If I had spent a large chunk of the past two years firing missiles into France, at some point I’d expect a missile back. I would know, even in the delirium of my Francophobic violence, that the French would target me for death one day, and what’s more that they would have every right to do so. So what’s with all the wailing and rushing for the fainting couch following Israel’s decapitation of the Houthi terror group? This is a virulently anti-Semitic militia that has been terrorising the Jewish State with bombs and drones for two years straight. Israel’s strike back is not a ‘war crime’, as the moral illiterates of the Israelophobic mob would have you believe – it’s justice.
It was an extraordinary hit. It took place on Thursday. The IDF fired missiles directly into a building in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, in which the top dogs of the Houthis had gathered. It is now confirmed that the Houthis’ self-styled ‘prime minister of Yemen’, Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi, was killed. So, it seems, was much of his cabinet. The Saudis, long-time opponents of the Iranian-backed Houthis, believe Rahawi’s foreign minister, justice minister and his ministers for youth, labour and social affairs were taken out, too. Leading Houthis survived, including Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the supreme commander of this regressive Islamist outfit. But there’s no question: Israel has dealt a devastating blow to the Houthis.
The outrage was instant and idiotic – even by the standards of Israel’s haters. Listening to howls of ‘war crime!’ from the usual quarters in the West, you could be forgiven for thinking IDF troops had stormed the Cabinet Office of some innocent, democratic government and put a bullet in the head of the assembled lawmakers. ‘Israel apparently can wipe out entire governments of Middle Eastern countries’, opined Mehdi Hasan. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks frothed that Israel has ‘just murdered [the] prime minister of Yemen and their entire cabinet’. It couldn’t be clearer, he said: Israel is a ‘terrorist state’. Journalist Abby Martin got tens of thousands of retweets when she said Israel can now ‘murder’ literal prime ministers with ‘zero consequences’. If Yemen had ‘killed Netanyahu’, she said – what a striking switch from the word ‘murder’ to the word ‘kill’ – then the ‘nukes would already be flying’.
The generous part of me wonders if naivety is the fuel of this infantile rage over Israel’s strike against the Houthis. The more realistic part knows something more sinister is at play. For to depict Houthi leaders as innocent victims of a mad, bloodlusting Jewish State is to be recklessly and unforgivably ignorant of the reality on the ground. For now, let’s leave to one side the fact that the Houthis, those pitiless stooges of the theocratic tyranny of Iran, are not widely accepted to be the legitimate government of Yemen. The UN and others say the true rulers of Yemen are the exiled government of former president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, which has been based in Riyadh since the Houthis took Sanaa in 2015, as part of the brutal civil war / Saudi-Iran proxy war that has left Yemen in ruins.
Even more pointed is the fact that the Houthis have been bombing Israel for two years. Since 7 October 2023, in solidarity with Hamas’s fascistic slaughter of the Jews of southern Israel, the Houthis have fired hundreds of projectiles at Israel. This has included scores of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Most of them have been intercepted by Israel’s missile-defence systems, but some snuck through, with deadly consequences: an Israeli civilian was killed and several others injured by a Houthi strike on Tel Aviv in July last year. So all those people weeping and hollering about Israel’s blast at the Houthis, what are they saying exactly? That anti-Semites should have the right to strike the Jewish State but the Jewish State has no right to strike back?
Ansar Allah – the official name of the Houthis group – is a profoundly racist and regressive movement. Its very flag dreams of Jew murder. ‘Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam’, it says. It has made good on its medieval loathing of the Jews by firing its Iranian-sponsored bombs into the heart of the Jewish nation. Maybe the people who are agog that Israel has had the temerity to take out the Houthi leadership didn’t get the memo: You can’t kill Jews with impunity anymore. You can’t just go around plotting the death of Jewish people. It’s not 1492. Or 1942, for that matter. Violent anti-Semitism, fascistic intrusions into the safety and sovereign rights of the Jewish people, has consequences now. Radical, I know!
Boil it down – really boil it down – and what the Houthis and their suicidal sympathisers in the West are saying is that the Jewish State should let itself be attacked. It should never respond to the menaces of its enemies. An avowedly Jew-hating militia is firing ballistic missiles at you? Big deal. Suck it up. They wouldn’t say this about any other nation. If anti-black racists were firing on the people of Botswana, they’d say that was bad. If a Japanophobic militia was launching assaults on Tokyo from inside China, they’d recognise the need for action. Only Israel is expected to put up with military onslaughts from its bigoted foes. Only Jews are implicitly instructed: ‘Don’t fight back – who the fuck do you think you are?’
Has Earth ever had such a gathering of pathetic cry-bullies as we now see in the anti-Israel movement? Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and then wailed ‘War crime!’ when those Jews fought back. Hezbollah rained missiles on northern Israel for two years, causing mass destruction, forced displacement and the deaths of Druze kids, and then cried ‘Barbarism!’ when Israel responded with the pagers operation to take out Hezbollah’s top dogs. The Houthis say ‘We hate the Jews and we want to kill them’ and then act all affronted when the Jews say ‘Nah, not today’. And Iran sponsors all this apocalyptic agitation against the Jewish State and then goes blubbing to the UN when the Jewish State takes out its leading military men.
