The Terrorism of Self-Defense: A Brief Lesson in Imperial Double Standards

 

BY NICKY REID

It seems like just yesterday that our newly minted president, Joe Biden, was promising this country and the world at large a brand spanking new era of peace for Yemen. After watching two consecutive administrations facilitate Saudi Arabia and their fellow Gulf State ghouls in blockading, starving, bombing, and systematically slaughtering the poorest country in the Middle East to the tune of some 377,000 mostly civilian bodies, even the generally callous hypocrites in Joe’s own party were screaming, “Enough!” 4 million people were forced to flee their homes, 75,000 children under the age of five starved to death, and 2.5 million people languishing in the worst cholera outbreak in modern history. All because a rag-tag tribe of anti-imperialist Shiites dared to overthrow an American and Saudi-backed dictatorship.

What has occurred in Yemen since 2015 isn’t so much a war as it is a slaughter and Joe Biden, a man who as vice president to Barack Obama when he greenlit this bloodbath is intimately responsible for his share of the dead, was finally making a big show out of displaying a little goddamn mercy. He lifted the Trump era designation of the Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization that promised to choke off what little international aid actually managed to get into the country, and he made a solemn promise to end all American support for the Saudi coalition’s “offensive operations” in the country while working towards a peace deal. Looking back, the vague language Biden used in this declaration of peace should have tipped us off to the fact that we were being bullshitted by a career bullshitter.

I wish I could tell you folks that Joe Biden hasn’t done dick to end the ongoing slaughter in Yemen, but the reality is actually far more heinous than that. In almost mincing spite of his hollow little words, Biden has continued in his predecessors’ footsteps by actively facilitating what can only accurately be described as a Wahhabi holocaust against the peasant population of Yemen. He has approved the sale of a billion dollars in American killing machines to Riyadh as Save the Children has seen a 60% increase in civilian casualties during the last three months of 2021 alone. And all this horror could be ended tomorrow with the snap of that neoliberal chickenhawk’s boney fingers if he simply lifted the crippling blockade and stopped servicing the Saudi coalition’s warplanes. That’s it. It’s that fucking simple. This nightmare would grind to a screeching halt.

Under these circumstances, one would be a fool to come to any other conclusion than that Joe Biden wanted his “peace” and to eat the malnourished bones of starving children too. It was all just another put-on. A heavily publicized act of contrition for Joe’s soulless dregs in the mainstream media to ooh and ah over. “Look how presidential our new monster is. He’s so much classier than that vulgar circus gimp, Donald Trump!” Well, starving children can’t eat class and the Houthi rebels have been left with no other choice but to break through Joe’s cellophane “peace” and defend themselves.

Over the last several months the Houthis have launched a series of desperate but brazen drone strikes targeting the airports and oil industries that have facilitated Saudi Arabia’s and the United Arab Emirates’ remorseless slaughter of their people. Civilians have died and this is always unconscionable but under such desperate circumstances, I can’t see how these ravaged people had little other option. Unsurprisingly, the Houthis ‘ gall to actually fucking defend themselves is the only crime heinous enough to earn a response from the Biden White House. They are blaming the victims like a varsity rapist, and they are openly threatening to renew the Houthi’s terrorist designation, a decision that aid groups continue to scream at that deaf monster would result in the starvation of millions. That’s because the Houthis are not a terrorist organization. They are Yemen’s rightful government and an attack on them is an attack on the Yemeni people themselves.

Why do you think the Saudis have been busy bombing school buses and hospitals for the last seven years? It’s not just because they’re fucking animals. It’s because the Houthi rebels are Shiite populists who took their nation back from a puppet in a popular uprising. Their success would have been impossible without the support of the Yemeni people. So, the Yemeni people themselves had to die. Otherwise, other oppressed people living under the yoke of Salafi whack jobs like say the Shia majority in oil-rich Bahrain might find themselves empowered to follow in their footsteps. It’s the old domino theory all over again and in spite of what certain well-intentioned pacifists may have tried to tell you, that Nixonian trope is 100% accurate. When the Vietcong dared to fight back, the Pathet Lao followed. This threat isn’t about the specter of creeping communism or the Shia Crescent. It’s about the dreaded threat of a good example. If the US and its flunkies let one ragged tribal peasant give us a black eye, then soon the whole playground is going to want a piece.

And how did Biden’s heroes in the Gulf respond to the Houthi rebels’ meager act of “terrorism?” Well, with an act of shockingly disproportionate terrorism of their own of course. Just three days after the Houthis killed three people at an Abu Dhabi oil facility with a jerry-rigged RadioShack drone strike, the Saudi coalition lead a sophisticated assault on Yemen that would amount to their deadliest bombing in seven years and nearly single-handedly turn that January into the war’s deadliest month since 2016.

It all started with an airstrike on a telecommunications center in Hodeida that killed three children playing nearby. But the true intention of this attack was to cripple civilian communications and local media coverage for the next several hours to limit the coverage of their true target. In direct violation of the Geneva Convention, Biden’s beloved coalition bombed a detention center in Sadaa housing innocent African migrant workers transitioning through Yemen to Saudi Arabia, slaughtering at least 91 helpless civilians and wounding 237 others. The western media and the State Department who had screamed bloody murder at the top of their lungs over the relatively minuscule Abu Dhabi drone strike were as silent as tombstones. Not one word from the typically chatty imperial peanut gallery.

That’s because the mass slaughter of a migrant detention center isn’t terrorism. The western world’s definition of terrorism has nothing to do with dead civilians or using fear as a political weapon. Terrorists aren’t the death squads who ethnically cleanse whole tribes in the jungles of Colombia, they’re the communist guerrillas who sling coke to defend them. Terrorists aren’t the Turkish secret police who rape and torture children, they’re the Kurdish rebels who avenge them. Terrorists aren’t the Zionist gestapo who ethnically cleanse the West Bank, they’re the Islamic rebels who launch desperate firebombings with kites and balloons just to give voice to their anguish.

And terrorists sure as shit aren’t the powerful men in the clean white buildings of Washington who casually decapitate entire civilizations with their industrial complexes the way you or I would order a goddamn pizza. Terrorists aren’t even the oil-rich sultans who brainwash pissed-off kids into throwing commercial airliners into American skyscrapers in revenge. No, no, terrorists are desperate people of color like the Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, the Vietcong, the Pathet Lao, Ho Chi Minh, Muamar Gaddafi, Che Guevara, Geronimo, and Nat Turner. In the eyes of Uncle Sam, the only real terrorists are the peasants who fight back. But maybe they wouldn’t have to if the people of this country grew a goddamn conscience and stood up to the state that slaughters in our name, but I guess that would just make us terrorists too.

What America and its malignant beneficiaries do in places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, and the Donbas essentially amounts to the collective punishment of entire races of people for the revolutionary acts of their bravest citizens. There is another word for this form of state-sanctioned terrorism and its genocide. If that makes the Houthi rebels and all those like me who dare to defend their resistance against tyranny terrorists, then what does that make the partisans of the Warsaw Uprising? And who are the Nazis in this tragic story?

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.   

  https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/04/the-terrorism-of-self-defense-a-brief-lesson-in-imperial-double-standards/