The war in Yemen and the American drive for global domination

Niles Williamson

Yet another front has been opened in the US-led war drive in the Middle East, this time in Yemen. In flagrant violation of international law, Saudi Arabia, backed by the Obama administration, has now completed its third day of air strikes targeting strategic locations as well as residential neighborhoods in Yemen.

At least 39 civilians have been killed, including at least six children. The death toll will no doubt rise sharply in the coming days. These actions are being carried out with US logistical support, utilizing fighter jets and bombs provided by the United States.

The assault from the air has been accompanied by threats of an imminent ground war spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Saudi Arabia has mobilized approximately 150,000 soldiers, massing troops and heavy artillery on its border with Yemen. US-backed Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has indicated that his government, which has already positioned war ships in the Red Sea, is prepared to dispatch troops to Yemen to take part in the assault.

The US-sponsored war has as its aim the defeat of Houthi rebels backed by Iran and forces loyal to former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh that have taken control of much of Yemen’s western provinces. Washington hopes to reinstate its beleaguered stooge, President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled the country this week in the face of a Houthi assault on his compound in the southern city of Aden.

The US also wants to reclaim the Al Anad airbase, which has been used to launch drone strikes within Yemen that have killed more than 1,000 people since 2009. The air base was seized by Houthi rebels on Wednesday morning, shortly before Saudi Arabia launched its air war.

The eruption of war in Yemen is the culmination of years of intense intervention by American imperialism. The government of Hadi, which replaced the US-backed Saleh regime in 2012, is broadly despised for its collaboration with US drone strikes. As the stooge government disintegrated, the country was engulfed by sectarian conflict pitting different militias and proxy forces against each other.

The sectarian fighting in Yemen now has the potential to explode into a conflict involving the entire Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Among the countries that have provided support for Saudi Arabia against the Houthis are Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. On the other side stand the governments of Iraq and Syria, which have sided with Iran in opposing military operations.

The developments in Yemen have once again exploded the pretext put forward by the United States government that its foreign policy is based on the promotion of democracy and human rights and the fight against terrorism. The US is backing a war spearheaded by a monarchy in Saudi Arabia that beheads its own subjects and provides financial support to Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, along with the blood-soaked military dictatorship in Egypt that issues mass death sentences and shoots down workers in the street.

What accounts for the American government’s interest in controlling Yemen? In one word: oil.

The Bab el-Mandeb strait, which, along with Egypt’s Suez Canal, connects the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, is located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea on the Horn of Africa. Much of the oil exported from the Persian Gulf to Europe, the United States and Asia must pass through the narrow strait, making it a key chokepoint for global trade.

Anthony Cordesman, the influential foreign policy strategist at the Washington DC Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, laid out the strategic calculations of the American ruling class. Noting that 3.8 million barrels of oil and petroleum products flowed through the Bab el-Mandeb strait in 2013, Cordesman recently wrote that the interests at stake included “the cost and security of every cargo that goes through the Suez canal, the security of US and other allied combat ships moving through the canal, the economic stability of Egypt, and the security of Saudi Arabia’s key port at Jeddah and major petroleum export facility outside the Gulf.”

In other words, the war is for geo-strategic advantage and world power.

Cordesman added that while the US “has already said it would give logistical and intelligence support…the situation in Yemen may well come to require more than that, and some kind of US combat support”—i.e., direct US military action.

The American people are being dragged into another criminal operation with incalculable consequences, planned and implemented behind their backs without even the pretense of public debate, let alone consultation.

Yemen is the latest in a string of military interventions by American imperialism that have wreaked havoc on the Middle East and Central Asia. Fifteen years after the launching of the “war on terror,” chaos and destruction plague the entire region.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which resulted in the death of more than a million people and the destruction of an entire society. Iraq was followed in 2011 by the bombing of Libya and the overthrow and murder of President Muammar Gaddafi, which has resulted in the descent of that country into sectarian civil war.

Since 2011, the US has stoked a civil war in Syria with the intention of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad. In the course of this regime-change operation, the CIA gave support to Al Qaeda-linked militants and other radical Islamists, some of whom went on to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The civil war has so far resulted in the death of more than 200,000 people and displacement of millions more.

The United States is now in the midst of a new war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, in which it finds itself in a de facto alliance with Iran, dropping bombs in support of Shiite militias fighting in Tikrit.

Beyond the Middle East, Ukraine is in a state of semi-disintegration as a result of American intervention through the promotion of a fascist-spearheaded coup and installation of an anti-Russian ultra right-wing government. American policies have triggered a massive militarization of Eastern Europe, posing the threat of a nuclear war with Russia. At the same time, the US is pursuing a policy of encircling China through the network of military alliances and provocations that make up the “pivot to Asia.”

The US recklessly and shortsightedly careens from one disastrous adventure to the next. Every catastrophic intervention becomes the justification for the next war. The one consistent principle is the determination of the American ruling class to assert its interests and impose its domination in every corner of the globe.

This policy of ever-expanding war and foreign intervention is tied to the delusional conception of global hegemony that has guided American foreign policy since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Over the last quarter century, US imperialism has sought to offset its declining world economic position by using its military superiority to bully or destroy regimes it deemed hostile to its global ambitions, while intimidating its imperialist “allies.”

In its mad drive for global domination, the American corporate and financial aristocracy is pushing the world towards a third world war that threatens humanity with a nuclear holocaust. The only force that can stop the hand of American imperialism and halt the drive to war is the international working class, organized on a revolutionary socialist program.

Revisiting The Caste Question

Priyanka Dass Saharia 

How is modern form of caste in contemporary times? Nicholas Dirks had argued on colonial power knowledge complexes instrumental in reifying it within bureaucratic structures and discourses. The various institutions of caste were used as tools to manage the divide and rule policies perpetuated by the British. The question then becomes as to what form did these changes take? In what ways did the imported modernity of colonialism changed the ‘registers’ of belief and social reality in India?

The problem with asking questions like these is the lacunae of historical documentation to support a sociological argument which could then easily be critiqued to harness political bias into a historical point. To think of caste being definitive or in functional terms of a division of labour (W. Crooke) which was a common trend in the colonial times was a fallacy, as Dirks asserts. In this light it becomes imperative to read the colonial archives, to ‘interrogate’ it ‘along the grain’ as Ann Stoler had put it. Textual analysis presupposes certain indictments which inevitably colours judgements, making the exercise lopsided in its results. To think of ‘colonialism’ being a monolithic entity, all ‘colonial knowledge’ being anachronistic and manipulative, meaning to crush and destroy native culture was a polemic approach to reading history. Let’s not forget that colonial rule didn’t arrive fully formed in the Battle of Plassey, ‘colonial’ as a construct was evidently created by various discourses, some going on to impute spurious ideas of unity between the West and Western ideas as embodying a latent form of moral authority. Through a lack of narratives, it launches into a demonization of colonial minions and administrations in its analysis giving rise to the popular notion of the ‘subaltern’. Various scholars advocate their views under the label of ‘Critical History’ quoting Gramsci popularly as a sonorous, overarching harbinger of a spirit that would give voice to these subalterns assuming that colonialism was a definitive monolith. The problem with subaltern history was that it was riddled with a rhetoric that presupposed more than recover. It was meant to recover lost voices, reconstruct fragmented and fractured narratives from bottom-up but often it ends up imaging the quotidian experiences of the people themselves and enforcing undue relevance on fragmentary glimpses creating extrapolations which run the risks of being politically guided. If these groups are claimed to have voices, often they are robbed of them in their representations. The British didn’t create caste. They did chart it, record it and use it for their bureaucratic purposes but caste existed right there before them.

