Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Hamas Attack on Israel Deals Blow to Saudi Prince’s Grand Vision

by

In a country where the government tightly controls social media posts and people have been arrested for being too outspoken about certain issues, many Saudis took to the internet to praise Hamas’s actions and denounce Israel.

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel — which has left at least 1,500 people dead on both sides — effectively rules out any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian authorities that would help achieve Saudi Arabia’s objectives. That means any normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is probably on hold for the foreseeable future.

Hamas’s attack “stalls Saudi Arabia’s stabilization and development plans” for the region, said Lina Khatib, director of SOAS University of London’s Middle East Institute.

That might actually be a lesser worry for MBS than how events have been playing out among the Saudi population.

In a country where the government tightly controls social media posts and people have been arrested for being too outspoken about certain issues, many Saudis took to the internet to praise Hamas’s actions and denounce Israel.

Othman Al-Khuwaiter, a Saudi energy sector expert and columnist based in the eastern Saudi city of Dhahran, reveled in what he characterized as the humiliation of Israelis.

“God willing, this will be seared in their memories forever,” Al-Khuwaiter wrote. “They are under siege just when they thought they were masters in full control.”

At the start of the attack over the weekend, Saad Al-Bazei, a professor of English at King Saud University in Riyadh, hailed “the unprecedented and glorious achievements of the Palestinian resistance deep within Israel.”

Social media accounts of individuals that normally post every utterance by MBS and praise his every move were quick to hit back.

‘Grand Project’

“This is an attack on Saudi Arabia’s grand project for the Middle East and we must be in solidarity with the state of Israel,” Badr Al-Saadoun, a Riyadh-based lawyer, wrote on social-media site X.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry called for an “immediate end to escalation by both sides” but added that “the exploding situation” was a result of Israel’s “occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights and the systematic provocations against their sanctities.”

The statement was widely shared by Saudis defending Hamas’s actions.

Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank that has been involved for years in efforts to forge Saudi-Israeli normalization, said the statement angered many of Israel’s allies in the U.S. and prompted calls to Saudi officials in Riyadh and Reema bint Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in the U.S.

A spokesperson for the embassy said he couldn’t immediately comment.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed massive retaliation for Hamas’s actions, it would be unthinkable for MBS to deliver an Israel normalization deal to his people during carnage in Palestinian territories, Dubowitz said.

“This is very much what” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “intended,” he said.

Israel-Saudi peace can end all hope for Palestinians

by

Netanyahu is unwilling and unable to give Saudis and Americans what they say they want – “Palestinian statehood” – but in reality, both are willing to settle for much less.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have quietly been making peace for the past several years.

It began with intelligence sharing in response to the Iranian threat and has expanded to commerce and trade.

Neither country appears in a big hurry to accelerate the process despite optimistic talk in Israel. One thing holding things back is what it means for the Palestinians and the Americans.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says normalization would “effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, says not until the Palestinians get their own state with east Jerusalem as the capital.

At least that’s what he says. To which Bibi emphatically says, “No, never.”

Many in Israel and elsewhere are confident that the Saudis aren’t really serious about Palestinian statehood and are unwilling to sacrifice their own interests for it.

Like so many of the other moderate Arab leaders who are making peace with Israel, they’ve grown weary of the Palestinians and their inflexible, maximalist demands.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told a Saudi newspaper, “The Palestinian issue will not be an obstacle to peace with Saudi Arabia,” reported i24News. What would the Palestinians get? His government will offer to “improve the Palestinian economy.”

PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in separate photographs: Israeli-Saudi peace is a good thing only when it also includes Israeli-Palestinian peace, says the writer. (credit: Sputnik/Kremlin/Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in separate photographs: Israeli-Saudi peace is a good thing only when it also includes Israeli-Palestinian peace, says the writer. (credit: Sputnik/Kremlin/Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

Israel won’t give the Saudis, US Palestinian statehood, but no one will push

Netanyahu is unwilling and unable to give Saudis and Americans what they say they want – Palestinian statehood – but in reality, both are willing to settle for much less (no one is seriously consulting the Palestinians).

The prime minister can expect to pay a much lower price for normalization, including – probably – a promise not to annex the West Bank (easy, since he already made that deal with the United Arab Emirates), some limitation on settlements, greater economic assistance and mobility for the Palestinians, and some semblance of peace talks.

Both Netanyahu and MBS also have an American problem.

