the region. It was truck-bombed by terrorists in late 2013, completely destroyed. In November 2016, I met and interviewed the former director of Kindi, Dr. Ibrahim Hadid. He emphasized how he tried to get the attention of international organizations both when the hospital was initially occupied by terrorists, and later when it was destroyed. He was met with silence.
Yet another obstacle for cancer patients needing treatment was the fact that for years, the road out of Aleppo would be cut by terrorists, meaning the 1.5 million or more civilians within greater Aleppo were under siege. Aleppo residents told me there were times where the siege lasted for weeks, and more.
The director of this centre rightly insisted there should not be sanctions on medicine. This is criminal. As noted in the RT report, 30 children had died of cancer in that area, due to western sanctions, according to the director.
I previously wrote about the issue of these criminal western sanctions on Syria, quoting Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, who I interviewed in December 2015. I noted:
In terms of how to provide actual relief to the Syrian people, Dr. Shaaban stated:
“The first thing the West should do in this battle against terrorism is to lift the sanctions from the Syrian people. The sanctions are helping terrorists against the Syrian people, who are suffering doubly from the terrorists and from Western measures against the Syrian people.”
Stephen Gowans recently wrote about the US government’s long-time plans to topple the Syrian government, sanctions being one part of the plot.
“Documents prepared by US Congress researchers as early as 2005 revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in Syria. …As an alternative to direct military intervention to topple the Syrian government, the United States chose to pressure Damascus through sanctions and support for the internal Syrian opposition.”
The advocacy website, End The Sanctions on Syria, notes: “Similar sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s were shown to have caused the deaths of more than half a million Iraqi children.”
The site went on to report that (as of May 2014), “701 of 1,921 Syrian health centres have been ‘completely gutted’ by the terrorist attacks. Yet rehabilitation of these centres is retarded by the US-EU sanctions, which have already left ‘a deep mark on the healthcare system’… including by blocking access to medicines, medical equipment, transport and communications.”
A May 27, 2015 article in The Lancet reports: “The cost of basic food items has risen six-fold since 2010, although it varies regionally. With the exception of drugs for cancer and diabetes, Syria was 95 percent self-sufficient in terms of drug production before the war. This has virtually collapsed as have many hospitals and primary health-care centres.
Economic sanctions have not removed the President: …only civilians are in the line of fire, attested to by the dire state of household and macro-economies. Sanctions are among the biggest causes of suffering for the people of Syria.”
Recall that last April, when the US and allies illegally bombed Syria on false pretext of Syria having used a chemical or nerve agent in Douma (didn’t happen), one of the targets was a facility in densely-inhabited Damascus which was involved in the local production of cancer treatment components.
Regarding the actual nature of the buildings bombed, Syrian media, SANA, describes the Pharmaceutical and Chemical Industries Research Institute as “centered on preparing the chemical compositions for cancer drugs.” The destruction of this institute is particularly bitter, as, under the criminal western sanctions, cancer medicines sales to Syria are prohibited.
Interviews with one of its employees, Said Said, corroborate SANA’s description of the facility making cancer treatment and other medicinal components. One article includesSaid’s logical point: “If there were chemical weapons, we would not be able to stand here. I’ve been here since 5:30 am in full health – I’m not coughing.”
Of the facility, the same SANA article noted that its labs had been visited by the OPCW, which issued two reports negating claims of any chemical weapons activities. This is a point Syria’s Ambassador al-Ja’afari raised in the April 14 UN Security Council meeting, noting that the OPCW “handed to Syria an official document which confirmed that the Barzeh centre was not used for any type of chemical activity” that would be in contravention to Syria’s obligations regarding the OPCW.
Five Saudi activists face possible execution. Their crimes? “Participating in protests”, “chanting slogans hostile to the regime” and “filming protests and publishing on social media”.
The five, including women’s rights campaigner Israa al-Ghomgham, come from the Shia-majority Eastern Province. They have spent more than two years in prison. Now the prosecution has demanded their deaths.
