CounterPunch bracht afgelopen vrijdag een door Paul Street geschreven artikel over Jemen en het verschil in verontwaardiging en ondernomen acties tegen het scheiden van vluchtelingen en hun kinderen door de VS overheid…. Kinderen die families meenamen op hun vlucht voor een in een groot aantal gevallen geweld dat op de één of andere manier is verbonden met de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde >> de VS…. Dit afgezet tegen de ontbrekende aandacht voor het grote aantal kinderen dat al is omgekomen bij de door de VS en GB gesteunde genocide van de Saoedische coalitie op de sjiitische bevolking van Jemen……..
Ongelofelijk dat men wel terecht flink pissig wordt over het afnemen van kinderen van hun ouders door de overheid van de VS, die deze kinderen heeft ontvoerd; terwijl men wegkijkt van een genocide aan de andere kant van de aarde, waar NB de VS meehelpt aan en de regie voert over een genocide, die volgens Save the Children alleen in 2017 al naar schatting aan zo’n 50.000 kinderen het leven moet hebben gekost…….. (ofwel vermoord door de Saoedische coalitie, de VS en Groot-Brittannië, de laatste heeft als de VS ook een fikse steen bijgedragen aan de massamoord in Jemen….)
Overigens schunnig ook dat de EU en Nederland nog steeds goede banden onderhouden met de (terroristische) reli-fascistische dictatuur van Saoedi-Arabië, om als Nederlander je ogen voor uit je hoofd te schamen……
Lees het volgende artikel en geeft het ajb door! (er moet onmiddellijk een eind gemaakt worden aan de genocide die de VS, Saoedi-Arabië en anderen uitvoeren in Jemen en de daders moeten worden vervolgd door het Internationaal Strafhof!!)
JULY
20, 2018
by PAUL
STREET
Photo
by Felton Davis | CC
BY 2.0
Hundreds
of thousands of people showed
up across the United States at more than 600 gatherings three
weeks ago. They came out to protest Donald
Trump‘s “zero
tolerance”
immigration policy in highly choreographed, Democratic
Party-affiliated “Families Belong Together” rallies and
marches. Liberal
celebrities marched
and spoke. Local, state, and federal Democratic Party politicians and
office-holders gave passionate speeches denouncing Trump’s
separation of Central American migrant children from their parents at
the southern U.S. border.
Marchers
carried signs expressing their concern for children and families.
Here are some of the messages
written on
the posters displayed at these gatherings:
“We
care”
“I
Raise my Voice Not so I can Shout but So that Those Without a Voice
Can be Heard”
“Do
All Lives Still Matter?”
“What
Would Mr. Rogers Say?”
“Compassion”
(The
issue that sparked this remarkable outpouring has already been pushed
off the front pages and the cable news headlines by the resurgent
RussiaGate story, brought to new intensity by Trump’s “spectacular
debacle”
alongside
Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. It is a victim of the
all-powerful “now we see you, now we don’t” U.S. news cycle –
this even as nearly
two-thirds of
the migrant children criminally separated have yet to be reunited
with their parents and as evidence emerges that the Trump
administration intended for the family separations to
be permanent.)
“Emaciated
Babies”: 50,000 Yemeni Children May Have Died in 2017
We
have yet to learn of any large and widespread U.S. demonstrations on
behalf of the children and families of Yemen, where the U.S. is
deeply complicit in the creation of a situation that “looks,” in
the words of the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, “like the
Apocalypse.” UNICEF
reported last
year that a child dies from preventable causes on the average of once
every 10 minutes in Yemen.
As
the Associated Press (AP) reported
last May,
roughly 3 million Yemeni women and children are “acutely
malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives.”
Further:
“Nearly
a third of Yemen’s population — 8.4 million of its 29 million
people — rely completely on food aid or else they would starve.
That number grew by a quarter over the past year…Aid agencies warn
that parts of Yemen could soon start to see widespread death from
famine. More and more people are reliant on aid that is already
failing to reach people. …It is unknown how many have died, since
authorities are not able to track cases. Save the Children late last
year estimated that 50,000 children may have died in 2017 of extreme
hunger or disease (emphasis added), given that up to 30 percent of
children with untreated cases of severe acute malnutrition die.”