They need the United States to broker the deal – and pay for it – but they don’t want President Joe Biden to get the credit because they feel he has dissed them.

Neither can get a White House invitation, though Biden did say he’d see Netanyahu in the US later this year but avoided saying where.

Biden has made Israeli-Saudi normalization a high foreign-policy priority for both political and policy reasons.

He’d like to have the bragging rights for 2024, especially among friends of Israel who think he’s been too tough (he hasn’t) on Netanyahu, especially his attempts to end the country’s independent judiciary.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and other top officials have been repeatedly meeting with Israeli, Saudi, Palestinian and other regional officials in an effort to broker a deal.

Biden’s top priority is reversing the kingdom’s growing coziness with China, Russia and Iran, all anxious to fill the big power vacuum left by America’s pivot to Asia.

The Saudis know this and are asking a high price, which Bibi will gladly let Uncle Sugar pay.

It’s an old custom. When Netanyahu made peace with the UAE, he reportedly promised to help them get F-35s and other American benefits.

I personally witnessed a top Foreign Ministry official ask the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to help get Washington to deliver on a promise that Israeli diplomats had made to an African dictator.

And US taxpayers have spent billions underwriting Egypt’s peace with Israel.

No price is too high when spending other people’s money, namely American dollars.

THE SAUDIS are demanding a NATO-type security treaty, complete with Article V mutual-defense guarantees.

That’s what it got when Saddam Hussein was at the doorstep in 1990 but now they want it in writing.

Plus, they want access to the same kind of weapons and technology Israel gets.

That kind of deal is important to the Saudis because they know something too many Americans ignore: oil wells are not bottomless.

And they want the US to build a civilian nuclear-energy program. And Biden doesn’t want them turning to Russia or China for that help.

The oil-gorged kingdom also has abundant uranium.

They will want to enrich it themselves, something Washington currently objects to.

Any deal must require close US monitoring to make certain enrichment is kept far below weapons grade.

The Biden administration and many on both sides of the aisle in Congress have a high level of distrust toward MBS and hold him responsible for the savage murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

They also recall Saudi vows that if Iran gets the bomb they’ll want one, too.

Specifically, a defense treaty would require two-thirds Senate approval, which is highly unlikely given widespread views of the homicidal prince and the kingdom for their abysmal human-rights record, for their unreliability and for keeping gas prices high at the pumps.

Netanyahu, with his diminished standing, would not be an effective lobbyist for the Saudi cause.

Both Netanyahu and MBS are said to be concerned that if the next president is a Republican, that person might be averse to delivering on Biden’s commitments.

There’s also a Saudi succession issue. MBS is the de facto ruler because his ailing father, King Salman, 87, reportedly has Alzheimer’s and succession could be tumultuous since the ruthless heir has made many enemies in his brutal climb to the top.

The Palestinians are the big losers. Few believe MBS is sincere about demanding recognition of Palestinian statehood any more than the signers of the Abraham Accords were.

When Bibi was asked by Bloomberg News what was being said about the Palestinians in his discussions with the Saudis and other Arab leaders, he replied, “A lot less than you think.”

The Palestinian Authority is weak, corrupt and ineffective.

Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas is 87, in poor health, in the 18th year of a four-year term and refusing to pick a successor.

His maximalist demands on Israel have led many to believe he is more interested in victimhood than statehood.

There is a price for being left out. Once the Saudis make peace with Israel, Palestinians will have lost their remaining leverage.

Anger and frustration will only grow as they feel ignored and neglected by both Israel and their Arab brethren.

Israelis will be the most convenient targets and the result could be greater violence.

An unintended consequence would be to validate the extremists on both sides of the conflict, Hamas and Iranian proxy terrorists, and hardliners in the Netanyahu government who will press to stiffen their repression and opposition to any concessions to improve quality of life in the West Bank.

Don’t expect to see an Israeli flag flying over an embassy in Riyadh any time soon, but the intelligence and security cooperation will continue to grow and there will be more and more Israeli and Saudi businesspeople traveling between the two countries, and then the ultimate sign of acceptance – tourists.

Peace with Saudi Arabia may end the Arab-Israeli conflict, as Netanyahu has said, and if he has his way it will also end hopes for Palestinian statehood.