Their plight reveals the vacuity of claims that Saudi Arabia is “liberalizing”. The death in 2015 of King Abdullah and his replacement by Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has led to much gushing in the west about the new reforming regime and, in particular, about the “vision” of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, heir apparent and driving force behind the “modernization” moves. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a fawning piece about the Saudi “Arab spring”. “It’s been a long, long time,” he wrote, “since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.” Even the fierce critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali has suggested that if the crown prince “succeeds in his modernisation efforts, Saudis will benefit from new opportunities and freedoms”.
Yes, Salman has allowed women to drive, to run their own businesses and to attend sports events. Cinemas have opened and rock concerts been staged. But the king remains the absolute ruler of a kingdom that practices torture, beheads dissidents and exports a barbarous foreign policy, including prosecuting one of the most brutal wars of modern times in Yemen.
Over the past year, dozens of activists, clerics, journalists and intellectuals have been detained in what the United Nations, an organization usually wary of criticizing the kingdom, has called a “worrying pattern of widespread and systematic arbitrary arrests and detention”. Few countries execute people at a higher rate. Under the current “reforming” regime, at least 154 people were executed in 2016 and 146 in 2017. Many were for political dissent, which the Saudi authorities rebrand as “terrorism”. A regime that permits women to drive but executes them for speaking out of turn is “reforming” only in a columnist’s fantasy.
For all the paeans, what really attracts western commentators and leaders to Saudi Arabia is that the regime’s refusal to countenance any dissent has until now created a relatively stable state that is also pro-western. Precisely because the Saudi royal family is deeply reactionary, it has long been seen as a bulwark against “radicalism”, whether that of the Soviet Union, Iran or local democratic movements.
…
Last week, in the wake of a Saudi bombing of a school bus in Yemen that left 33 children dead, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, defended Britain’s relations with Riyadh on the grounds that the two countries were “partners in fighting Islamist extremism” and that the Saudis have helped to stop “bombs going off in the streets of Britain”. In fact, Saudi Arabia bears more responsibility for the rise of ‘Islamist’ terror than any other nation.
From the 1970s onwards, flush with oil money, the Saudis exported across the world Wahhabism, a vicious, austere form of Islam that the Saud clan has used to establish loyalty to its rule after creating Saudi Arabia in 1932. Riyadh has funded myriad madrasas and mosques. It has funded, too, ‘jihadist’ movements from Afghanistan to Syria. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi. So were most of the 9/11 bombers. A 2009 internal US government memo described Saudi Arabia as “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”. The Saudis have leveraged their knowledge of such groups to win influence with the west.
The viciousness of the Saudi regime is matched only by the cynicism of western leaders. The price is being paid by the children in that school bus and by the five activists facing possible beheading for peaceful protests; by the million of Yemenis on the verge of starvation and by thousands of Saudis imprisoned, flogged and executed for wanting basic rights. But what’s all that when set against the value of a “friendly” regime?
August 21, 2018 “Information Clearing House” – A somewhat grainy video, presumably shot from a decade old cell phone, shows more than two dozen load Yemeni kids, aged 6 to 15, playing, laughing, and excitedly moving about their school bus, invoking warm childhood memories for anyone who has ever caught a bus to and from a school outing.
Moments later every single one of these kids were killed, vaporized by a Saudi fired missile.
This atrocity took place on 9 August, leaving 51 dead, 40 of whom were children, with most victims under the age of 10, while another 77 were seriously injured, according to the International Red Cross.
The US Department of Defense has tried to downplay the United States role in what must surely constitute a war crime and/or a crime against humanity by either arguing it’s still investigating the matter or by disingenuously minimizing its involvement.
“We may never know if the munition [used] was one that the US sold to them,” Army Maj. Josh Jacques, a spokesperson for US Central Command, told Vox. “We don’t have a lot of people on the ground.”
Well, we do know who sold Saudi Arabia the missile, and there are plenty of Yemeni journalists and international aid agencies in Yemen “on the ground.”
Remnants of the missile, which were posted on Twitter by Hussein Albikaiti, a Sana’a-based journalist, show its CAGE code, serial number, and the wording, “FIN GUIDED BOMB.”
A search of the CAGE code shows the missile to be issued by US defense contractor Lockheed Martin, while the serial number shows it to be a MK-82 missile manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas.
