Zionist enforcers out of the Red Sea area! Defeat NATO/Zionist Imperialism!
For workers strikes to defend the West Asian masses against imperialist mass murder!
Joint statement of ClassConscious.org and LCFI
The 11 January attacks on Yemen by US and UK forces are the military expression of their defence of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The motive for the bombing is pure-unadulterated race-hate and imperialist arrogance. How dare these Yemeni Arabs take military action to defend the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza! These untermenschen [a term from Nazi ideology used to describe “inferior peoples”] must be taught a lesson. That’s the thinking of Zionist racists in high places like Anthony Blinken and Grant Schapps – bringing a certain frisson of racialised solidarity into the equation of imperialist terror. The outsourcing of the most barbarous tasks to those with an ethnocentric motive for so accentuating ‘normal’ militarism is a feature of the advanced decay of British imperialism, and the US is going the same way. Bizarrely, Sunak claims that the assault on Yemen is ‘self-defence’ – just like the Israeli genocidaires say that cutting off power to premature babies in hospital incubators is ‘self-defence’, and attempt to argue that at The Hague. For such people, Yemenis, who have demonstrated in their millions in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and evidently support the actions of the Houthi. must be given a taste of what the population of Gaza are getting, for daring to challenge Israel’s genocide.
The whole world knows that the population of Gaza, including countless women and children are being exterminated by Israeli AI-guided carpet-bombing and white phosphorus burns (barbaric chemical warfare). It is clear that the current British government supports that extermination, arms in hand. No matter what double-talk we hear from Biden, Sunak and David Cameron about trying to nudge Israel into easing up on the civilian killings, that is the reality. If anyone anywhere, tries to stop Israel’s massacre, they are to be bombed by the US/UK and their civilians murdered likewise. They have the backing of Labour leader Starmer, who supports Zionist genocide against Palestinians ‘without qualification’ – another racist murderer who needs to be tried for complicity in this mass extermination. Both parties earlier made it clear that they defended Israel depriving the Gaza population of fuel, power, food and water – which makes them as guilty of being part of this holocaust as the worst Auschwitz prison guards were in the Nazi holocaust.
The Houthis are now being attacked by these gentlemen, representatives of the imperialist system hegemonized by Anglo-Saxon-Zionist capital, because they are the ones who are really trying to slow down the killing of civilians and the greatest crime against children ever committed in the history of humanity.
We applaud the principled actions of the Houthi in seeking to impose a blockade on Israel to try to force it to desist from its genocide in Gaza. The people of Yemen, under their leadership, were themselves subject to a genocidal war for decades waged by Saudi Arabia, acting as a US/Israeli client. It is an example of how the imperialists use divide and rule methods, mobilising sectarian Sunni antagonism to the various unorthodox, Shia-influenced and -derived populations in West Asia to bolster their domination. Imperialist covert support for ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria, despite their ‘terrorist’ actions at times against the West, are characteristic – indeed this goes back to Western backing for the Afghan Mujahedin in the 1970s and 1980s against the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the USSR.
But the Houthi managed to defeat Saudi Arabia, despite the terrible atrocities against them and their people, and made it clear in some exemplary attacks that they have the armed capacity to destroy the oil-producing facilities of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil monarchies if sufficiently provoked. Out of this bloody stalemate came the opportunity for China to broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the end of the Saudi war against the Houthi. So now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who (along with Egypt and Ethiopia) joined BRICS on New Years Day, are not keen on this US-Zionist war against the Houthi. The UAE, with conspicuous support from Russia and China, moved the ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council on 8 December, which was pointedly vetoed by the US.
Trump’s Abraham Accords, which aimed to tie together the Gulf States and Israel and decisively consign the Palestinian question to history and terminal betrayal, have blown up the US’s face. Though Biden is desperate to revive them. Saudi Arabia and the UAE refused to be part of Biden’s ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’ in the Bab-el-Mandeb straight, and Djibouti, on the other side of the straight, condemned the US/UK attack outright and solidarised with Yemen.
The tension over the Palestinian question, at this moment, raised to the highest level since the founding of Israel, is accelerating the erosion and isolation of the whole of imperialist domination in the region. It does not seem to the least attentive observers, but, politically and diplomatically, this genocide is costing their strategic interests dearly and is jeopardizing the very existence of their “aircraft carrier in the Middle East”:
“Israel is our fortress. It’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. (…) If Israel disappears, the BRICS will control 90 percent of the world’s oil and that would be a catastrophe for U.S. interests.” Robert Kennedy Jr., an “independent” (sic) candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, explains Israel’s strategic importance and identifies who are the enemies of Washington’s foreign policy (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=870155398093784).
The Houthi have one of the most battle-hardened armies in the world. Unlike the Zionist scum in the IDF, who are only capable of murdering women and children, and even cutting off power to the incubators of premature babies and leaving them to starve and decompose, the Houthi fought the much more powerful, US-supplied army of Saudi Arabia and its allies to a standstill. The very mountainous terrain of Yemen is similar to Afghanistan in many ways: it is easy to hide the sophisticated weaponry the Houthi have developed in places where the imperialists would not have a clue about. They will no doubt still be able to menace Israel-bound shipping no matter what the US/UK try to do about it.
The Houthi may at some point be able to sink the aggressors’ ships, or one of them, which would cause immense problems for Biden/Sunak at home. They won’t be able to stop the Houthi, and it would take a ground invasion of Yemen for them to even seriously try. Which is a huge trap for them. Some say that the reason Russia and China failed to veto the resolution condemning the Houthi actions in the UN Security Council is that it would facilitate US imperialism blundering into such a trap. Be that as it may, the US often does what it pleases and Israel certainly does irrespective of what the UN says. It would still have been better to deprive them of any UN cover and veto the condemnation – this would have increased their diplomatic isolation. Such a trap in Yemen for US forces would be just what the US deserves – a quagmire to end all quagmires, one might say. But for us, the mistake of Russia and China in not vetoing action against the Houthis at this time may be as serious as the historic mistake they both made in not vetoing imperialist intervention in Libya, when the UN Security Council approved the so-called “no-fly zone” over Tripoli. Once again, the limitation of the governments of Russia and China in the struggle against imperialism is wide open.
As revolutionary Marxists, we seek the defeat of US/UK/Israeli imperialism and a regime-change in Occupied Palestine (‘Israel’) to destroy the Zionist regime, enforce the full right of return of all Palestinians!
If Gazans are to leave the Gaza prison it must be to reclaim the lands in Israel stolen from all Palestinians in 1948 and since! No ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Hands off the population of the West Bank! Hands off Israeli Palestinians!
Defend Yemen. Defeat the US/UK aggressors! Try the genocidaire leaders in Washington and London, and their accomplices at home and abroad!