The
AP told the heartbreaking story of Umm Mizrah and her children,
tragic drops in the bucket of what could become one of the biggest
humanitarian catastrophes of the last half-century:
“The
young mother stepped onto the scale for the doctor. Even with all her
black robes on, she weighed only 84 pounds …The doctor’s office
is covered with dozens of pictures of emaciated babies who have come
through Al-Sadaqa Hospital in Aden …Mothers like Umm Mizrah…skip
meals, sleep to escape the gnawing in their stomachs. They hide bony
faces and emaciated bodies in voluminous black abaya robes and
veils…The doctor asked the mother to get back on the scale holding
her son, Mizrah. At 17 months, he was 5.8 kilograms (12.8 pounds) —
around half the normal weight for his age. He showed all the signs of
‘severe acute malnutrition,’ the most dire stage of hunger. His
legs and feet were swollen, he wasn’t getting enough protein. When
the doctor pressed a finger into the skin of his feet, the
indentation lingered.”
Things
have gotten worse in the last two and half months. According
to Lisa Grande,
head of the UN humanitarian effort in Yemen, “8.5 million people
that we describe as being pre-famine… when they wake up in the
morning, they have no idea if they will eat that day…by the end of
this year, another 10 million Yemenis will be in that situation.”
Two
and a half weeks ago, special PBS correspondent Jane
Ferguson related the
plight of Maimona Shaghadar, who “suffers the agony of starvation
in silence. No longer able to walk or talk, at 11 years old, little
Maimona’s emaciated body weighs just 24 pounds…Every day,” a
nurse told Ferguson in a remote Yemen hospital, medical personnel
“see these sorts of cases.”
Cholera,
a prominent 19th-century disease, has become epidemic there, thanks
to the collapse of water sanitation. Cholera has already killed
thousands of Yemeni civilians, children especially, and a million
Yemenis are currently infected. Yemen is now home to what
Ferguson calls “the
worst cholera outbreak in modern history. Now every time the rains
comes, people fall ill.”
“American
Made”
The
cause? In “mainstream” U.S. media, the Yemeni children and
families suffering this near “apocalypse” are victims of a
three-year-old war between Yemen’s Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels
who hold the country’s north, and a Saudi Arabian-led coalition,
armed and backed by the United States. But there is little evidence
of significant Iranian involvement in Yemen. The desperately poor
nation’s “civil war” is a remarkably one-sided affair in which
the world’s only Superpower (the United States) has been providing
critical support for what amounts to the crucifixion of millions of
innocent children and families. Combined with a vicious economic
blockade, the US-Saudi coalition’s relentless bombing campaign has
collapsed Yemen’s economy, leaving two-thirds of the population to
depend outside on food aid for survival. The air onslaughts have
devastated much of Yemen’s basic infrastructure so that more than
half the population lacks access to safe drinking water – the key
cause of the cholera epidemic. In a recent trip deep into Yemen’s
countryside, Ferguson found a Doctors Without Borders cholera
treatment center that had been crushed into rubble by a U.S.-Saudi
airstrike the day before – an obvious war crime. “It was just
about to open its doors to patients,” Ferguson reports.
Ferguson
spoke to Dr. Ali Al Motaa, a Yemeni college professor who did his
doctorate in the US. “The missiles that kill us,” Motaa said,
“American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks,
Abrams, American-made. You are saying to me, where is America?
America is the whole thing.”
By
Ferguson’s account, from deep inside rebel-controlled territory:
“The
aerial bombing campaign has not managed to dislodge the rebels, but
has hit weddings, hospitals and homes. The U.S. military supports the
Saudi coalition with logistics and intelligence. The United States it
also sells the Saudis and coalition partners many of the bombs they
drop on Yemen. In the mountains outside the capital, we gained
exclusive access to the site where the Houthis store unexploded
American-made bombs, like this 2000-pound Mark 84 bomb made in
Garland, Texas. It landed in the middle of the street in the capital,
we are told.”
That
was before he U.S.-Saudi forces, with the Trump administration’s
approval, decided to launch an offensive
against the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah,
through which almost all the food and medicine coming into
Houthi-held Yemen passes. As Al
Jazeera reported three
days ago, the UN is warning that “the humanitarian crisis in Yemen
is worsening as tens of thousands of families are displaced by the
Saudi-UAE coalition offensive to retake the strategic port city….the
relentless air raids and lack of aid are making an already dire
humanitarian crisis even worse for the civilians who live in the
region….tens of thousands of families have been displaced from
Hodeidah as a result of the fierce fighting.