“A US made laser guided bomb did this 2 a bus full of school children,” tweeted Albikaiti. “The bus was directly hit by a Saudi-UAE jet, fueled by USA plane, coordinates by US and UK satellites. One bomb sent these happy children to the graves after burning them alive and cutting them to pieces.”
Worse – the British and US mainstream media is complicit in the cover-up of yet another atrocity in Yemen, like always!
Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?
No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media
Maybe the most dangerous reality of the Trump presidency might be the media’s obsessive want to over analyze every tweet, off-hand remark, and gaff made by the current occupant of the White House, which, in turn, places television news networks at the centre of what has been a more than a 3-year long psychodrama if you count the 2016 election campaign.
The media’s obsession with this obviously unhinged and deranged US President comes at the cost of informing the American public of the horrors that are occurring in their name and with their tax dollars in countries many voters can’t even find on a map.
While CNN and a handful of other mainstream television networks carried news of the Saudi coalition missile attack on the school bus, there has been almost no follow up, leaving the public totally in the dark about the role the US played in this war crime, and in what has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
According to FAIR, a media analysis service, the left-leaning cable news network MSNBC has not run a single segment related to the conflict in Yemen since early 2017 but ran with more than 1,300 broadcasts regarding Trump’s probable but still speculated collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.
The US media demonstrates a proclivity to report on Yemen only when an American serviceman is killed, according to FAIR, with networks devoting substantial coverage to a botched raid on January 29, which left one US soldier dead alongside dozens.
On the August 9th strike in Yemen, the British media has fared no better. The Guardian, for instance, widely considered a “bastion of liberal values and humanitarian concern,” failed to feature the killing of 40 Yemeni children among its 13 headline stories, while the Independent failed to include it among its top 8 headlines, according to Middle East Eye.
Coupled with a lack of media coverage is the near total silence that emanates from both US lawmakers and the Department of Defense, with the latter holding only a few public hearings on Yemen since the conflict began more than 3 years ago, one that has resulted in more than 23 million Yemenis being in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.
This is unconscionable and anti-democratic given the US provides the intelligence, guidance systems, warplanes, bombs, and missiles to the Saudi coalition.
Moreover, on the few occasions, Yemen is mentioned in the media, the extent of the human catastrophe is downplayed and underestimated. For instance, most media reports include a total death count of approximately 10,000 Yemenis, but aid agencies have estimated more than 150,000 died of disease and starvation in 2017 alone, with up to 130 children dying each and everyday.
According to the International Red Cross, 70% of the population needs aid to survive; 2.5 million have no access to clean drinking water; 1 in every 12 is severely malnourished; 940,000 are suspected of having cholera; while almost no medical supplies are getting into the country because of the Saudi blockade of Yemen’s ports, and the destruction of infrastructure throughout the country.
While this is a Saudi war of choice, it is planned and supported by the government of the United States, acting on behalf of the American taxpayer. It’s time the media report the full extent of the US role in prolonging the suffering in the Middle East’s poorest country so that voters can pressure their elected representatives into bringing an end to this senseless violence.
The lives of the next busload of Yemeni school kids depends on it.
CJ Werleman is a journalist, political commentator, and author of ‘The New Atheist Threat: the Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists.
A busload of young boys are on a field trip. They are excited – their summer session of school is over, and this is to be the outing to celebrate. The boys jostle on the bus. It is noisy. One of them covers his ears. They are all laughing.
One of their friends is taking a video (which will later be shown on Yemen’s al-Massira television). The video shows the universal joy of being an adolescent, of being filled with anticipation at the field trip.
Along the way, the bus stops at a crowded market in the town of Dahyan, in the Saada governorate in Yemen’s north, on the border with Saudi Arabia. This governorate, or province, is largely in support of the Ansarullah insurgency and is the center of regular aerial bombings by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The teachers with the young boys make the stop to pick up supplies for the trip: snacks and water. The excitement on the bus does not abate.
It is just then, in this crowded market, that Saudi aircraft fire on the bus. It is a direct strike, according to witnesses.
The Red Cross now says that 50 children died in the strike (11 adults were killed). Among the 79 wounded, 56 are children – many fighting for their lives.