Saudi Arabia does not care about Palestine or Jerusalem; it cares about Israel

by

Saudi Arabia is no friend of the Palestinians, despite recent claims by Riyadh’s foreign minister that an independent state of Palestine is essential for normalization to take place. Riyadh has been against the legitimate Palestinian resistance for more than two decades.

I’m going to add a few more things. #1. A 2 state solution is impossible anyway. Israel is literally in the way. It’s simply a lie. #2. The Palestinians do NOT owe half of their country to the foreign Zionists. They own NOTHING, not one square inch of Palestine. #3. The Arab world does not consider the Saudis their Islamic leader. Wahhabism belongs to the Saudis alone. The former Israelis can stay in Palestine as Palestine citizens. No more Israeli rulers.

September 21, 2023

The normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israeli is in the news again, in what has become a will they-won’t they situation.

Israel is eager to have formal ties with Saudi Arabia as it is the richest Arab country in the Middle East and has the weight and influence that makes it the main player in regional politics.

Saudi Arabia already has relations with Israel, of course, and Israeli companies operate in the Kingdom, including those responsible for security during the Hajj period in Makkah.

However, it is keen to have formal relations with the apartheid state in order to get US arms supplies and have its own uranium enrichment facility.

For the US, having a formal and smooth relationship between its two major allies in the Middle East will be good for its own foreign policy.

Washington’s interests in the region will be protected and it will be able to implement its policies with relative ease.

The losers in all of this are the Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia is no friend of the Palestinians, despite recent claims by Riyadh’s foreign minister that an independent state of Palestine is essential for normalization to take place.

Riyadh has been against the legitimate Palestinian resistance for more than two decades.

Moreover, it has imposed severe restrictions on charities operating in the occupied Palestinian territories and the transfer of donations from Saudi citizens for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Anyone showing any kind of support for the Palestinian cause can expect to be imprisoned or worse

During the 17-year-old crippling Israeli siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, Saudi Arabia has basically abandoned the Palestinians living there.

Saudi Imams are banned from praying for the Palestinians or mentioning them in their supplications in mosques across the Kingdom, especially in Makkah and Madinah.

Anyone showing any kind of support for the Palestinian cause can expect to be imprisoned or worse.

I have heard Muslim pilgrims complaining of being suppressed by security officers in the Grand Mosque in Makkah when they prayed for the Palestinians, Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Appeals to the Almighty to rid Palestine and Al-Aqsa of the Zionists are simply not allowed by the Saudi regime.

With the normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Palestinians will lose a fair-weather “friend” who used to be shy about dealing with the Israelis.

This shyness pushed Riyadh to throw some crumbs to the Palestinians out of shame and embarrassment.

Now it is all out in the open; Saud Arabia even has someone in Riyadh declaring that he is the “chief rabbi” of the Kingdom.

The PA… exists solely to protect Israel and the Israeli occupation

What about Saudi support for the Palestinian Authority, you may ask?

The PA is not working for the Palestinians; it exists solely to protect Israel and the Israeli occupation.

PA security officers are never there to protect Palestinians when they are attacked and abused by illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinians engaged in legitimate — under international law — resistance against the occupation are tracked down, tortured and imprisoned by the PA.

When the Israeli occupation forces killed five Palestinians the night before last in Jenin, the PA was busy detaining Palestinians in Nablus and other West Bank cities.

OPINION: How the PA contributes to Palestine’s obliteration

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal Bin Farhan told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June that the regional normalization push with Israel has “limited benefits” without Palestinians being given a state of their own.

“We believe that normalization is in the interest of the region, that it would bring significant benefits to all,” he said.

As long as Saudi Arabia believes that benefits come from the Zionist entity killing your Palestinian brothers, occupying their land, demolishing their homes and desecrating religious sites, then you clearly do not care about them.

“Without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people, without addressing that challenge, any normalization will have limited benefits,” added the minister.

What peace does Saudi Arabia want?

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative proposed by the Saudi regime called for two states in Palestine, one for Jews in the lands occupied in 1948 and the other for the Palestinians in the land occupied in 1967, in return for normalized relations.

The Saudis were thus willing to abandon more than two-thirds of historic Palestine and essentially condone the ethnic cleansing of the land from pre-1948 to today; the Nakba is ongoing.

Have the Saudis not yet understood that Israel has never, ever, made any concessions on territorial or other issues?

And that Zionism demands the creation of Greater Israel?

The usurper state is expanding constantly, which is why Israel has never declared where its borders are.