What motivations drive people to maintain these caste hierarchies? Were these boundaries fluid? William Pinch in his work on Warrior Ascetics shows that certain caste groups tried to move up the social ladder already around 1800, many years before the colonial census. Through the life of Anupgiri Gosain in the 18th century, he shows an alternate side to the popular imagination of Hinduism being a religion of non violence. Caste distinctions like other forms of power, like race and gender, are policed, are constantly negotiated in social spaces; these boundaries are policed through complex intersections between on the one hand, ideological constructs about people being ‘in their place’, and, on the other hand, socio-economic forces which are marshalled to prop up these constructs.

If ‘difference’ becomes a conceptual category to understand these boundaries what was the nature of this category? One remembers that Ambedkar did not see these categories as essentialised distinctions. Reservations were introduced for certain groups which had suffered from various historical disadvantages, and they were intended to help these groups to overcome these barriers so that they could participate fully in national life. ‘Difference’ as a category also needs to be studied in the context of its conception and practices of a lived reality. Judith Butler saw ‘difference’ as a conceptual category with no natural foundations however it would be fallacious to understand caste dynamics in the light of western theories; as a matter of fact, the majority of Hindus in the past, and arguably in the present, have not thought about caste in this manner – they have regarded caste distinctions as ‘naturally’ inscribed into the social order and these natural inscriptions supported by a theological-Vedic base.

Looking tangentially, at the textual idea of the concepts in some classical Buddhist texts., there is debate over the term ‘Brahmana’; orthodox Hindu strands view this status as ‘naturally’ inherited; others ‘ethicize’ this understanding by claiming that one’s Brahmana status is determined not by birth but by moral perfection. The manner in which one views the relation between guna and karma will determine whether one adopts a ‘mythical’ (varnāśramadharma) view or an ‘empirical’ (jāti) view of caste. Those who argue that caste is determined by guna and karma tend to affirm ‘mythical’ notions of organic social bodies into which human beings are allotted their placed by their inherited karmic dispositions. The problem, of course, is who is going to determine the quality of these dispositions – the individual herself, the higher caste, a council of all the castes, the learned people, the government, and so on? While the Gita’s appeal to guna and karma is often mentioned in defences of ‘democratized’ notions of caste, it must be remembered that the text is a product of its own times – it prohibits any cross-border traffic across the varṇas, viewing such confusion of castes (varnasamkara) as a sign of moral degeneration. The notion of mythic caste was developed in late colonial India to respond to the charge that Hindu social existence lacks deep metaphysical foundations. Mythic caste was projected as an idealised social template that would avoid what were viewed as the excesses of western individualism, and bring together the empirical castes (jati) into an organic whole of interdependent parts to build up a unified ‘Hindu front’ against western imperialism. What is crucial to remember is that mythic caste is an idealised projection of what a social utopia looks like – we do not have any historical evidence that mythic caste has been implemented on the ground in south Asia.

‘Difference’ as a conceptual category can never be studied in isolation. Differences in caste, ethnicity, gender or even disability never exist in a pure form but always in hybridism; knotted up in multiple and often overlapping categories. Ghurye had profoundly commented on the changing and dynamic nature of caste as a ‘difference’, when in action. The disjunction between the ‘book view’ and the ‘field view’ that Srinivas had brought out further proves that these categories are never a given. Our understanding of them is dynamic and relational.

The theme of transgression of boundaries between different caste groups, be it antagonistically or paternalistically (where one party is often ‘shown its place’) can be studied taking the case of Khairlanji Massacres of 2006, where it was found that the upper castes weren’t the Brahmans but ‘intermediate’ sections (OBCs) at conflict with the Dalits and dominance was established through numbers and play of power. Knowledge systems are a product of power and maybe that is why Dirks’s argument on caste being a colonial construct through registers of census manufacturing gained much popularity. Now, the question is, how do these knowledge systems gain legitimacy? J. Mencher in her article ‘The Caste System Upside Down’ casts light on some pertinent issues of the ways in which ‘caste’ is addressed. Ethnographic works on Caste talks about the myopia of ethnographers; “Whom you talk to matters in how to understand the system. If you study the system bottom up, then it’s pertinent that we talk to other groups than the Brahmans” says Anindita Bhattacharya in her seminar on Mencher. “If differences are deemed innate then it is a product of knowledge systems and dominant paradigms which again are constructed by and cater to selective interest groups” concludes Dr. Janaki Abraham. She cites from her research work on the Tiyas of North Kerala who occupy the category of OBC in the ‘book view’ but the ‘field view’ presents us with different lived realities, “There are always micro processes of resistance against the groups who try to reproduce the hegemony in varied forms and by different means. They ascribe to alternate theories of tracing their descent from Kyrgyzstan while another theory hinges on a Greek descent.” From these insights we observe the alternative ways in which groups articulate their own conceptions of ‘difference’ and represent themselves in ways counter to the hegemonic interest groups.

The problem with viewing caste through the lens of the ‘organic whole’, a functionalist approach in sociology is that such communitarian notions are not easily situated within liberalism’s commitment to basic civil and political rights. Whether the sociological approach adopted for investigating caste is ‘essentialist’ or functional, they would both collide with a liberal understanding of individuals as primarily citizens with basic rights. Is providing a teleological explanation to the histories of caste hierarchies an alternative to accommodating them? Scholars have argued that indigenous practices in time were to be eliminated should be initially tolerated and this logic lead to the tolerance of caste marks and dietary practices giving way to sanskritisation; a ‘natural’ marking (essence) of a social body tracing it back to a Vedic theological base is often an active part of academic discourses

The ‘discplinarisaion’ of domains often leads to different conceptual constructions of the same issue, which ultimately is incommensurable for working in two different world views. The neat dichotomy between an anthropological vs. philosophical approach to studying caste could lead to bifurcation of the meanings of ‘caste’ emerging from diverging conceptions of ‘mythic’ (the varṇic system based on the Puruṣa-Sukta of the Ṛg Veda) and ‘empirical’ (or jāti) . The precipitating questions thus formulated are whether the former is a form born out of degeneracy from the latter or (like Ambedkar) who rejected the karmic theory of transmigration located caste in the ‘lived realities’ of the everyday placing a greater emphasis on this-worldly socio-economic reconstruction (Barua, 2009).

What comes across through sketching these conceptual terrains are some pressing questions – a). The ways in which one negotiates with the quotidian and exclusivist claims made on the pretext of caste in one’s everyday lived reality if those claims stem from a world view with isn’t shared to formulate a dialogic form of inter-caste traffic, b). The future of caste studies in a backdrop where metonymic indexing of ‘Caste’ to India in South Asian Studies globally identifies ‘Caste’ as a basic form and expression of the Indian society a threat to modernity, c). How does one understand the ‘subaltern’ in today’s time with the plural theories on caste from a theological to a post colonial domain; who is the subaltern? (E.g. where does one put the dalit woman here or the categories with uncertain pedigree, d). Even in the liberal democratic understanding of national development, the caste question would always act like a double edged sword; a barrier to development yet an inevitable reality in the unforeseen future, where even the counterarguments of a self rule are problematic (a teleology of self rule grafted in a future with no absolute temporal reality) could lead to a reconstitution of the social and a reformation of the idea of ‘caste’. In this case who would legitimise the shifting of meanings in these alternative modes of textual analysis?

