Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Boris Johnson to the UK people: "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Boris Johsnon to Yemenis killed by Saudi airstrikes: "When I was foreign secretary I signed off on sales of more arms to the Saudi Kingdom. Many more civilians, including women and children, are going to lose loved ones before their time." BAE Systems sold £15 worth of arms to Saudis during Yemen assault

"Since the war [in Yemen] began, the UK has sold at least £4.7bn-worth of arms to Riyadh," claims the Guardian. That is not a lot in terms of GDP, but it still makes a difference for us here in the UK in terms of jobs at least. Our government is just doing business with an ally. Blame the Saudis: had they stockpiled more of what they needed before the war ( lawfully! ), they wouldn't have put the UK in such a position. Similarly, don't blame Deutsche Bank for axing jobs. Blame those thousands who will lose their jobs during the coming three years; those who were not smart enough and did not work hard enough to keep the bank stronger and competitive. 

It doesn't make a difference, but it is at least a symbolic action. We Won't Load Your Ships of Deaths

Sometimes some people somewhere do care Italians unions refuse to load Saudi ship carrying weapons to Yemen

"Rights groups have accused Paris of being complicit in alleged war crimes against civilians in Yemen, where around 10,000 people have died and millions been forced to the brink of starvation." Who are these (leftist, ignorant) "rights groups" who do not know that we need strategic partners to preserve the values of "the free world" and of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité". Haven't you seen the French chanting "Je suis Yéménite", "Je suis Sudanais(e)", "Je suis Algérien(ne)? France ships (more) arms to Saudi Arabia

Yemen: Death from above

What is all the fuss about? Some "democrats" complaning about transparency? The SAS has been involved in operations for decades. It has been "liberating people" and secure defense for "our regional partners." Just watch any documentary and you will how "the heroes" of SAS and how they defend 'our country' in far away countries and restore "peace" and "stability". 'Serious' questions over SAS involvement in Yemen

Tunisians to the Saudi Crown Prince: "Tunisia is not for sale", "No to the murderer", and "Our land is not a destination for you to wash off your sins." A charge has been filed to a high Tunisian court against Bin Salman and the Saudi crimes, including the ones committed in Yemen. US, UK and other "democracies": hand-shaking and hugs, arms deals, hundreds of billions of dollars,  and decades of support of the Saudi autocracy.

Families who survive in the rubble of their former lives

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.” The US [and its allies] helped massacre Yemeni schoolchildren

This headline is on Foreign Policy, not on a marxist website America is committing war crimes and doesn't even know why (In the url the adjective 'awful' is added to describe the crimes. I am not aware whether under Obama, for example, the likes of FP, ever called the actions of the US "war crimes").  Personally, I began to learn about the crimes of American imperialism only in the build up to the 2003 war on Iraq. At that time, it was through books and documentaries by authors such as Noam Chomsky and William Blum. Before that I mainly knew the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein ...  The claim in the FP article that Iran has been supporting the Houthis is flimsy and has been disputed by a few analysts  who qualified such "a support".    Here is one of those analyses . Related One of Blum's book is the famous Rogue State . Ironically, it is endorsed by Osama bin Laden and available on the CIA website. No, it is not a conspiracy theory ...

Fly Emirates! Tortured, detained, disappeared: United Arab Emirates abuses rife in southern Yemen

"Reasons include the United States' interest in maintaining lucrative arms deals with the Gulf states – primarily Saudi Arabia – and the fact that many U.S. politicians support bombing Iran (as demanded by the  right-wing Israeli leadership)." Middle East nightmare – made in Washington

The conflict in Yemen is not really about Iranian influence, as is often claimed to and in Western capitals. It’s certainly not about legitimacy or democracy, nor yet about sect, creed or colour. It’s about filthy lucre, and the corrupt access to it via state-capture. The Arab Spring—a rising up of the “street” against the  kleptocracy —was co-opted and corrupted in Yemen by  political factions  (and their foreign sponsors.) The UN-sponsored  National Dialogue Conference  supposed to be a national fresh start after decades of corruption, nepotism and misrule, was itself corrupted by those very factions it sought to replace: many of the ancien regime were able to retain and leverage ill-gotten political and financial resources, despite those being the major cause of the 2011 uprising. And the West stood idly by. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas "Greed is the root of evil"

What kind of a war is the Yemen war?

When it comes to the Middle East, the UK is nothing but a rogue state

Germany When doves cry Note: there is no word about the selling of submarines, for example, to the settler colonial state of Israel.  Complicity in crimes for jobs and accumulation of capital.

"The “Houthis are Shi‘a” narrative should be seen for what it is—a carefully crafted piece of political rhetoric devised to gloss over important differences between religious denominations, to reinforce the false image of a war between those who identify as Sunni versus those who identify as Shi‘a, and to encourage foreign—and particularly US—military intervention in Yemen. It provides a dangerously simplistic mental short cut for policymakers who are unfamiliar with Yemeni history and politics. In so doing, it diverts attention from the massive humanitarian crisis caused by years of civil war and the US-backed Saudi-led coalition’s ongoing blockade and bombardment. The cynical use of sectarian language casts the conflict in Yemen as part of an epochal, region-wide struggle rather than a local civil war made more deadly for Yemeni civilians by Saudi and Emirati intervention." How the Houthis became "Shi'a"

"Clearly the so-called “sectarian civil war” in Yemen is a recent permutation of the self-declared Sunni monarchies’ geostrategic rivalry with the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as those ruling dynasties’ discrimination against their own Shi`a populations. Overall, ample evidence is presented that the problems that provoked Yemen’s Southern Movement ( hirak ) and the 2011 popular demonstrations, respectively, are rooted in militarism and corruption rather than religion, and that the Gulf’s royal families have for decades feared mass mobilization in the most populous, least prosperous, perennially restive part of the Peninsula." Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf

Being complicit in mass murder is legal, court rules After all the business of England is business. " The sales contribute to thousands of engineering jobs in the UK, and have provided billions of pounds of revenue for the British arms trade."