The
U.S. is involved in direct as well as indirect assault on Yemen.
Yemen was home to the first
known U.S. drone attack outside
Afghanistan in 2002. Hundreds of U.S. drone and other airstrikes have
targeted Yemen since
2009.
Trump
drew his first military blood in Yemen. U.S. Navy special forces
carried out a raid—planned by the Obama administration and handed
off to the incoming Trump team—that killed 25 civilians, including
10 children in the mountainous Yakla region of Yemen’s Al Bayda
province. One of the children killed was an 8-year-old
girl,
Nawar al-Awlaki, daughter of the Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki,
who was killed on Barack Obama’s orders in a September 2011 U.S.
drone strike in Yemen. Nawar’s older brother, 16-year-old
Abdulrahman, was killed in a second Obama-commanded drone strike soon
afterward.
Trump’s
continuation of the U.S. slaughter of al-Awlaki’s children was
consistent with his campaign claim that he would kill the relatives
of terrorist suspects—a war crime. “The other thing with the
terrorists is you have to take out their families; when you get these
terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump pronounced
on Fox News in
December 2015.
A
PBS NewsHour report earlier this month describes the Yemen tragedy as
a “man-made” catastrophe. A more historically specific
characterization would be “Empire-made” or “Washington-made.”
As Bill Van Auken accurately
reported on
the World Socialist Web Site five weeks ago:
“This
total war against an entire population…would be impossible without
the uninterrupted support—military and political—of US
imperialism since its outset…The US, together with its main NATO
allies the UK and France, has supplied the planes, warships, bombs,
missiles and shells used to devastate Yemen and slaughter its people.
In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama presided over
some $115 billion in arms sales to the monarchical dictatorship in
Riyadh. The Trump administration, which has sought to forge an
anti-Iran axis with Saudi Arabia, the other reactionary Gulf oil
sheikhdoms and Israel, has touted arms deals with Riyadh that
potentially would amount to $110 billion.”
“The
Pentagon has given direct and indispensable aid to the Saudi-led
onslaught, providing midair refueling for the planes that bomb Yemeni
civilians, staffing a joint command center in Riyadh with US
intelligence and logistics officers and reinforcing the Saudi-UAE
blockade of the country with American warships. Recently, US Green
Berets have been deployed with Saudi ground forces to assist in their
anti-Yemen operations. Under the banner of the ‘war on terror,’
the Pentagon is waging its own air war in Yemen, conducting at least
130 air and drone strikes in 2017, quadruple the number in 2016…The
Trump administration gave the go-ahead for the current siege of
Hodeidah Pentagon officials have reported that US officers are
helping to select targets in the port city.”
Historical
Continuities
The
Trump administration’s funding and equipping of the savage war on
Yemen shares three key characteristics with the “zero tolerance”
immigration policy that Trump was recently forced to (partially and
haltingly) rescind. First, it unconscionably uses innocent children
and families as hostages and pawns in the advance of White House
policy goals.
Second,
it is richly consistent with U.S. policy stretching far back in
history (see
this on
the long U.S. record of family separation and
thison
the long U.S. history of directly and indirectly attacking and
killing children and other civilians in foreign nations).
Third,
it is consistent with Barack Obama’s record. The Obama
administration backed the
Saudi-led Arab assault on Yemen. It also (as few marching against
Trump’s border policy seem to know or care) responded to Central
American migration and asylum-seeking with a policy of aggressive
deterrence and detention – a
policy that included the caging of children.
Why
No Mass Marches for Yemeni Children?
Clearly
the murder of tens of thousands of (Yemeni) children is a bigger
crime than the undoubted transgression of traumatically if (hopefully
temporarily) separating 2300 Central American children form their
migrant parents. Why don’t hundreds of thousands of U.S.-Americans
march on behalf of Yemeni children and families killed, maimed,
starved, sickened, and otherwise placed at grave risk by Washington
and its Arab allies?