A report released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) this year suggested that this kind of violence is not unusual. Five children have been killed or injured in Yemen each day since the start of the Saudi-UAE war on the rebel-held areas of that country in March 2015.
The numbers are shocking, but also numbing – nearly every child in those parts of Yemen (11 million of them) needs humanitarian assistance, with millions of children acutely malnourished, with no safe drinking water or sanitation, with few schools, with cholera and acute diarrhea as normal features of life and with regular bombings and shootings around them.
Funerals in places of war and occupation are not sober affairs. They are heightened by the anger at the manner of death, but more so they are political rallies of great emotion.
The children’s bodies arrived in cars wrapped in green. The coffins, wooden boxes, had a picture of each child on them. They were carried along the road to a simple graveyard. Their coffins were carried by boys from the Yemeni Scouts and Guides Association, their motto on their shirts reading kun musta’idan, or “be prepared.”
Bomb strikes are routine; Saudi and Emirati planes might have struck this funeral as they did in 2016, when they killed about 155 people in the al-Kubra Hall in Sanaa. Chants against Saudi Arabia rent the air. They were mingled with chants against the United States. No one in Yemen is unaware of the US complicity in this war.
‘War can’t be a clean operation’
Remorse is not forthcoming from either Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Both governments insist that the raid was “legitimate” and that “war can’t be a clean operation unfortunately” (as UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash put it in Dubai). The Saudis, like the Israeli government when it arrests and kills children, said it was the Yemenis who were “responsible for recruiting and training young children.”
There is barely remorse in the United States, from which the weapons of death go to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It was a US-made plane that fired US-made bombs on these Yemeni children. Yemeni journalist Nasser Arrabyee took a picture of part of the 500-pound (227-kilogram) Mark 82 bomb used to kill the children.
This bomb was made by General Dynamics at its plant in Garland, Texas. In 2017, bombs from this factory made their way to resupply the arsenal of Saudi Arabia, whose free-fall bombs were getting low as a result of the war on Yemen. General Dynamics made millions of dollars on this sale. This same type of bomb was used in the Saudi strike on the funeral in Sanaa in 2016. US weapons firms have made hundreds of billions of dollars selling weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said he had sent a three-star general to lead an internal investigation into “what happened.”
But what happened is well known and has been well known for a very long time.
Last November, a 30-year veteran of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Bruce Riedel, described Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen as a “quagmire.” He said it had become the “worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world” and that if the Saudi blockade continued, “50,000 children could die in Yemen.”
A year before that, Riedel pointed his finger directly at Washington and London. In April 2016, he said frankly, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman [of Saudi Arabia] that this war [on Yemen] has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and British support.”
In other words, any war crime committed in Yemen by the Saudis and the Emiratis is a war crime committed by the governments in London and Washington, which continue to supply these monarchies with billions of dollars’ worth of deadly weaponry that can be used to kill children on a school trip.
Exit from this war?
On September 6, the various parties to this war will go to Geneva to try to restart impossible talks. The contending Yemeni parties have said they will come to the table. It is obvious that this war is seen by Saudi Arabia and the UAE as a way to weaken Iran, although Iran’s actual role in Yemen is dubious. Nonetheless, Iran has said it awaits an invitation from the UN to come to Geneva. It would like to hold face-to-face talks with its adversaries, with the UN as arbiter.
Iran has submitted a four-point plan to give the talks some heft, including an end to the aerial bombardments and an immediate ceasefire. But there is no stomach in Saudi Arabia to take Iran’s offer seriously.
In a recent article, Riedel says this war in Yemen is the “signature foreign-policy initiative” of King Salman and his son, Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. “The crown prince,” Riedel writes bluntly, “has blemished his reputation by the reckless decision to intervene in Yemen and the humanitarian catastrophe it created.”
It is unlikely that Saudi Arabia, absent serious external pressure, will stop this war. The integrity of the current king and his son – and in many ways the monarchy itself – is enveloped in this war.