They will be wherever Israel can push them to be.

All of this has happened even while the so-called “peace process” was going on; even as “normalization” and the “Abraham Accords” have been signed.

The Saudi foreign minister has repeatedly mentioned Saudi conditions for normalization, including the creation of a Palestinian state in the land occupied by Israel since 1967 alongside a Jewish state.

“There is no way to resolve the conflict other than by ensuring the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” he said as recently as Monday.

Israeli Channel 12 TV has reported senior Saudi officials as saying that the Kingdom will not sign a “free” normalization deal as the UAE and Bahrain did.

This is all a smokescreen.

I am certain that the Saudis do not care about the Palestinians.

This is evident from the way that the regime keeps praising the Israelis and demonizing the Palestinians, to the extent that speaking about supporting the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation has become a crime, while showing support for the Israeli occupation has become the norm.

Saudi media host Israelis, but not Palestinians who are against the Israeli occupation.

On Wednesday, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman told Fox News that, “every day we get closer” to normalizing ties with Israel.

“We don’t look at Israel as an enemy, we look to them as a potential ally with many interests that we can pursue together,” the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia told The Atlantic last year.

An announcement about a normalization deal with Israel that disregards legitimate Palestinian rights is just a matter of time.

I expect it to be made very soon, because the Kingdom does not care about Palestine or Jerusalem; it cares about Israel.

MBS Does Not Care About the Palestinians

by

The Saudi diplomatic gesture toward the Palestinians appears to have been the result of the Biden administration’s insistence. MBS further said that Palestine is not an issue of priority for Saudia Arabia.

Although it remains uncertain whether the Saudi step was coordinated with the Biden administration, the Benjamin Netanyahu government, or the Palestinian Authority, Riyadh has clearly opted to take a risky and quite ambitious diplomatic path considering the potential fallout at home and abroad.

The kingdom was likely hoping that the element of surprise would bring about certain political advantages in its fitful negotiations with the United States—the principal target of its serious conditions and demands to accept the grand bargain of normalization with Israel.

After all, the Saudi diplomatic gesture toward the Palestinians appears to have been, according to well-informed sources in Washington, the result of the Biden administration’s insistence more than any Saudi political factor, whether domestic, regional, or international in nature.

Saudi Arabia cannot simply normalize relations with Israel without offering a fig leaf like elevating its relations with the State of Palestine to the ambassadorial level.****

“In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given.

It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining”

Muhammad bin Salman

Saudia crown Prince further said that they had other important issues to deal with.

Especially to curb Iranian influence on the Middle East.

Saudi’s always try to maintain peace in the middle east, during the 1967 Arab-Israel war, Saudia super headed a proposal called The Arab Peace Initiative, which resulted for the end of Arab-Israel conflict.

Saudi Arabia and BRICS

by

No one serious considers the Saudi monarchy to be a model of anything positive.

Although Ibn Abdul-Wahhab is considered to be the father of Wahhabism, it was actually the British who initially impregnated him with the ideas of Wahhabism and made him its leader for their own sinister purposes to destroy Islam and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The intricate details of this intriguing British conspiracy, are to be found in the memoirs of its master spy, titled “Confessions of a British Spy”.

By Ben Norton

How do you explain the potential inclusion of Saudi Arabia in the BRICS and the Global South-led drive toward de-dollarization?

Isn’t that bad?

No one serious considers the Saudi monarchy to be a model of anything positive.

But if there is ever going to be systemic change in the Gulf (which I think is inevitable at some point), it is much more likely to come about through integration with the Global South, not the imperial core.

It was the British and US empires that created the Saudi regime in the first place, protected it, and prevented any systemic change for the past century.

Moreover, it has arguably been the United States that has historically pressured and/or forced the Saudi regime to implement its most reactionary foreign policies, such as Riyadh’s support for Salafi-jihadist contras (in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc.), or its collaboration with Israeli colonialism, bombing of Yemen, sectarian anti-Shia propaganda campaign, and war drive against Iran.

If Saudi Arabia maintains a more independent, non-aligned foreign policy, that helps strengthen the resurgent Non-Aligned Movement, and is certainly good for West Asia.

That doesn’t make the reactionary monarchy desirable in any way — or directly help the largely South Asian migrant workers who keep the country running through brutal slave-like exploitation — but it does mean the possibility for potential peace in the region after decades of US-led neocolonial wars, a weakening of the US-led campaign to normalize Israeli colonialism, and a likely end to the wars on Yemen and Iran.