There are some pressing questions that we need to address as social scientists to these ideas of ‘difference’? How do we evaluate these ‘differences’ in the light of a socio-historical context which has shown us that ‘differences’ are often represented and in turn valued in specific ways by interest groups? How do we translate the ideas of ‘differences’ in a shared language of articulation? Lastly, how do we study the new forms that are created as a result of intersection of these categories? Within the framework of these questions, how do we, then, understand ‘change’ in a linear temporality of a ‘lived reality’?

India: Celebrating “Internet Freedom” In A Country Known For Custodial Killings?

Samar

The Supreme Court’s scrapping of Section 66 A of the Information Technology Act for being “unconstitutional in entirety” is indeed a great moment in the life of the democracy. The Act did, in fact, invade citizenry’s right of free speech “arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately”. However, is this really a moment to celebrate in the life of a republic whose criminal justice system is rotten to the core? Will it really lead to any exercise of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, in a land where ordinary citizens fear the police more than the criminals?

Writing a discordant note in times of celebration for something “hard won” by the civil society is not an easy task. Putting things in perspective in the middle of euphoric celebrations can come across as a dirty task. But not all seemingly dirty tasks are dirty indeed, especially at a time when the country has been pushed into a Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission by its prime minister.

There is a joke doing on the rounds on the same Internet, which have been freed again by the recent ruling of the Court. The joke goes something like this-

Police gets information on a neighbourhood cyber cafe indulging in storing and distributing pornographic material and promptly raids it. On returning to the police station, they get to know that it is the CPUs that store information and not the monitors they have confiscated. They know that confiscating the CPUs would not be of any use as the owners must have deleted the criminalising evidence immediately after the raid. They return nonetheless, recover drugs and book the cafe owners under the provisions of the Narcotics Act.

The joke, unfortunately, is no joke; the system is one. And it is a cruel one at that. It can recover drugs from places where they never existed. This system actually stores everything, from drugs to assault rifles in police stations, to plant and implicate whomsoever it wants to, “recovering” the planted material as incriminating evidence.

Take, for example, the case of Liaquat Shah, an alleged terrorist on a suicide mission, arrested by the Delhi Police from Haji Arafat Guest House near Jama Masjid with assault rifles and explosives. Later investigations by the National Investigation Agency, the nation’s central counter terrorism law enforcement agency, empowered to deal with terror related cases across India without the permission of states, absolved Liaquat Shah of all terror charges. The Agency is now investigating officers of the Delhi Police and their informer for attempting to fabricate Shah in a false case. Shah’s case is not exceptional or extreme. Such fabrications are amongst the routine methods employed by police across Indian states.

These policing methods are not reserved for terror suspects or those with criminal records/tendencies. Law enforcers use them against all poor, marginalized, and vulnerable sections of society, with “democratic” abandon. Consider the dramatic withdrawal, in 2009, on the advice of Union Home Ministry, of over 1-lakh cases that had been slapped on adivasis by the Jharkhand government. The cases included “crimes” like stealing fruits from forest, cutting wood, grazing cattle, hunting, and entering reserved forests without permission, which have added to the harassment of adivasis for years. The withdrawal, to wean adivasis away from Left Wing Extremism, did come as a major relief to the victims of the system. It is just that neither did the law enforcers bother to explain why the cases were slapped on them in the very first place, nor did the Judiciary divulge why these minor cases dragged on for years.

Slapping cases on innocent citizens comes easy to the law enforcers. But, how do they fare when it comes to helping victims of crime? The answer: worse. Police stations, the first point of contact between a citizen and the grievance redress mechanism of the justice system, are often the citizenry’s last resort. There is good reason for the dread. Leave poor and vulnerable sections aside, which are mauled by this point of first contact with the system, even the upwardly mobile middle class find them sickening, threatening, and incorrigibly corrupt. To be fair to the police, the reasons behind the rot are not only of their own making. One of the most underpaid, undertrained, and overburdened within the criminal justice system, the police are almost as much victims as those who are haplessly forced to approach them.

How can they solve crime without training in scientific investigation methods? By rounding up “suspects” and extracting confessions by torture is the answer. Do they get it right despite the use of the abhorrent practice? We are back to the joke we began with. They do get one thing right for themselves though – the capacity of inflicting violence on people gives them an unenviable capacity of extorting money from suspects and their families. They often do this with great “democratic” abandon too; they often extort all parties involved.

What about the Judiciary, then, especially the lower judiciary? One doesn’t need to add too much to what the higher judiciary has said already. V. N. Khare, former Chief Justice of India (CJI), was unequivocal in saying that corruption is rampant in the lower judiciary and agreed to the fact that bribes for bail were endemic. Justice P. Sathasivam, another former CJI, concurred with him. Add to this the fact that the higher judiciary is not alien to corruption itself and the fact of the enormous backlog of cases and the recipe for disaster is complete. One of the immediate results is seen in cases involving grant of bail to the accused; the role of the magistracy has shifted from the principle of shielding the accused from undue arrest to earning money out of granting and declining bail. It is not hard to see that such a judiciary can only fail the people.

It is time to return to the joke again. What if the cyber café owners were accused, not of possessing and promoting pornography but, of letting their café be used for “hate speech” – a euphemism for criticizing the government, as seldom do those really indulging in hate speech get charged, leave alone arrested. What if the police arrested the owners using one of the perennial tricks: the Narcotics Act, Arms Act, and so on? How long will it take the owners to get relief? This is where the real rot lies.

It is in this context that the current scrapping of Section 66 A is welcome, in principle, but will not change much on the ground. It would be cathartic at best; it will let some citizens criticize the system for failing them on the Internet, and allow the same citizens to miss the elephant in the room when they are offline: the rot that surrounds their closest police station.

Sri Lanka : Deterioration Of The Legal Intellect

W. J. Basil Fernando

The discovery of the bodies of four members of the same family in Wennapuwa on 1 January 2015 is one of the gravest crimes reported in recent times. The victims of these horrific murders were a dental surgeon attached to the Lunuwila Hospital, her husband who was a businessman, their 13-year-old son, and 15-year-old daughter.

Police Spokesman Ajith Rohana stated to the media that an individual who had served as a watchman has been arrested in connection with these murders and that during investigations this person has confessed to committing the murders with the help of his illicit lover. Spokesman Rohana further said that while three Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers were escorting the suspect to the crime site in order to recover the murder weapon—an axe used to commit the murders—the suspect committed suicide by jumping into the Ma-Oya River.

It is strange that three CID officers were unable to prevent the suspect, who was in their custody, from jumping into the river, and further still that they have not been able to successfully rescue this suspect even after he plunged into the River. The three CID officers were obliged to take all precautions necessary to prevent the suspect from escaping or attempting suicide while in their custody. It is also the usual custom to handcuff an arrested suspect when he is taken out of the police station.

Given many previous examples of serious crimes suspects being killed in custody, it is hard to believe the version given by the three CID officers regarding the death of this suspect. It is the obligation of the Inspector General of Police and other senior police officers in the area to conduct an inquiry into the death of the suspect. So far, there has been no report of any such inquiry. The Police Spokesman did not inform the public of any such inquiry into the circumstances of this custodial death.