Pressure will not come from the US government. It is happy enough to see its weapons dealers make enormous profits – the kind of “Made in America” that pleases President Donald Trump. In the United Nations Security Council, the US pressured the members not to demand an independent inquiry. All that was asked for was a “credible” investigation. That means there will be no real investigation, as there was none for the Sanaa funeral bombing in 2016.
Staff members at UNICEF, meanwhile, have been heartbroken. The children had UNICEF backpacks, part of the aid that keeps the country from total breakdown. “There’s obviously a war on children,” said Juliette Touma of UNICEF.
This is the hour when children die. This is the hour when adults fail them, the hour of bombings and impossible negotiations.
A deserted cell in the public section of Aden Central Prison (Photo by AP)
Over 49 detainees have been tortured to death in clandestine prisons run by the UAE in southern Yemen where brutal interrogation techniques, including physical and psychological torture, are used by Emirati forces, a report says.
The report provided by Yemeni military figures, who worked with the Saudi-led war coalition against Yemen, and obtained by Al Jazeera revealed that detainees in UAE-run jails in southern Yemen were subjected to sexual abuse by Emirati army personnel and their Yemeni surrogates.
The forces subjected the inmates to rape and electrocution in the genitals, chest and armpits, it said, adding some prisoners were physically assaulted and insulted while being hung in midair.
The sources also recounted other examples of horrors in the UAE-controlled prisons, saying electric cables were used alongside wooden bats and steel poles during interrogation sessions.
Some of the detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation while being confined to narrow spaces with poor hygienic conditions and limited air ventilation, according to the report.
This form of torture was accompanied for some of the inmates by sessions where their skins were lashed with whips and their injuries were subsequently covered in salt. Others, it said, had industrial nails inserted into their fingers and toenails.
According to the report, more than 49 people were tortured to death and five gravesites were used to bury the deceased.
The number of UAE-run secret prisons, according to the report obtained by Al Jazeera, is 27, including sites in Hadramout, Aden, Socotra, Mayyun Island, as well as a facility in Eritrea where the UAE maintains a military base.
In February of last year, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei thanked US President Donald Trump for finally revealing Washington’s “true face”.
“What we have been saying, for over thirty years, about political, economic, moral, and social corruption within the US ruling establishment, he [Trump] came out and exposed,” Sayyed Khamenei told a group of Iranian Air Force commanders on February 7, 2017. “With everything he is doing … he is showing the reality of American human rights.”
In the months that followed, Trump has been busy pulling back the curtain.
Between filling his cabinet with warmongering neocons like John Bolton and pairing up with hawkish generals and shady billionaires, the Trump administration also found time to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).
Citing alleged anti-“Israel” bias, the US will be the first state to leave the UN body voluntarily.
“For too long, the human rights council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias,” exclaimed the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, earlier this month.
One can be forgiven for thinking that this reads a little too much like a bit of soul-searching on the part of the American government.
But while Washington’s exit from the HRC can certainly be described as ironic, the move is hardly surprising.
The ill-timed maneuver came as American border guards ripped apart families, and Washington assisted allies in massacring tens of thousands in Yemen, all the while defending the killing of unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza.
According to US-based peace activist Scott Rickard, “the Human Rights Council should have been considering ejecting the United States based upon its human rights violations.”
“In the United States we have one of the most atrocious human rights records; we have almost ten thousand people a year being killed by police officers,” Rickard added. “At the same time, the United States is heavily involved in warfare around the world, murdering millions in my lifetime alone.”
‘Murderers & thieves’
In the lead-up to the US withdrawal from the Council, the outgoing UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, blasted the Trump White House for its “unconscionable” policy along the US border with Mexico.
Zeid was referring to the Trump administration’s recently abolished effort to dissuade illegal migrants from crossing the border by separating children from their parents and dispatching them to detention centers with no assurances that they would ever be reunited.
“The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable,” Zeid said during his opening remarks to the HRC’s 38th session this month.
Trump attempted to justify his immigration policy by citing concerns over ‘security and safety’.
Recently, he was quoted as saying that those who sneak across the border “could be murderers and thieves and so much else.”
Such comments, much like the mass outrage by Trump’s critics at home who are often complicit in the slaughter of Yemeni and Syria children, are intended to disguise the fact that the asylum seekers are fleeing the very violence and chaos that the US instigated.
