The Trump administration has been taking care of assorted business at a frantic pace in the past two months. All sorts of unfinished affairs are being dealt with and positions that had been previously kept off the table because they would offend and upset all sorts of establishment figures are being put back on it.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been handling all sorts of unfinished business from Taiwan to the Middle East. And one of those is finally designating the Houthis, a Shiite Jihadist group that took over much of Yemen, as a terrorist organization.
This should be a no brainer.
1. The Houthis are Jihadis backed by Iran.
2. The Houthis attacked the USS Mason.
3. The Houthi motto is, ” Allah is Greater, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
But since Qatar seems to control our media via Al Jazeera and the Washington Post, which has acted as a Qatari front in the Khashoggi case, controls much of Congress, and since Qatar is allied with Iran, we’ve been served up a steady diet of propaganda which falsely claims that fighting the Houthis is causing a deadly famine in Yemen.
The truth is that the Houthis cause the famine by stealing food from the people who need it. Aid organizations go in, deal with the Houthis, pass out food, and it doesn’t get to the people who need it. (This is a familiar pattern and scam in Africa and the Middle East.)
Last year, the AP and even CNN broke the embargo and reported the truth.
In the northern province of Saada, a Houthi stronghold, international aid groups estimate that 445,000 people need food assistance. Some months the U.N. has sent enough food to feed twice that many people. Yet the latest figures from the U.N. and other relief organizations show that 65 percent of residents are facing severe food shortages, including at least 7,000 people who are in pockets of outright famine.
The Houthis, a Zaidi-Shiite religious movement turned rebel militia, control an expanse of northern and western Yemen that is home to more than 70 percent of the country’s population. In these areas, officials and relief workers say, Houthi rebels have moved aggressively to control the flow of food aid, putting pressure on international relief workers with threats of arrest or exile and setting up checkpoints that demand payments of “customs taxes” as trucks carrying aid try to move across rebel territory.
“Since the Houthis came to power, looting has been on a large scale,” said Abdullah al-Hamidi, who served as acting education minister in the Houthi-run government in the north before defecting to the coalition side earlier this year. “This is why the poor get nothing. What really arrives to people is very little.”
Each month in Sanaa, he said, at least 15,000 food baskets that the education ministry was supposed to provide to hungry families were instead diverted to the black market or used to feed Houthi militiamen serving on the front lines.
Sending food to Yemen just puts it in the hands of terrorists and the people end up starving.
But now that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo moved to designate the Houthis as a terrorist group, Congress is up in arms, echoing Qatari-Iranian agitprop via the media which is full-time agitprop.
A call the State Department held this morning to brief House and Senate committee staff on the Yemen move devolved into a shouting match and left staffers from both parties shocked by the apparent lack of a plan to ensure that food and aid continue to reach Yemeni civilians, millions of whom are already on the verge of famine.
There’s no plan here because the Houthis control the territory. If you send them food, they take it and people starve. If they’re defeated, things will get better.
“The staff on both sides were just flabbergasted that some basic questions on how we were going to protect the people of Yemen were not answered. It almost felt as though they weren’t planning to answer it. I don’t want to say they don’t care, but it was just very troubling,” the aide adds, noting that the briefers also struggled to provide a national security rationale for the move.
Seriously. A national security reason for designating the Yemeni Shiite version of ISIS which attacked a US vessel as a terrorist group?
We’re in Pravda territory here.
Meanwhile Republican House and Senate members have decided to get all worked up about this because it’s not like there’s anything critical going on in America for them to worry about.
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