The practice of reporting the deaths of suspects in custody, particularly in cases where the crimes are of a very serious nature, has now become frequent. This practice—of police officers claiming suspects of a serious crime, while in custody, causing their own death, either by jumping into a river or by attempting to attack the officers that were then forced to shoot—became most frequent during the second term of the Mahinda Rajapaksa government.

After the conflict with the LTTE was over people gradually became aware that law enforcement in Sri Lanka had been seriously undermined and that there were pressures on the government to take effective action to restore law and order. Such demands became more acute due to a series of very serious crimes that began to occur in various parts of the country.

Obviously, the criminals were utilising widespread instability in the country and very visible inaction on the part of law enforcement officers. This mass dissatisfaction began to be expressed by way of shock waves, particularly when a whole family was murdered. This compelled the government to demonstrate that the situation was still under their control.

The method that was adopted by the government to demonstrate their control was to announce that a special team from the Special Task Force (STF) had been sent into the area where the crime had occurred and that this team was seriously investigating the matter. The pictures of the officers in action were also often exhibited in newspapers. The next thing people would hear is that the culprits had been captured and that as they tried to escape from custody, the officers had been compelled to shoot them to death.

With this, the idea of bringing such suspects before the courts, and investigating and prosecuting them, as was the practice in the country for a long time, was replaced by the type of drama described above.

This method of trying to quell the people, after they had been shocked enough to protest, was a product of the Ministry of Defence, which was then under the control the Secretary of the Ministry, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He would himself appear at news conferences and quite triumphantly claim that whenever serious crimes have occurred the government has intervened decisively and brought the matter to a successful end.

Thus, the successful end to a crime was no longer the enforcement of the law within the framework of due process, followed by bringing the culprits to court to face a fair trial, the outcome of which could only be determined by the judge presiding over the case.

The law and the judge were both displaced. Even the criminal investigative process was displaced. In its place, a group of paramilitary officers were assigned. And the ultimate outcome was a summary execution, disguised as a killing in self-defence or a suicide by the culprits themselves. Of course, no one would have taken the story of the attempted escape or the suicide seriously. Everybody guessed what had really taken place. Thus, with such interventions from the very top of government, the legal process, when it came to such scandalous crimes, was suspended.

The legal intellect was simply silenced. The prosecuting lawyers and the defence lawyers and the judge all became irrelevant factors when dealing with crime. In fact, the legal intellect was considered irrelevant. It was in the aftermath of the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) that the then Deputy Defence Minister Ranjan Wijeratne claimed in Parliament that these things couldn’t be done following legal rules. Gradually, this was extended to crime control in general. In tracing the rapid deterioration of the legal intellect in Sri Lanka, the extrajudicial killings committed by the State should be scrutinised as one of the most significant factors for such deterioration.

A Different Form Of Holocaust Denial

Mickey Z.

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

I just learned of an upcoming NYC event called the “Animal Holocaust Memorial Service/March.”

The first line of description on its Facebook page reads: “We live in a time when the longest running and most devastating holocaust is taking place right under our noses, yet just like the Holocaust during World War II, it is completely ignored.”

Upon encountering this predictable but counterproductive exhibition, I had two immediate thoughts:

The use of the word “holocaust” in relation to factory farming is semantically accurate but horribly insensitive and demonstrably ineffective.

The excuse that the world “didn’t know” about the Nazi Holocaust is an enduring and spurious fabrication.

Since one or both of these thoughts will be deemed “controversial” by some, please allow me to elaborate…

“Surprise and pain”

If there was ever a litmus test for discerning a good war from a bad war, history provided it during WWII. Indeed, the most frequently evoked after-the-fact rationale for the deadliest war in history being labeled a moral battle was the Allies' supposed aim to stop the Nazi Holocaust.

Hitler's "final solution" took the lives of roughly 6 million Jews along with millions more Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Roma, homosexuals, labor leaders, and suspected communists. If decency played any role, the United States would have taken action against Germany some time during the 1930s.

Howard Zinn explains that, simply put, "the plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a concern to Roosevelt ... (who) failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority."

As Benjamin V. Cohen, an advisor to FDR, later commented, "When you are in a dirty war, some will suffer more than others.... Things ought to have been different, but war is different, and we live in an imperfect world."

Swirling around the subject of the Holocaust in our "imperfect world" are many questions. Who knew about Hitler's plan and when? What was done to stop it? Were there complicit roles played by factions within the United States?

While volumes have been written to correctly challenge those contemptible historical criminals who deny the Nazi death camps ever existed, one of the more subtle forms of denial is rarely questioned or even mentioned. This particular negation involves the deep-seated belief that the West was simply not aware of the extent of Nazi Germany's atrocities until the war was nearly over, and once they knew the truth, they acted expediently to save lives.

To accept this fiction is to enable oneself to believe that the inaction of the Allies was due merely to lack of information. Apologists can pretend that the details of the Holocaust were not known and if they had been, the United States would have intervened, but as historian Kenneth C. Davis explains:

"Prior to the American entry into the war, the Nazi treatment of Jews evoked little more than a weak diplomatic condemnation. It is clear that Roosevelt knew about the treatment of the Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and about the methodical, systematic destruction of the Jews during the Holocaust. Clearly, saving the Jews and other groups that Hitler was destroying en masse was not a critical issue for American war planners."

Indeed, when a resolution was introduced in January 1934 (!) asking the Senate and the President to express "surprise and pain" at the German treatment of the Jews, the resolution never got out of committee. Such inaction was not reversed even as more specific details began to reach the average American.

On October 30, 1939, the New York Times wrote of "freight cars ... full of people" heading eastward and broached the subject of the "complete elimination of the Jews from European life" which, according to the Times, appeared to be "a fixed German policy."

As for the particulars on the Nazi final solution, as early as July 1941, the New York Yiddish dailies offered stories of Jews massacred by Germans in Russia. Three months later, the New York Times wrote of eyewitness accounts of 10,000-15,000 Jews slaughtered in Galicia.

The German persecution and mass murder of Eastern European Jews was indeed a poorly kept secret and the United States and its Allies cannot honestly or realistically hide behind the excuse of ignorance. Even when the Nazis themselves initiated proposals to ship Jews from both Germany and Czechoslovakia to Western countries or even Palestine, the Allied nations could never get beyond negotiations and the rescue plans never materialized.

One particularly egregious example was the 1939 journey of the St. Louis. Carrying 1,128 German Jewish refugees from Europe, the ocean liner was turned back by U.S. officials because the German immigration quota had been met. The St. Louis then returned to Europe where the refugees found temporary sanctuary in France, Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Most were eventually captured by the Nazis and shipped to death camps.

"The rescue of European Jewry," writes Henry L. Feingold in The Politics of Rescue, "especially after the failure to act during the refugee phase (1939-1941), was so severely circumscribed by Nazi determination that it would have required an inordinate passion to save lives and a huge reservoir of good will toward Jews to achieve it. Such passion to save Jewish lives did not exist in the potential receiving nations."

With a lack of public acknowledgement from the Roosevelt Administration, U.S. public opinion was not aroused. This, Feingold believes, convinced men like Goebbels that the “Allies approved or were at least indifferent to the fate of the Jews.”

Goebbels's line of thinking was not too far from the truth. Even when eyewitness accounts from Auschwitz reached the U.S. Department of War and some in the Roosevelt Administration were pushing for the bombing of the death camp or at least the railways leading to it, the word came down that air power could not be diverted from vital "industrial target system."