“The president has to realize what a hundred years of US policy towards Central and South America has caused,” said radio talk show host Robert Patillo.
“US efforts to destabilize governments, US efforts to set up puppet dictators – that’s why we have this level of crime and this dysfunction in Central America,” Patillo explains.
For puppet dictators, look no further than Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom, which remains the source of the Takfiri ideology, fueling global terrorism and the country of origin of 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 has somehow stayed off of Trump’s travel ban from seven countries.
This week, the US Supreme Court upheld the ban, arguing that it had a “legitimate grounding in national security concerns” and was thus constitutional.
Trump’s ban, which is breathtaking in scope and inflammatory in tone, extends to North Korea, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Venezuela.
And while Saudi nationals are responsible for the deaths of more than 2,360 people as a result of terrorist attacks on US soil, the countries covered by Trump’s ban are responsible for none.
Journalist and political commentator Syed Mohsin Abbas believes that “those Muslims who are the lackeys and the puppets of the US foreign policies, who freely give their recourses to the US and who don’t oppose the US’ imperialist policies in the Middle East are not banned.”
Abbas describes the ban as a “direct attack against any nation in the world who dares to stand up to the US” with Iran being one of the primary targets.
American Civil War 2.0
The policies of the Trump administration are as much a reflection of a deeply polarized United States, as they are an indication of the responsibility that the powers that be bear for instigating those very same divisions.
A new poll testifies to just how divided the American public has become over issues like immigration, declaring that some 31% of the population believes a second civil war is likely in the next five years.
The Rasmussen national telephone and online survey revealed that uncompromising accusations of fascism and an alleged desire for open borders have raised fears in the US over the possibility of an armed confrontation between Trump’s supporters and those opposed to his policies.
And in light of the manner in which the current political climate in the country has drawn the curtain to reveal the hitherto well-concealed, callous visage of American society, any suggestion that this previously unthinkable scenario now appears far more likely holds water indeed.
Shooting practice at an Israeli school: targets set up by police depicted figures wearing the Palestinian kuffiyeh headdress.
Israeli police planned to teach children how to shoot at Palestinians as part of a training exercise in a school.
The incident in the Menashe Regional Council, near Haifa in northern present-day Israel, was brought to light in recent days when Palestinian citizens of Israel took photos of what was happening.
Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli parliament from the Joint Arab List, is demanding an investigation into the training sponsored by the Israeli police and the education ministry, which he said “prepares students psychologically to kill Arabs.”
One photo shows a person – most of their body blurred with a black marker – using a paintball gun to fire at cutouts of men and women wearing checkered kuffiyeh headscarves that are associated with Palestinians.
Zahalka made his demand in a letter to public security minister Gilad Erdan, according to the publication Arab48.
The activity in Menashe Regional Council is part of widespread training of children by police in Israeli schools, according to Arab48.
In 2011, the newspaper Haaretzreported on how a group of Israeli high school students from Herzliya took part in a simulated shooting attack at a military base “in which the targets were figures decked out with the Arab kuffiyeh headdress.”
One source told Haaretz that the exercise, which was also supported by the education ministry, was tantamount to “educating toward hatred of Arabs.”
The training in the Menashe Regional Council school is also reminiscent of an incident last year in which Israeli police put on a demonstration for a group of fifth-graders for how to “confirm a kill” – in other words how to perpetrate an extrajudicial execution.
Early this year, American comedian Jerry Seinfeld visited a training center in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank where tourists are given demonstrations on how to kill Arabs.
And in a disturbing parallel in 2015, police in North Miami Beach, Florida, were found to be using photos of African American men for target practice at a shooting range.
Separate and unequal
Zahalka noted that the incident occurred in Menashe Regional Council, which bills itself as a paragon of coexistence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
There are approximately 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. They are the survivors and their descendants of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Unlike Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, they hold Israeli citizenship and a right to vote, but nonetheless live under dozens of laws that discriminate against them because they are not Jewish.
Israel operates a separate and unequal school system for Jewish and Arab students.
Anti-Arab incitement and indoctrination is endemic in schools for Jewish children from the earliest grades.