Differences
of geographical proximity and familiarity are part of the
explanation. Equally if not more significant: the dominant U.S
media’s systematic under-reporting of U.S, imperial aggression in
the Middle East; that media’s portrayal of is the Yemen war as a
regional Sunni-Shia and Saudi-Iranian conflict in which the U.S. is
only peripherally involved; the Yemeni victims’ status as Muslim
Others who are linked in the dominant U.S. media and politics culture
with the officially U.S,- and Israel-demonized state of Iran (a
nation that all too unmentionably looks like a model of democracy,
social justice, and women’s rights in comparison to its regional
arch-enemy and Washington’s “good friend” the absolutist and
arch-reactionary state of Saudi Arabia). For these and other reasons,
the Democratic Party establishment sees no political advantage in
confronting Trump on U.S. Yemen policy, a policy in which both
reigning U.S. political parties are deeply complicit.
Help
Paul Street keep writing here.
More
articles by:PAUL
STREET
Paul
Street’s latest
book is They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm,
2014)
==========================
Zie ook:
‘Saoedi-Arabië woedend over VN rapport waarin de waarheid wordt verteld over S-A en de oorlog in Jemen‘
‘Trump wijst elke bezuiniging af op de hulp van de VS voor de genocide die Saoedi-Arabië uitvoert in Jemen‘
‘Saoedische terreurcoalitie raakt alweer een bus met kinderen, dit keer tijdens een bombardement van een vluchtelingenkamp……..‘
‘Genocide Jemen: ‘eindelijk ontdekt’ door reguliere media VS, nu nog Nederland en de EU‘
‘Saoedische aanval op schoolbus in Jemen: 43 kinderen vermoord……‘
‘Aanval op schoolbus Jemen, door Saoedi-Arabië opzettelijk als doel gekozen, geen reden voor VS veroordeling……‘
‘Bom waarmee schoolbus in Jemen werd getroffen is van VS makelij‘
‘Democratisch congreslid eist antwoorden over de rol van de VS bij de massamoorden in Jemen, zoals de aanval op een schoolbus‘
‘8 miljoen Jemenieten, inclusief een groot aantal kinderen, dreigen te sterven van de honger……..‘
‘Jemen, de gemartelde, vermoorde of ‘verdwenen’ Jemenieten, onder verantwoording van de Saoedische coalitie……‘
‘Door VS geregisseerd bombardement op ziekenhuis Hodeida >> 50 doden……‘
‘Saoedi-Arabië geeft toe in Jemen gruwelijke oorlogsmisdaden te hebben begaan…. ‘ (en daarmee is ten overvloede nog eens duidelijk gemaakt dat ook de VS meewerkt aan oorlogsmisdaden en die genocide in Jemen…..)
‘Agressie vanwege een vermeende gifgasaanval op Douma, terwijl de tienduizenden kinderen die in Jemen worden vermoord middels een genocide blijkbaar niet meetellen……‘
‘Saoedische coalitie valt in Jemen de laatste haven voor humanitaire goederen aan…… Weer ziekenhuis met hulp van VS gebombardeerd………‘
‘VS rol in Jemen gaat verder dan eerder gemeld, ofwel nog meer VS hulp bij Saoedische genocide op sjiieten…..‘
‘Congres VS geeft akkoord voor verdere steun aan de Saoedische genocide in Jemen……‘
‘VS versterkt militaire terreur t.b.v. genocide >> deelname aan aanval op Jemenitische havenstad Hodeida…….‘
‘VS en Groot-Brittannië weigeren een onmiddellijk staakt het vuren op haven t.b.v. door genocide geterroriseerd Jemen…..‘
‘VS vecht in Jemen, Pentagon loog weer eens >> Congres eindelijk ‘wakker’‘
‘Saoedi-Arabië vermoordde minstens 20 bruiloftsgangers in Jemen‘
‘Saoedi-Arabië dreigt Iran aan te vallen voor vanuit Jemen afgevuurde ‘raketten’ op Saoedische ‘doelen……….’‘
‘VS doet planning van de Saoedische genocide in Jemen…..‘
‘VS rol in Jemen gaat verder dan eerder gemeld, ofwel nog meer VS hulp bij Saoedische genocide op sjiieten…..‘
‘Jemen: meer VS steun voor genocide op sjiieten met grote levering ‘slimme munitie’ aan Saoedi-Arabië……‘
‘Jemen: BBC propaganda voor genocide door Saoedische coalitie……..‘
‘Mike Pompeo (ex-CIA, VS min. van BuZa en ‘christen’) liegt openlijk over genocide in Jemen‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht)
‘Saoedi-Arabië heeft op verzoek van de VS intensief haar islam ideologie (en die van ISIS) verspreid…..‘