It was claimed by American military planners, according to Feingold, that Auschwitz was "beyond the maximum range of medium bombardment, diver bombers and fighter bombers located in (the) United Kingdom, France or Italy."

Reality: Allied bombers passed within five miles of Auschwitz in August 1944.

In March of 1943, Frida Kirchway, editor of The Nation, summed up the situation succinctly: "In this country, you and I, the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt. If we behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent cowardly ones, the two million lying today in the earth of Poland ... would be alive and safe. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and yet we did not lift a hand to do it."

In April 1943, an editorial in the London New Statesman and Nation contemplated the legacy of Allied indifference to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, predicting "when historians relate this story of extermination, they will find it, from first to last, all but incredible."

That editorial writer, it turns out, was far too optimistic.

Correct or Effect?

The global animal by-products industry -- by definition -- involves packed transports, warehousing, experimentation, gassing, and the targeted mass extermination of sentient beings.

It’s been estimated that in all the wars and genocides in recorded history, a total of 619 million humans have been killed. That same number -- 619 million non-human animals -- are killed every five days for “food” by an industry that’s also a top source of human-created greenhouse gases (translation: ecocide).

In a clinical sense, it’s undoubtedly accurate to deem this a holocaust, as in “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale.”

But, I wonder, does it lessen or make light of the nightmarish experiences of humans -- does it alienate much-needed, potential allies -- if we use this word to describe the ongoing treatment of non-humans?

I ask this question because the term “holocaust” has, of course, become uniquely associated with humans of Jewish ethnicity or heritage. While the scores of communists, Roma, homosexuals, and dissidents murdered in Nazi concentration camps would obviously not concur with such limited word usage, the reality remains: Within our current culture, the word “holocaust” has a very specific, highly charged, and proprietary connotation.

"Auschwitz,” wrote sociologist Theodor Adorno, “begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."

To disagree with Adorno is to betray one’s speciesist bias. It is also to betray the original meaning of the word: “A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire. The word derives from the Ancient Greek holocaustos.”

However, as confident as we are about our proper usage of the word holocaust, we cannot and must not ignore its impact within such a heavily-conditioned culture. Animal rights activists are already relegated to the fringes by mainstream society and demonized by the State. Unless we grow and diversify the movement, we’ll never reach a broad enough audience to fundamentally challenge speciesism. Are we speaking the right language and sending the right message to make that happen?

In a cultural vacuum, words like holocaust, concentration camps, slavery, rape, incarceration, and murder accurately, and effectively, describe the widespread human treatment of non-humans… but we don’t live in a cultural vacuum. Have we chosen a counterproductive battle by defying linguistic norms and clinging to such terms when we know full well how much emotional and political weight they carry?

More and more, I have witnessed anger, outrage, disbelief, and mockery from non-vegans in response to words like holocaust, concentration camps, slavery, rape, incarceration, and murder used in reference to non-humans, so I must ask:

As activists -- as advocates for the voiceless trillions -- is it more important to be semantically correct or to be effective?

What do you say?

New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During And After WWII

Robert Barsocchini

Germany’s The Local reports:

Professor Miriam Gebhardt’s book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin.

American professor of criminology J. Robert Lilly, who previously studied the issue, has said that Gebhardt’s findings are “plausible”, but “no exact number could ever be known because of a lack of records”.

Lilly continued:

“It will be resisted to some extent. There are American scholars who will not like it because they may think it will make the war crimes committed by the Germans less bad,” Lilly said.

“I don’t think it will minimize what the Germans did at all. It will add another dimension to what war is like and it will not diminish that the Allies won.”

(History professor Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has noted that World War 2 is part of the USA’s state-origin myth that perpetuates a useful self-image of righteousness and benevolence, similar to the dubiousness of the Iranian state now using its actions against ISIS to support a like self-conception.)

Lilly’s assessment, Local added, “chimes with Gebhardt’s attitude to her work, which she says aims simply to expose the horror of such actions in war.”

The rapes “lasted for years, not just at the moment of the conquest,” Gebhardt found.

Amnesty: Gaza Firing Of Indiscriminate Rockets Is War Crime

Robert Barsocchini

Amnesty notes in a new report that attacks by Gazans resisting Israeli occupation, invasion, and terrorist attacks amount to war crimes, due to the uncontrollable nature of the rudimentary projectiles Gazans are forced to use because of the Israeli occupation and siege keeping Gaza isolated from the rest of the world.

“According to UN data, more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel during the conflict.”

By contrast, Israel, both the occupier and aggressor, fired more than 7,000 high explosives into just one neighborhood of Gaza in a 24 hour period during its massive assault on the whole of Gaza. The assault on the residential neighborhood of Shujaiya included Israel firing 4,800 high explosives in just one seven hour period, prompting a senior US military officer to remark “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible … It’s not mowing the lawn [the term, implying an indiscriminate and genocidal mindset, that Israelis often use for their assaults on the trapped Gazans]. It’s removing the topsoil.”

The Western response to Amnesty’s report is typical. Whereas Western media is relatively silent over US collaborators in Kiev’s forces using indiscriminate rockets to kill more people than Israelis killed by rockets from Gaza (7, plus 13 or more Palestinians, due to the low quality of the Gazan projectiles), the report on Gaza is all over the corporate news outlets.

(Human Rights Watch reported of Kiev: “Unguided Grad rockets launched apparently by Ukrainian government forces and pro-government militias have killed at least 16 civilians and wounded many more… [this] may amount to war crimes.” Note that while occupied Gaza’s firing of similar weapons “amounts to war crimes”, a US collaborator’s firing of also-unguided weapons only “may amount to war crimes”.)

While Amnesty, in its new report, does give the death toll from Israel’s massacre against the trapped refugees of Gaza – “At least 1,585 Palestinian civilians, including more than 530 children, were killed in Gaza, and at least 16,245 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by Israeli attacks” while 67 Israelis, almost all soldiers and including less than ten civilians and one child, were killed – the New York Times, in its story on Amnesty’s new report, does not give the death tolls, as, obviously, it is damning to be on the side,as the US is, of an illegal colonial-settler occupier that commits massacres against the occupied, refugee population, slaughtering children at a rate of nearly 600 to 1.

Western reports also contain an implicit genocidal mentality: they make no suggestions for how Gazans should fight back (against illegal Israeli occupation and terrorism), the legal right of people struggling for self determination. Gazans, they thus suggest, should simply lie still and do nothing.

A proposal that instantly comes to mind for an alternative to unguided projectiles might be for Israel to trade Gaza its unguided projectiles for some guided ones, so that Gaza could have a deterrent that is legal to use (as unguided weapons are not). It would still be a completely unfair fight, which Israel and the West want. However, Gazans would then be able to train those weapons directly at Israeli government and military installations, which are woven throughout the cities of Israel, and Israeli officials would much rather have the projectiles whizzing off in random directions, hitting civilian and open areas or, rarely, being intercepted by the Iron Dome system, than increase the chance that they themselves face consequences for their aggression.

Another proposal would be for an Iron Dome system (ineffective as they are, stopping ~10% of projectiles) to be installed in Palestine.

But Israel’s ideal situation, of course, is for Gazans to simply lie still and die, to go away or disappear, allowing their land to be absorbed and annexed by Israel.