Proud to kill
The Israeli police said that the targets in the Menashe Regional Council school had been set up as part of an activity day to teach children “about good citizenship” and that to “engender interest among participants, a paint gun station was erected.”
“Before the activity began, the activity’s commanders and the school staff noticed the matter and hid the images, and no children saw them during the activity itself,” the police claimed.
The education ministry also called the use of the targets, according to the publication Ynet, a “serious mishap.”
Zahalka also wrote to Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett calling for those responsible for organizing the shooting training to be punished.
He stated that it was unacceptable for the ministry to merely cancel the activity without seeking accountability, and to try to shift the blame to the police alone.
Zahalka quipped that had a similar activity taken place in a school run by the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “would have demanded a meeting of the UN Security Council.”
Nadav Perez-Vaisvidovsky, an Israeli college lecturer, expressed shock at the training, tweeting, “This is the type of thing you see in history books and wonder how it could be allowed to go on.”
Yet this is only a small part of what the so-called international community is allowing Israel to do with impunity.
The European Union, for instance, which never ceases to issue reminders of the importance of learning “lessons from the past,” is currently pretending not to see how Israel is deliberately massacring unarmed civilians besieged in the Gaza Strip.
And there is little chance of accountability, since the incitement comes from the top, with Israeli ministers regularly calling for or applauding extrajudicial executions.
Naftali Bennett, the education minister, himself notoriously declared in 2013, “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.”
Ending complicity
Last December, Belgium’s KU Leuven university announced that it would end its role in an EU-funded “research” project carried out in partnership with Israeli police.
“The participation of the Israeli public security ministry indeed poses an ethical problem taking into account the role which the strong arm of the Israeli government plays in enforcing an unlawful occupation of the Palestinian territories and the associated repression of the Palestinian population,” university rector Luc Sels explained.
“What the Israeli police did is not that unusual, especially in the current atmosphere of racism against Arabs,” Zahalka wrote.
“In any case, the Israeli police do not require such an atmosphere as their record is full of disregard for the lives of Arab citizens, whom they continue to treat as enemies and not as citizens.”
Zahalka concluded that firing on cutouts of Arab citizens “falls within the racist policies of Netanyahu and his government, and therefore everyone is called upon to confront this racism until it is defeated.”
Killing huge numbers of innocent civilians is called “mass murder”, but only when mainstream media chose to call it so. Four years of war in Yemen show no sign of yielding – especially as Saudi-led coalition air attacks continue on a daily basis. In the past week, these attacks have killed at least 45 people including wedding party guests, women and children.
The war in Yemen has created devastation unseen before in the country’s long history of turmoil. Thousands have been killed and millions displaced, starved, and disappeared in what the UN has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. It’s not just bombs, bullets and arms that threaten Yemen’s children, women and men. The Saudi-led war also kills by stealth and as the West’s mainstream media turns a blind eye to the facts, or plays a “make them look impartial” game through displaying a certain discourse. Economic strangulation is being used by the Saudi-led coalition as a weapon of war, targeting jobs, infrastructure, food markets and the provision of basic services. Almost two-thirds of the population needs emergency support. The food system is collapsing, pushing the country to the brink of famine. Over 400,000 children are at imminent risk of starvation. This is one scenario that is worth a lot of attention on the international arena but is kept away from the limelight.
Another deadly scenario takes place also in West Asia, or the so-called Middle East; that is the war on Syria. The same game of creating a “chosen narrative” or “setting a blind eye” is played by Western politicians and the media machine alike.
On 7 April 2018, reports emerged from the opposition-held city of Douma east of the Syrian capital Damascus that scores of civilians had been killed and hundreds injured in a chemical attack. Soon Trump accused the Assad government of carrying out the attack, and threatening that soon, or maybe not so soon he will teach the “monster” a lesson.
Since the first time the West accused the Syrian government of conducting a chemical attack in 2013, several reports have been issued by American historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter, United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter, Veteran prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh, and MIT’s Theodore Postol based upon field research and providing facts that prove it could not have been the Syrian government behind the attack. However, these reports were not among the “chosen” information that is circulated across western media outlets.