The fact of the matter is simply that, as one of the world’s leading oil producers, and the de facto leader of OPEC, Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in the Global South-led drive toward de-dollarization is very important.

The petrodollar is absolutely fundamental in undergirding the US-led imperial system of economic domination, which is built around the dollar as the global reserve currency.

An end to Saudi petrodollar backing, even if only partially, would be a major blow to US economic hegemony.

If that imperial system does eventually collapse, whether or not the Saudi regime (or the UAE, Qatar, or any other Gulf monarchy) survives is up in the air as well — given how crucial US military support has been historically for protecting the Gulf monarchies.

But as long as the US empire was propping up the Saudi regime, it was not going anywhere.

Blinken’s normalisation delusion

by

Iran-Gulf rapprochement is shattering US and Israeli dreams

Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers announced that starting in May they will cut production by more than 1 million barrels a day. The cuts will continue until the end of the year.

Anyone hearing the statements being made these days by US officials — especially Secretary of State Anthony Blinken — about Washington’s stepped-up efforts to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be excused for thinking they inhabit a different planet.

They seem completely oblivious to the radical changes sweeping the region, especially the accelerating momentum towards ending US political and military influence in the Middle East and especially the Gulf.

Addressing Zionist lobbyists in Washington on Monday, Blinken declared the US “has a real national security interest in promoting normalisation” between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 “We believe that we can – and indeed we must – play an integral role in advancing it,” he said, adding ” we remain committed to working toward that outcome, — including during his current visit to Riyadh.

This was part of a speech in which Blinken reiterated the US’ unstinting support for Israel and warned that “all options are on the table” to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The most eloquent rejoinder to these optimistic delusions came in the form of four developments in the past few days that will have shocked and horrified the US and Israel, and Blinken personally.

— The announcement by Iranian navy commander Admiral Shahram Irani that his country and four Gulf states -(Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar) plan to form a naval alliance that will also include Pakistan and India. (Oman signed a naval treaty with Iran years ago).

— Tuesday’s reopening of the Iranian embassy in Riyadh at a ceremony attended by senior officials from both sides including Ambassador Alireza Enayati, a high-ranking diplomat whose appointment reflects the extent of the bilateral interests involved.

— Confirmation that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin-Farhan will visit Iran in the next few days to discuss strengthening trade and security ties and formally invite President Ebrahim Raisi to Riyadh.

— The signing by Saudi Arabia and Russia’s energy ministers of an agreement to bolster their ‘OPEC+’ deal by cutting oil production in order to maintain fair prices.

The move led to an immediate rise in oil prices and belied Western press reports about oil-related disagreements between Riyadh and Moscow.

These developments, which were not out-of-the-blue or unexpected, are obviously bad news for the US.

The planned naval alliance, in particular, makes redundant all US and European claims about protecting the Gulf states from an Iranian threat, or any justification for maintaining a massive naval presence in the region and large military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait.

Henceforth, the countries of the region will rely on their own navies and militaries to safeguard the security of their territory and waters.

They no longer need to be subjected to US extortion.

 

The Iranian ‘bogeyman’ has become an ally, the Sunni-Shia sectarian rift which the US exploited for decades is being healed, a historic reconciliation has been achieved, and a strong new partnership is being built on a solid basis.

I confess I did not expect the Saudi/Gulf reconciliation with Iran to develop so rapidly.

It shatters Netanyahu’s dream of turning the so-called Abraham Accords into an Israeli-led military and security alliance, and the Gulf region into a massive market for Israeli arms, especially the Iron Dome and David’s Sling systems — whose failings were exposed by the resurgence of Palestinian resistance, along with the myth of Israeli ‘exceptionalism’ in security expertise.

Now there is to be a naval security alliance between Iran and its Gulf neighbours.

Next, we could have an industrial and military-industrial partnership involving the exchange of expertise and technology, including in the nuclear field.

After that, joining forces in a single front to confront and terminate Western hegemony over the region and the common enemy Israel.

Blinken would be well advised not to go too far in committing to normalisation between Saudi Arabia and the occupier state.

He would do better to try to preserve his own country’s normalisation, presence, and alliances in the region, at a time when most states of the Middle East — including Saudi Arabia and the UAE — are flocking towards the BRICS grouping, the Shanghai treaty, and the new world order led by China and Russia.

