My Take | Just who are the real baddies here?
- With Israel being accused of committing genocide and the US supplying weapons to bomb Gaza, the Yemeni Houthis’ stance on ‘responsibility to protect’ Palestinians looks more courageous and legitimate by the day
It’s a recurrent scene in Hollywood films and pay-TV series, perhaps due to the high number of killings committed by US law enforcement against their own civilian population.
The drama scene usually has one or more officers beating someone to a pulp or a “suspect” being shot, all the while shouting, “Stop resisting!”
The Joe Biden White House has been employing a similar tactic with Iran since Israel launched its genocidal war in Gaza. It insists that it’s Tehran and its “proxies’’ – the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon – that are escalating tensions in the region, and the only way the United States can de-escalate and deter is to provide more weapons to Israel – to continue its Gaza carnage – and to bomb Yemen.
The latest excuse to bomb one of the world’s poorest countries – with ever faithful Britain tagging along for the ride – is that the Houthi rebels have been threatening shipping lanes in the Red Sea in “retaliation” against Israel’s military siege of Gaza. This is, of course, the narrative loyally repeated by the Anglo-American media, with the occasional “critical” pieces that warn Biden may be playing into the hands of Iran. You have to love the levels of deliberate delusion the mainstream media will always reliably rise up to in any international crisis that Washington creates or worsens.
So far, Tehran has actually done very little. The capture of an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman by its navy looks more like a tit-for-tat with Washington. The US seized the same tanker in 2021 and subsequently took the Iranian crude oil it carried for breaching its sanctions against Iran.