…

Here are is a comparison between the damage done by projectiles fired from Gaza and the ones fired by Israel:

Damage caused in Israel by Gaza projectiles:

An Ultra Orthodox Jewish man inspects the damage at a building after a Rocket fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip hit the Journo family house, in the southern city of Sderot, Israel, 03 July 2014. EPA

Damage caused in Gaza by Israeli projectiles:

The head of the Red Cross recently commented that he had never seen such destruction, and Oxfam noted that, with Israel’s siege against Gaza in place, it will take 100 years to repair the destruction Israel inflicted.

Amnesty reported that Israel “deliberately flattened entire homes full of civilians”.

In a damning act of self-incrimination, Israel is now physically blocking human rights monitors from entering Gaza to report on what Israel did.

In Israel’s 2008,/2009 massacre against Gaza, in which Israel also committed aggression (being the occupier and breaking the ceasefire), the UN was able to enter, and reported that Israel’s operation was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to … terrorize a civilian population” (UN fact-finding mission, pg. 408, par. 1).

Israel remains the largest recipient of US funding and backing.

…

More background and details on the situation here and here.

Also note that Israel has recently re-confirmed its position against the two-state solution required by international law and supported virtually uniformly by the international community for ~40 years. The solution affirms the right of Israel to exist – within its legal borders – to have as many arms as it wants, and even to build a wall, but only on its legal border. Israel currently uses the building of the wall to steal land and resources reserved for the Palestinians by the United Nations.

The charter of Israel’s ruling party, Likud, promises that it will never allow a Palestinian state to exist. See prof. Juan Cole’s “The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for the Destruction of Any Palestinian State“.

ISIS Everywhere: Have Saudi Chickens Come Home To Roost?

Taj Hashmi

Since its occupation of Mosul and parts of northern Iraq last June, the ISIS (aka ISIL) has emerged as the most dreadful terrorist organization in the world. Al Qaeda and its ilk seem to have receded to the background. Now ISIS is not only the most organized terror outfit, but is also the most powerful insurgent group in the world. The ISIS proclamation of statehood in territories it has occupied across Syria and Iraq (larger than the area of France) is only comparable to what the Taliban did in 1996 in Afghanistan, in modern history.

However, far from being a “Sunni jihadist group”, ISIS is yet another creation of botched up U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World. Attributing anything Islamic to the group is as ridiculous as attributing American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and illegal detention of “illegal combatants” at Guantanamo Bay to Christianity. Nevertheless, ISIS is an enigma, a by-product of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war, and last but not least, an integral part of Washington’s false flag operation in the Muslim World.

While the Taliban Emirate disintegrated in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, it’s too early to predict if the ISIS Caliphate will go the Taliban way in the near future. Soon after ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi troops at Mosul ignominiously, some top U.S. generals believed it would take five to seven years to defeat the Islamist rebels. And interestingly, when Mosul fell, ISIS had around 30 to 50 thousand fighters, less than 60 artillery pieces and similar number of tanks, and no air force. By now the enigmatic terrorist-cum-insurgent group has enlisted thousands of fighters – Muslim men and a few women – from across the world.

Its popularity among jihadist ideology-motivated Muslim youths is phenomenal. Being disillusioned with their top leaders for negotiating peace with American and Afghan governments, some Afghan Taliban fighters have joined the group. A news report in a Bangladeshi daily (Bangladesh Pratidin, March 24, 2015) reveals that several Islamist groups in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan are also getting organized to fight for their own “Islamic State” in South Asia. Now it seems, ISIS is everywhere.

As ISIS victory in Iraq shocked analysts and observers, so did the way the White House, State Department and the Pentagon reacted to the fall of Mosul. While the decisive defeat of Iraqi troops by ISIS caught the White House by surprise, American analysts since then have started drawing alarmist pictures about the future of Iraq and the entire Muslim World. They think a) not only Iraq and Syria but also the entire Muslim World, and even the United States, are going to face the ISIS attacks in the near future; b) Iraq is going to be fragmented into three entities – the Kurdish north, Sunni central, and Shiite south – and c) eventually an ISIS-led Caliphate would transcend the entire region from Turkey to Iraq, and Egypt to Yemen, and beyond.

However, we know Washington loves to fight deceptive proxy wars in different corners of the world on a regular basis, and often over blows things to justify false flag operations. Ever since President Johnson lied about a communist attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4, 1964 as the pretext for a full-fledged invasion of North Vietnam, Washington has never looked back. It lied about Saddam Hussein’s non-existing WMD to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Washington has never stopped patronizing and promoting the reactionary Saudi regime – even by condoning its gross violations of human rights for decades. America’s ongoing support for Saudi-sponsored violent Islamist rebels in Syria may be mentioned in this regard. In view of this, one may raise the question: Aren’t ISIS fighters America’s Saudi chickens, which have come home to roost finally?

Although ISIS hates democracy and secularism, and seem to be on a killing spree, eliminating Shiites, liberal Muslims, Christians and Western hostages, its controlling Iraqi territories is not all bad news for America. This possibly legitimizes American boots on the ground, which would signal another windfall for its Military-Industrial Complex. Then again, proxy wars and false flag operations sometimes backfire.

Like its precursors in Afghanistan – the Mujahedeen, al Qaeda and Taliban – the ISIS seems to have emerged as the latest Frankenstein’s Monster for Washington. Nevertheless, ISIS’s anti-Shiite position accentuates the Shia-Sunni conflict (an important catalyst in the Saudi-Iranian proxy war), and legitimizes Washington’s false flag operations across the region. At the end of the day, Washington is likely to get rich dividends from the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, being fought in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen

American obsession with the Islamist regime in Iran and the Baathist regime in Syria are at the core of the ISIS problem. American support for the Free Syrian Army was a step towards strengthening Syrian rebels, including the obscurantist Islamic State. By early 2012 American- and Israeli-armed and Saudi financed Arab mercenaries infiltrated into Syria in the guise of Free Syrian Army. Interestingly, they were fighting along with al Qaeda fighters against the Assad regime. Secretary Hillary Clinton later admitted that anti-Assad rebels and al Qaeda had fought together against Syrian army.

There are dozens of anti-Assad al Qaeda affiliates among Syrian rebels. Saudi Arabia backs some of them. Among others, al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra strives for a caliphate in Syria, Iraq and beyond. In mid-2013 they merged with another al Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to establish a bigger Islamic entity out of Syria and Iraq. And the rest is history. However, we may not take America’s alarming views seriously. Iraq is least likely going to be divided into three independent entities; and the so-called Caliphate will fizzle out, soon. Wishful thinking and geopolitically unattainable goals do not converge.

The conflict is likely to overflow into Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq among Kurds and others. Syrian Kurds might also strive for autonomy. The spillover effect of the Syrian sectarian conflicts would further destabilize Iraq. Since Hezbollah in Lebanon depends on Syrian support, a Sunni Islamist regime could be lukewarm to hostile to the Shiite militia. One is not sure if the post-Assad Syria could be still friends with Iran and Hezbollah. However, Iran is likely to control Iraq for decades, and through Iraq is likely to keep an eye on Syria and influence Syrians.

