Geography Archives: Yemen

The War Nerd dissects reporting on Saudi Arabia to show how the corporate media cares more about a dead Washington Post columnist than a quarter of a million Yemenis killed in a Western-backed war.

The Saudi-UAE war on Yemen has been going on for five years. Despite recent peace talks leading to an improvement in aid distribution, the violence has escalated in certain key districts of Yemen over the past two weeks. Since January, 35,000 Yemenis have been displaced from their homes, an indicator of the dangerous situation in the country.

Sweden might have some credibility if it banned weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is not enough to be moved by the tragedy in Yemen. Action is necessary.

‘We are losing the fight against famine’, said the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock to the UN Security Council on 21 September. He was talking about Yemen, which has been bombarded by the monstrous anger of the Saudi-Emirati guns from March 2015.

Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis—all of which constitute war crimes under international law.

Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely ignoring his most devastating war?

The lack of media interest makes it seem like a crisis unfolding in slow motion. But that is only because outrage and compassion are now meant to be weaponised when they can be useful in justifying imperialist interventions. For the Yemeni people the agony is real and there is no escaping it.

Since May 2015, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has sustained a permanent military invasion against Yemen, the poorest country of the Middle East. The House of Saud argues that the lands and air attacks are due to the advancement of the Ansarolá movement, born in the core of the Houthis tribe which exercises the Zaydi shi’a Islam.

The current civilian slaughter, chaos, and daily indignities in Yemen create the perfect recruitment tool for the expansion of terrorist organizations. Al-Qaeda has been operating in Yemen for a long time.… In addition, IS has begun to make their presence felt in Yemen.

In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way.  On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]

Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often.  It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore?  How come he died, and what’s the reason for?”  Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to […]

As the 2016 electoral game here ratchets up to nasty polemics, the US media is mainly focused on the carnival atmosphere of the Republican Party candidates.  (The Democratic Party infighting is only now beginning to boil over.)  Meanwhile, the Obama administration, free from scrutiny, continues its airstrikes in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and […]

Early this month in Germany, a few thousand refugees from war-torn Syria and neighboring countries spilled out of a train station and into Munich.  Rather than being tripped by the locals, or thrown inside cargo trucks, or sorted out according to skin color (as per quaint Old World custom), the migrants were actually welcomed by […]

President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages — including one American — during a drone strike in Pakistan.  Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our […]

I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city.  The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]

You want to know why I’m nuts, Doctor?  I’m part of the lunatic left, that’s why. My delusions of intellectual grandeur are great enough to make me believe that I can actually comprehend the bombings, the embargoes, the torture — all wrought by the good old US of A — while everybody else goes shopping.  […]

  The Western errors and neo-liberal damages: Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi knew how to contain the Islamist drift, but they were slaughtered.  In Libya, Paris and Washington have it all wrong. We reached Samir Amin — philosopher, economist, and director of the Third World Forum based in Dakar — in Paris by phone, to […]

I have become a card-carrying, tax-paying moderate, thanks to a study I found in Politico.com.  In this study, psychologists Kaitlin Toner and Mark Leary discovered that the more extreme politicians’ views are, the more they think they’re right.  In fact, politicians’ “belief superiority” — the certainty that their own viewpoints are correct — was linked […]

Last weekend, I participated in a panel on the illegality of drones and targeted killing off the battlefield at the conference “Drones Around the Globe: Proliferation and Resistance” in Washington DC.  Nearly 400 people from many countries came together to gather information, protest, and develop strategies to end targeted killing by combat drones.  I found […]

“These people who are commonly known as leaders view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money.  These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their shoulders, and to simple-minded people who are in the habit of accepting every word […]