But the US’ overbearing arrogance ensures he will neither listen to nor act on that advice.

Normalization ‘smacks of desperation’ as US and Israel court emboldened MBS

by

2 June 2023

“In order for this Israeli government to survive, they need to keep alive the narrative that normalisation with Saudi Arabia is incredibly imminent,” he said. “When in fact, it isn’t.”

US and Israeli officials are putting a chill on reports that Saudi Arabia and Israel are inching closer to establishing official relations, underlining how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has time on his side to normalise ties.

A senior US official told lawmakers on Wednesday there had been “a lot of hyperventilation in the press, a lot of excitable rumint” that a breakthrough between Saudi Arabia and Israel was near.

“Especially in the Israeli press,” assistant secretary of state Barbara Leaf told a Senate hearing.

“They’re just electric with the idea that Saudi Arabia might take that step.”

The day before, Israel’s national security advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi, suggested there was daylight between the Biden administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which he said was “in a fog” on normalization talks between Washington and Riyadh.

The comments follow a deluge of reports – primarily within the Israeli press – providing near-daily updates on the Biden administration’s back and forth with Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

Hopes for an agreement rose in early May when top Biden advisor Jake Sullivan declared that Saudi-Israel normalization was in the US national security interest.

A report by Axios that the White House aimed to seal a deal within 6-7 months, before the next US elections, added to the frenzy.   

“The rhetoric has definitely moved,” Yoel Guzansky, a Gulf expert at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, told Middle East Eye.

 “That was the first time the Biden administration put normalization out there so publicly as a priority, but when you move past the rhetoric, not all that much has changed from a year ago.” 

On Friday, the State Department announced that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will travel to Saudi Arabia next week for talks on strategic cooperation expected to include normalisation.

A senior US official said the admininstration would continue to push for a deal while also pursuing progress “short of formal diplomatic normalization.” 

Keeping narrative alive

Aziz Alghashian, based in Riyadh and a fellow at Sepad with a research focus on Israel-Saudi ties, told MEE that the drip-drip of media leaks had reached an “annoying crescendo” and “smacked of desperation by Israel to appear closer to Saudi Arabia”. 

“In order for this Israeli government to survive, they need to keep alive the narrative that normalisation with Saudi Arabia is incredibly imminent,” he said. “When in fact, it isn’t.”

To be sure, Saudi Arabia and Israel are closer now than at any time in history.

Saudi Arabia was not a party to the 2020 Abraham Accords that saw the UAE, Morocco and Bahrain normalise ties, but it has been impacted.

The two cooperate quietly on security and intelligence to combat Iran.

The US move to put Israel in Centcom – US military command for the Middle East – expanded those defence links.

Last year, Saudi Arabia and Oman publicly joined Israel in US-led naval exercises for the first time.

‘If Saudi did this deal with a Republican president, it would cement the idea they are a partisan player’

– Prem Kumar, Albright Stonebridge Group

This month, Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen spoke on the phone twice to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman within one day as part of negotiations to allow direct commercial flights to the kingdom for Muslims from Israel making the Hajj pilgrimage. 

“There is no doubt that we are closer than ever to a deal, given the fact that ‘ever’ was almost zero a few years ago,” Aaron David Miller, former State Department advisor, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told MEE.

Contradicting Biden, Saudis deny opening of airspace is step toward ties with Israel | The Times of Israel

For its part, the Biden administration is looking to patch up ties with Riyadh that are under strain over human rights and oil production.

The kingdom’s decision in March to reestablish ties with Iran in a deal brokered by China signaled Saudi’s drift from Washington.

“The administration feels it over-course corrected,” Miller said.

“Now, there is no more talk of Riyadh as a pariah and they are looking for a way to strengthen the relationship.”

A normalization deal would showcase US diplomatic heft in the region when allies complain of waning interest.

It would also be a triumph for Netanyahu, who returned to office last year with a pledge to expand the Abraham Accords but has had to pivot to domestic challenges after backlash to his contentious judicial overhaul. 

“Biden wants it more than ever. Bibi wants it more than ever.

But Mohammed bin Salman can wait,” Alghashian told MEE.

Unlike the 2020 Abraham Accords, where talks between Arab states and Israel were conducted in secret, Saudi Arabia’s opening demands were leaked for the world to see.