It’s time the Obama Administration realize its support for pro-Islamist rebels in Syria was the main catalyst behind the rise of the Islamic State. By maintaining positive neutrality in the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, Washington should allow the U.N., Arab League and Iran free hand to resolve the crises. Obama should realize if rebels win in Syria, they would certainly form a government hostile to the United States and Israel. It could become a replica of post-Saddam Iraq and even worse, a failed state. As Bush’s Iraq invasion empowered Iraq’s Shiite majority and turned Iraq into an Iranian satellite, Obama’s support for Sunni extremists in Syria greatly contributed to the rise of the Islamic State.

In sum, America must not play the Israel card in its negotiations with Iran, and should discard the Saudi card to resolve the Syrian civil war. While the Saudi regime is the most reactionary and intolerant in the Muslim World – only marginally better than the erstwhile Taliban regime in Afghanistan – Washington must abandon all conservative ideas about “stopping Iran’s bomb, by bombing Iran”. Nothing short of engaging Tehran by Washington as a partner for peace and progress, all the major crises in the region, including the growing menace of Islamic State, will remain there to haunt us for decades.

5 Facts You Need To Know About Yemen And Its Conflicts

 Russia Today

One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players – and some of the world’s most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation's conflicts.

Strategic location

The territory that lies within Yemen’s borders is ONE of the most ancient cradles of civilization in the Middle East, once known as ‘Arabia Felix’ – Latin for “happy” or “fortunate” – in ancient times. The lands of Yemen were more fertile than most on the Arabian Peninsula, as they received more rain due to high mountains. But because of declining natural resources, including oil, Yemen and its population of about 26 million are now very poor.

Still, the country boasts a strategic location on the southwestern tip of Arabia. It is located along the major sea route from Europe to Asia, near some of the busiest Red Sea shipping and trading lanes. Millions of barrels of oil pass through these waters daily in both directions, to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal and from the oil refineries in Saudi Arabia to the energy-hungry Asian markets. The Yemeni transport hub of Aden was ONE of the world's busiest ports in the 20th century.

North & South Yemen, plus the tribes

Although the history of the lands of Yemen date back thousands of years, modern Yemen itself is a young nation, with its current borders having taken shape in 1990, after North and South Yemen united. Before that, both parts were involved in conflicts of their own.

Northern Yemen was established as a republic in 1970, after years of civil war between royalists and republicans, with the first supported by Saudi Arabia and the latter by Egypt. Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, rose to power through the military and held power for decades. Although Southern Yemen agreed to merge with Saleh’s northern republic in 1990, they soon became unhappy about the move. The north and south became embroiled in a new civil war, resulting in thousands of casualties, while Saleh’s power prevailed.

Outside big Yemeni cities, there are a number of tribal areas that are effectively self-governing. With a large number of civilians being in possession of arms – it is believed there are more guns in the country than citizens – local tribal militias often repress the national army and apply their own laws, based on traditions rather than the state’s constitution. Houthis have risen to be ONE of the most powerful militias in Yemen.

Sunni-Shia rift

The majority of Yemen’s population is Muslim, but it is split between various branches of Islam – mainly Sunni or Zaidi Shia. The divisions between the Sunnis and the Shia are based on a long-running religious conflict that started as a dispute about the Prophet Mohammed’s successor. While Shia Muslims believe the prophet’s cousin should have filled the role, Sunnis support the picking of Muhammad’s close friend and advisor, Abu Bakr, as the first caliph of the Islamic nation.

That said, Zaidi Shias – making up about 40 percent of Yemen’s population – are the only Shia Muslim sect that do not share the belief in the infallibility and divine choice of imams, strongly revered as spiritual leaders among Shias. This causes them to align closer to Sunni practices.

At the same time, over the past decades, strict and puritanical Salafi and Wahhabi ideas of Sunni Islam – coming from neighboring Saudi Arabia – have become increasingly influential in Yemen.

Houthis

Houthis represent the Zaidi branch of Shiite Islam from the far north of Yemen, adjacent to the Saudi border. The name of the group comes from a leading family of the tribe. Its member – a Zaidi religious leader and former member of the Yemeni parliament, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi – was accused by the government of masterminding a Houthi rebellion, including violent anti-Israeli and anti-American demonstrations, in 2004. The Yemeni regime ordered a manhunt for al-Houthi, which ended with hundreds of arrests and the death of the Zaidi leader, with dozens of his supporters also killed.

Since then, the Houthis have been actively fighting with the central power, demanding greater political influence and accusing the government of allying with mainly Wahhabi Saudi Arabia while neglecting national development and the needs of the traditional Zaidi tribes.

While Yemen’s now embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has claimed that Houthis are supported by Hezbollah – the Lebanese Shia militia – some Western officials have alleged that Iran, one of the few Muslim nations of the Shia branch, financially supports Houthis in an effort to control Yemen’s Red Sea coast. This allegation is denied by the Houthis themselves.

Al-Qaeda & ISIS

Since 2009, Yemen has been an operational base of Al-Qaeda militants. After the Yemeni and Saudi branches of Al-Qaeda merged to form Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group became ONE of the world’s biggest exporters of terrorism, with the US considering it the most dangerous branch of Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden’s family lived in southern Yemen before emigrating to Saudi Arabia.

Yemen’s fight against AQAP has been largely supported by the United States. Since 2007, the US has supplied more than $500 million in military aid to Yemen through programs managed by the Defense Department and State Department, and conducted controversial drone strikes targeting terrorists in the country.

Al-Qaeda’s ideology is based on radical Sunni Islam and thus is hostile to Houthis, who have also been at war with AQAP militants.

With several forces fighting in the country – including the official government, Houthis, and AQAP – the Yemeni chaos provided a fertile ground for extremism. Extremist groups affiliated with the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) now operate in Yemen, conducting terror acts against both the military and civilians. In the latest March 20 attack, over 100 people were killed and some 250 injured in suicide bomb attacks on mosques in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, with ISIS militants claiming responsibility for the assault.

Fear of Terrorism is Making Us Crazy, Especially in the US

Dave Lindorff

When I lived in China, there was a story going around about a China Airlines flight in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had left the cockpit and then, on their return, found the door locked. They reportedly got a fire ax, and with the whole planeload of freaked out passengers watching in horror, started wailing in the metal door. The co-pilot then turned, and seeing the panic developing, calmly drew the curtain across the aisle, hiding their work from view. The axe’s bashing continued until they broke the latch and got back to the controls.

Lucky this was before the 9-11 attacks! Now, because some terrorists forced their way into crew cabins and took over a few planes, virtually all aircraft have reinforced cabin doors that cannot be broken into. Predictably, this panicky response has led to a new kind of risk: mass passenger deaths by pilot suicide. A young Lufthansa pilot, apparently with a death wish but wanting to have his demise make a murderous impact, waited until the pilot had left for the loo, then locked him out and sent the plane into the side of a French Alp.

So what do we do now? Put a toilet in the cabin of every plane so that neither pilot or co-pilot ever has to leave her or his colleague alone in the cabin during a flight?

Of course, we’ve already got a problem since another solution that the FAA came up with to terrorists on planes commandeering a flight was to allow pilots, most of whom are retired military pilots, to bring a gun on board. Of course that is only a good idea if the pilot is mentally stable and a good shot. What if the pilot is the whack job? The gun just makes the job of destroying the plane that much easier.

It is certainly a tragedy that 149 innocent people including a class of 16-year-olds and a couple of babies, went to their doom along with the deranged Lufthansa co-pilot, but the disaster shows how nuts our societies have become because of overblown fears of terrorism.