On April 7, the US, France and the UK were quick to respond to the alleged attack and as former Middle East correspondent for ABC News Charles Glass described it, “it was a case of execution before trial”.
Glass said there has been great inconsistency in Western policies on Syria, pointing out that the US favored the use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, causing the deaths of thousands of Iranian soldiers.
“The British, the French and the Americans have all been involved by proxy; they’ve all been involved in supplying weapons to the opposition groups in Syria. They’ve been involved in training them in southeast Turkey and Jordan and in facilitating their passage in and out of Syria. This is indisputable.” He noted.
In 2016, Saudi Arabia admitted that it used UK-manufactured cluster bombs in its war on Yemen. Prior to the revelation, Britain denied their cluster munitions were being used by the Saudi-led coalition.
In this context, Professor of American Studies at Tehran University, Dr. Zeinab Qassemi Tari told al-Ahed news that the matter reminds her of Hermana and Chomsky’s notion of worthy and unworthy victims:
“the media frames and filters one victim as worthy and the other as unworthy and this becomes the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns.”
To overtly explain the notion a bit more; Worthy victims are the ones who merit lavish attention and concern, are those whose fate can be attributed to someone else, preferably an official enemy. Unworthy victims, whose fate is ignored or denied, are those for whose suffering or slaughter we are responsible. The criterion holds remarkably closely, past and present.
Dr. Qassemi Tari pointed out that “the atrocity committed against the Yemeni civilian population on a large scale which has created a catastrophic situation does not get a comparable attention to that of Syria.”
“To give but one example, based on a UNICEF report every 10 minutes at least one child out of five dies out of deprivation and nearly half of all children are chronically malnourished. Not to mention the siege and the mass starvation of the majority of the Yemeni population.”
She notes that when the war in Yemen is covered, the media blames the Houthis (often unjustly referred to as Shia Iran proxy); because such a narrative reduces the complex political situation in Yemen, which began with the reinstating of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to an alleged Shia/Sunni strife.
According to the university professor and political analyst, “the media overlooks the other side of the story which is the Saudi’s closure of land, air and sea to cut desperately needed food, and medicine and the backing of the United States and its Arab dictatorships.”
She underscores that interestingly, the power of the “western media” (often associated with “objectivity”) as opposed to state-run media of the so-called “third world countries” is so strong that, Noam Chomsky, also calls for a US military Intervention in Syria.
There is just a series of double standards in the Western media in particular over Yemen and Syria during our time. The Syria attack reveals the hypocrisy of the West. This West relies on unverified claims to punish Syria while it fuels the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen despite documented abuses.
Several activists and journalists among which is Neil Clark state that Western media refuses to reflect the real situation in the war-stricken country. Yemen is not being mentioned by Sky News or BBC very much and there is a terrible lack of objectivity in reporting by BBC and Sky News, when it comes to the Saudi crimes against the Yemeni people.
Theresa May and Donald Trump are supporters of Saudi Arabia, assisting its genocide of the people of Yemen. The US and Britain equip the Saudis with arms to continue its war against Yemen, and fund and arm terrorist Wahhabi groups in Syria to continue their violence across the country. However, they remain silent on the Israeli daily perpetrations in Occupied Palestine, its siege on the Gaza Strip, the killing of children and women almost on daily basis. They remained silent while Israel launched its war against Lebanon in 2006 when it haphazardly bombed civilians and deployed cluster bombs and white phosphorus. Today also, it is not surprising to see that these Western governments along with mainstream media remain silent over the tragedy in Yemen and Syria, and bring their own version to the spotlight.
Western intervention in the region has only served in destabilizing it, just like Western media has created a mainstream narrative that “victimizes” some and “evilizes” others by selection.
ANTHONY HARWOOD , FORMER FOREIGN EDITOR OF THE DAILY MAIL
96% of Syrian territory is under the control of the Armed Forces and the national government. One and a half million of those who had to leave the country due to the war, have now returned and begin normal life and the colossal task of reconstruction in a nation devastated by shrapnel, both from the terrorists of the so-called Islamic State and Al Nusra Front, and from the US air force that still continues bombing operations and maintains troops at illegal bases in the Arab state.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 