In exchange for normalizing ties, it wants security guarantees from the US, help in developing a civilian nuclear program and fewer restrictions on arms sales.  

“The obstacle boils down to whether the Saudi demands can be met,” Miller said.

“And the price they want is very high.”

The elephant in the room is Saudi Arabia’s position on Palestine. 

In January, Saudi’s top diplomat said that the kingdom will not normalise ties until an independent Palestinian state is created, and the Saudis have not publicly indicated a change to that position.

Guzansky said Saudi demands for an independent state are likely a negotiating position, but “Riyadh’s wishlist to normalize definitely includes something in the Palestinian arena, it’s below the threshold of state, but it must be addressed and it’s not clear this [Israeli] government can do that.”

Building consensus

Saudi’s demands  require major lobbying in Congress on behalf of the Biden administration, at a time when members of the president’s own party want to curtail the relationship over human rights concerns.

Many lawmakers have also expressed unease with its nuclear ambitions.

On Wednesday, US Senator Chris Murphy elicited a public pledge from Leaf, the State Department’s top Middle East official, that the administration would not make security guarantees to Saudi Arabia without first seeking congressional approval.

Current and former US officials tell MEE that if the Biden administration wanted, it could override congressional opposition to arms sales with a presidential veto, but there is little appetite to do so given the delicate state of US-Saudi ties and the upcoming presidential election. 

‘MBS feels he is in a very strong position and doesn’t have to give in to anyone’

– Abdullah Baabood, Carnegie Middle East Center 

“The Biden administration does not want to go to war with members of the Democratic Party for this deal,” Miller told MEE. 

But building consensus in Congress is more difficult now that US-Israel ties have hit a rough patch.

Netanyahu leads a government made up of once-fringe, far-right lawmakers and his judicial overhaul has become a lightning rod issue within the Democratic Party.

The Israeli leader has yet to be invited to the White House. 

 

Israel itself has been vague on how it would respond to the Saudi nuclear program.

Hanegbi, the Israeli national security advisor, said the file would have to pass through US counter-proliferation regulations first, but a final deal wouldn’t be clinched without consulting Israel, where a debate is raging on how to address Riyadh’s nuclear ambitions.

“If the price for peace is giving Saudi Arabia enrichment capabilities, I think it’s too high,” Guzansky told MEE.

“Who knows what MBS would do in five years or even next year with that card.”

The US requires countries looking to cooperate on nuclear technology to sign a 123 agreement, which bans them from enriching and selling uranium – a Saudi goal.

‘MBS wants something outstanding’

Iran-Saudi Pact Is Brokered by China, Leaving U.S. on Sidelines – The New York Times

The administration has tried to trim Riyadh’s sails by emphasizing the political benefits of an agreement.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham even told the Saudis that normalization during Biden’s term could help them build goodwill in Washington.

“That’s an argument the Saudis have internalized,” Prem Kumar, a former advisor to President Obama on the Middle East who is now at the global advisory firm, Albright Stonebridge Group, told MEE.

“They realize that if they did this deal with a Republican president, it would just cement the idea that Saudi Arabia is a partisan player in Washington,” he added. 

Abdullah Baabood, a nonresident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, believes that card is overplayed in the DC establishment.

‘Biden wants it more than ever. Bibi wants it more than ever.

But Mohammed bin Salman can wait’

– Aziz Alghashian, foreign policy expert

“We saw what the Saudis did to Biden when he visited,” he said, referring to Biden’s July 2022 trip to the kingdom.

“If Saudi wanted to get closer to the Democrats, they could have responded to the visit a lot more positively.

But they didn’t care.”

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pursuing a foreign policy that is more independent from Washington. 

China Brokered Truce Between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Could Ukraine and Russia Be Next? | Time

He is riding a boom in oil prices that have buoyed state coffers and put the kingdom back at the centre of global energy security concerns.

“MBS feels he is in a very strong position and doesn’t have to give in to anyone,” Baabood said.

“MBS wants something outstanding to normalize.”

Costly military interventions in hotspots like Yemen that defined the crown prince’s early rule have given way to efforts to position Riyadh as a mediator.

Besides restoring ties with Iran, he welcomed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back to the Arab fold and hosted a Hamas delegation alongside representatives of the Palestinian Authority.

Israel and the US label Hamas a terrorist group.

But Kumar believes normalizing ties with Israel fits with the foreign policy pivot. 