Just think about the insane delays, the fraught confrontations, the needless X-rays, the missed flights and the sheer nuttiness of the post-9-11 security screenings — especially in the US. We have to remove our shoes because one guy tried to light up a “shoe bomb” that probably wouldn’t have done anything to the plane anyhow. I remember waiting in line once as a TSA inspector removed the booties from a three-month-old baby in a carrier at Chicago O’Hare because the rules said shoes had to come off and go through the X-ray machine. Never mind that a dedicated bomber could down a plane by bringing in six 3 oz bottles of nitro in a sealed plastic bag without any problem — enough to blow out the side of the plane from his seat. (Thankfully, fears touted by the government two years back of alleged terrorist plans to stuff explosives up their colons for detonation in flight never materialized, or we’d all be getting proctological exams now before boarding!)

There are so many ways someone could get through any kind of screening and onto a plane with either a weapon or a bomb it’s ridiculous.

Recently my daughter arrived from London on a Virgin flight to Orlando with a connection to Chicago. The flight arrived too late for her to get through customs and make her connecting flight so she had to spend the night and take another flight in the morning. But her bag was sent on ahead of her on the original connecting flight! So if she’d been a terrorist, that bag could have taken down the plane and she could have disappeared. Nice job TSA. I’ve also been on flights where my baggage got left behind and was then sent on to me later. That kind of thing would be easy for a terrorist to arrange to happen.

It got so bad that for a while, after the “underwear bomber” episode, that for a while some of us who Homeland Security had it in for found ourselves having to strip to underwear before boarding a plane. Screening algorithms also led to people being barred from flights because they had a common name: Muhammad Islam, for example, the arab equivalent of John Doe. Or Ted Kennedy. One 75-year-old nun kept finding herself on a no-fly list because she regularly flew down to Ft. Benning Georgia to protest the activities of the US Army’s School of the Americas (a “school” that for years has, ironically, trained government terrorists in Latin America).

I’ve also watched suppliers wheeling goods for the terminal shops right past security — boxes of foodstuffs, stacks of bundled newspapers and magazines, tourist goods, etc. If someone wanted to smuggle a weapon on a plane, all they’d need to do would be slip it into one of those supply trolleys, or even get a job as an airport worker. I’m sure there are plenty of ways that could be done by a ground crew worker too, who deals with loading baggage or prepping the plane.

What it boils down to is acceptance of risk, and how much we want to do to try and reduce it.

The US has gone way too far in my view. Of course the worst thing is the obsessive Big Brother spying that the government has been ramping up ever since 9-11, from the NSA’s efforts to “sweep up” all communications to the Patriot Act, with its wholesale evisceration of the Bill of Rights. But there are many other costs that we are now paying for this obsessive fear of terror.

Air travel is just one example of this madness.

Take our recently built YMCA. It has five locker rooms. Really, five. Why? Because there’s such a fear these days of predatory pedophiles abroad in the land that the planners of the new building thought they’s best have male and female locker rooms for adults over 18, then separate male and female locker rooms for boys and girls under 18, and a family locker room with large stalls and doors for families with small children (If we get a case somewhere in the US or a 16-year-old abusing a nine-year-old, the Y will probably have to add two more locker rooms, so they can have two for teens and two for pre-teens). You’d never see such a thing happen in Europe, where women go to the beach topless and children run around naked without a fuss, and where there’s usually some woman sitting in the public men’s room by the urinal collecting tips for keeping the place clean while they guys relieve themselves.

It can get pretty crazy. I recently brought a house guest — a visitor from Spain in town to perform a keyboard recital — to the local Y with me, so he could use swim some laps. He had come with just a bathing suit and a towel, but no wallet, figuring he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving it in a locker. But the staff wouldn’t let him in without a photo ID! When I said he was a guest at my house, and I am a Y member, they said that didn’t matter. “Rules are rules,” was the line. We had to return home to get his wallet and passport.

Music teachers at universities who teach children under 18 these days need to send their fingerprints to the FBI, again for fear they may be pedophiles (this while faculty sexual predators of students are often ignored). Some excellent musicians refuse to teach at such schools because of this absurd requirement. Who loses then? The kids.

And then there’s my pet peeve — police repression of hitch-hiking, a once-venerable practice that helped level society and allowed people to get to know each other across the land, as well as to help those without the money for a car to get places. It’s so bad lately that I’ve been threatened with jail by a thuggish local cop from a neighboring town who first lied that it was illegal to hitchhike in Pennsylvania, and then threatened to arrest me if I argued with him (actually it is only illegal to hitch in the state on a controlled access highway, or by standing in the roadway obstructing traffic). These days, the public is so terrified of hitchhiking that when I try it, usually the only people who pick me up are immigrants, who are used to hitchhikers. The joke is that police who are honest will confirm that society today in America is much much safer than it was back in the 1960s and 1970s, when I hitchhiked all over the country, and almost all the time, whether it was getting to class in college or going to visit a friend at a neighboring school.

Fear of terrorism, and miscellaneous dangers like pedophiles, pickpockets and foreigners, means we miss out on a lot in America. Few Americans travel anymore. The favored vacation is on a cruise ship, where the tourists are carefully insulated from the locals. And many countries are just blackballed because there might be a terrorist targeting Americans there.

Of course, foreigners are increasingly staying away from the US too. In part this is because of our own government’s intrusive vetting of them before granting a visa (as happened to the A-list British pop singer Cat Stevens, who was barred entry a while back. In part it’s because foreigners are afraid of the militarized police here in the US, who can be pretty brutal to people who don’t speak the language. Recall the harmless elderly Indian man who was viciously thrown face down on the sidewalk of suburban Madison, Alabama by a cop because he kept saying “No speak English” as the cop shouted at him incoherently. That poor fellow, who had just come from India to babysit his new grandchild so that his son, legally working in the US as an engineer, could go to work. The victim. who had been walking through the neighborhood admiring the houses, suffered a broken neck and paralysis that could reportedly be permanent. He’s not alone either. US police assaults on innocent tourists have been all too common.

The American nuttiness about and irrational fear of terrorism also has led to deaths. Police are quick to shoot and kill people that they “think” might be armed. Usually the victims of these shootings, which number over 1000 a year and are rising, are generally dark skinned, fitting the preconception of “terrorist,” though most acts of terror committed in the US have historically been the handiwork of white people.

It’s also expensive. There are over 2 million people in prison in America, and millions more who have prison records and so now cannot get decent jobs, or go to college. The cost of incarcerating people we’re afraid of, often for lengthy terms or for life, and of providing subsistence help to those whom we have tarred as felons and then left unemployable, is incalculable.

I attribute this rampant and corrosive fear in America to a combination of guilt and isolation. We know our country has too much stuff and too much power, and that we throw our weight and our bombs around and piss a lot of people off around the world, and so we fear those people. Here at home, those of us who have it good fear those who don’t, again not just because we are afraid they might take stuff from us, but because we feel guilty that we don’t do much to help them, instead fighting for lower taxes and fewer programs that provide help or relief for those in need. Meanwhile, we spend so much of our time inside a bubble, whether it’s our house and TV, our car, or our little work cubicle, that we don’t know or care about anyone outside our small circle of family and friends. When you don’t know people, and you also feel guilty, it leads to fear.

Terrorism plays to that fear. And political charlatans shamelessly play on it. Now we’re all paying the price, just as those 149 passengers and crew on the doomed Germanwings plane paid for the madness of giving it an unopenable terror-proof cabin door.