What a toxic mix of Islamist intolerance and depthless self-pity. What a foul combination of violence and victimology, where even as you’re raping a Jew or bombing Jews from their homes you somehow manage to convince yourself that you’re the real victim. And every step of the way, this nauseating Islamo cry-bullying has been flattered and further inflamed by the Israelophobes of the West, who seem to think it’s ‘war’ when you kill Jews and a ‘war crime’ when Jews fight back. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but if you start a war, you should expect war. As a passionate believer in the sovereign rights of nations, and the right of Jews to live in peace in their homeland, I support Israel’s swift, strong strike against its vile tormentors in Ansar Allah.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The outrage was instant and idiotic – even by the standards of Israel’s haters. Listening to howls of ‘war crime!’ from the usual quarters in the West, you could be forgiven for thinking IDF troops had stormed the Cabinet Office of some innocent, democratic government and put a bullet in the head of the assembled lawmakers. ‘Israel apparently can wipe out entire governments of Middle Eastern countries’, opined Mehdi Hasan. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks frothed that Israel has ‘just murdered [the] prime minister of Yemen and their entire cabinet’. It couldn’t be clearer, he said: Israel is a ‘terrorist state’. Journalist Abby Martin got tens of thousands of retweets when she said Israel can now ‘murder’ literal prime ministers with ‘zero consequences’. If Yemen had ‘killed Netanyahu’, she said – what a striking switch from the word ‘murder’ to the word ‘kill’ – then the ‘nukes would already be flying’.
The generous part of me wonders if naivety is the fuel of this infantile rage over Israel’s strike against the Houthis. The more realistic part knows something more sinister is at play. For to depict Houthi leaders as innocent victims of a mad, bloodlusting Jewish State is to be recklessly and unforgivably ignorant of the reality on the ground. For now, let’s leave to one side the fact that the Houthis, those pitiless stooges of the theocratic tyranny of Iran, are not widely accepted to be the legitimate government of Yemen. The UN and others say the true rulers of Yemen are the exiled government of former president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, which has been based in Riyadh since the Houthis took Sanaa in 2015, as part of the brutal civil war / Saudi-Iran proxy war that has left Yemen in ruins.
Even more pointed is the fact that the Houthis have been bombing Israel for two years. Since 7 October 2023, in solidarity with Hamas’s fascistic slaughter of the Jews of southern Israel, the Houthis have fired hundreds of projectiles at Israel. This has included scores of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Most of them have been intercepted by Israel’s missile-defence systems, but some snuck through, with deadly consequences: an Israeli civilian was killed and several others injured by a Houthi strike on Tel Aviv in July last year. So all those people weeping and hollering about Israel’s blast at the Houthis, what are they saying exactly? That anti-Semites should have the right to strike the Jewish State but the Jewish State has no right to strike back?
Ansar Allah – the official name of the Houthis group – is a profoundly racist and regressive movement. Its very flag dreams of Jew murder. ‘Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam’, it says. It has made good on its medieval loathing of the Jews by firing its Iranian-sponsored bombs into the heart of the Jewish nation. Maybe the people who are agog that Israel has had the temerity to take out the Houthi leadership didn’t get the memo: You can’t kill Jews with impunity anymore. You can’t just go around plotting the death of Jewish people. It’s not 1492. Or 1942, for that matter. Violent anti-Semitism, fascistic intrusions into the safety and sovereign rights of the Jewish people, has consequences now. Radical, I know!
Boil it down – really boil it down – and what the Houthis and their suicidal sympathisers in the West are saying is that the Jewish State should let itself be attacked. It should never respond to the menaces of its enemies. An avowedly Jew-hating militia is firing ballistic missiles at you? Big deal. Suck it up. They wouldn’t say this about any other nation. If anti-black racists were firing on the people of Botswana, they’d say that was bad. If a Japanophobic militia was launching assaults on Tokyo from inside China, they’d recognise the need for action. Only Israel is expected to put up with military onslaughts from its bigoted foes. Only Jews are implicitly instructed: ‘Don’t fight back – who the fuck do you think you are?’
Has Earth ever had such a gathering of pathetic cry-bullies as we now see in the anti-Israel movement? Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and then wailed ‘War crime!’ when those Jews fought back. Hezbollah rained missiles on northern Israel for two years, causing mass destruction, forced displacement and the deaths of Druze kids, and then cried ‘Barbarism!’ when Israel responded with the pagers operation to take out Hezbollah’s top dogs. The Houthis say ‘We hate the Jews and we want to kill them’ and then act all affronted when the Jews say ‘Nah, not today’. And Iran sponsors all this apocalyptic agitation against the Jewish State and then goes blubbing to the UN when the Jewish State takes out its leading military men.
What a toxic mix of Islamist intolerance and depthless self-pity. What a foul combination of violence and victimology, where even as you’re raping a Jew or bombing Jews from their homes you somehow manage to convince yourself that you’re the real victim. And every step of the way, this nauseating Islamo cry-bullying has been flattered and further inflamed by the Israelophobes of the West, who seem to think it’s ‘war’ when you kill Jews and a ‘war crime’ when Jews fight back. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but if you start a war, you should expect war. As a passionate believer in the sovereign rights of nations, and the right of Jews to live in peace in their homeland, I support Israel’s swift, strong strike against its vile tormentors in Ansar Allah.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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