“It would potentially demonstrate that Saudi Arabia can have a strong relationship with both Iran and Israel,” he told MEE.

“No other Arab country would be able to claim that mantle.”

Netanyahu’s far-right government and tensions in the occupied West Bank, especially at the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in East Jerusalem, also muddy the equation with Saudi Arabia. 

“I think it’s an extremely risky move for Saudi Arabia as it tries to act as a leader of the Arab world. It would undermine their reputation,” Baabood said.

“Right now Saudi Arabia enjoys the benefits of security cooperation with Israel, without having to defend those ties publicly.”

The Zionist ‘Uyghur’ Trap for China

by

After a series of secret meetings between Saudi and Israeli officials were exposed by a select few of mainstream press outlets, both the Saudis and the Israelis are now becoming more open about the relationship between the two governments. Although, for years, GCC countries like Saudi Arabia have held a public position of hostility toward Israel, many researchers and observers have long been aware of secret cooperation between the two and that public statements were largely designed to provide a cover of Arab identity and self-interest for the benefit of public consumption.

As valid as it seems that China may be cracking down on moslem Uyghurs, China is actually responding to a long standing secret build up of Islamic radicalism used by UK/US/Israel and funded by Saudi Arabia to destabilize China, and the Caucuses.

Throughout past two decades Islamic schools have been funded and built in order to rouse independent movements among the Chinese Uyghurs and use them as shock troops against Chinese government.

Islamic radicalism is being propelled by zionists for two main purposes:

1. As patsy destabilization tools to derail economic rivals; and

2. As a propaganda war of Israel against moslem states.

I recommend books by Chalmers Johnson (Blowback),

Robert Dreyfus (Devil’s Game) and

Mark Curtis (Secret Affairs) for more insight on western creation of Islamic Radicalism.

Zionists are running a terror INDUSTRY.

They use  subverted Islamic teachings and historical revisionism to recruit and train proxy forces to destabilize and destroy both Islamic and Economic rivals. 

This Islamic radicalization Operation has a long precedence in Middle East when two centuries ago British created Wahhabism and then The Moslem Brotherhood for same purposes.

Infamous Zionist and pseudo Middle East “scholar” Bernard Lewis provided the British foreign office the Balkanization plan of Middle East by conjuring up violent uprisings via deliberate promotion of sectarian and Islamic fundamentalism.

Thanks to Zionism the Muslims are spread all over the earth. Sharia Law is only something personal now. Lewis has always been a liar and fear monger.

All three western intel agencies (Mi6, CIA and Mossad) have independently produced volumes of Islamic radical teachings in parallel with Saudi Wahhabism and have set up hundreds of Madrases in Middle East, North and North Eastern Caucuses into China, Africa, and Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Thailand…

US foreign policy advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were strong followers of the Bernard Lewis plan which Kissinger used in 1975 in Lebanon and Brzezinski used to defeat Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Bernard Lewis plan was “Lebanonization “, as in the manufacture “civil war” Kissinger unleashed in Lebanon in 1975.

The war pitted Lebanon’s Catholic, Palestinian, Shiite Moslem, Sunni Moslem, Druze, and Greek Orthodox populations against each other- with a steady supply of arms to all sides.

Lewis pushed for  “Islamic fundamentalism.”

“That British-run variant which he favors is opposed to modern science and technology and in opposition to tenets of Islam banning usury, AND is loyally committed to paying IMF debt.

Lewis sees fundamentalism as a battering­ ram against the nation-state.”

He writes,”Islamic fundamentalism is the most attractive alternative to those who feel there has to be something better, truer and more hopeful than inept rulers and  bankrupt ideologies foisted on from outside.”

He notes that British subversive movements acting under such a cover enjoy a practical advantage in Middle East.

“Dictators can forbid parties, they can forbid meetings­, they cannot forbid public worship, and they can, to only a limited extent, control sermons.”

As such they represent a “network outside the control of the state . . .the more oppres­sive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamental­ists by eliminating competing oppositions.” 

It goes without saying that the Zionist plan provided both the radicalization from the bottom AND the dictatorship propaganda against their rivals. 

When you hold the megaphone and the mercenaries, nation after nation will succumb to the Zionist trap of Islamic radicalization.

This process continues today via ISIS and sectarian mercenaries like some Kurdish minorities, and in case of Uyghurs in an attempt to Balkanize and defeat China as an emerging super power.

Saudi crown prince backed Israel plan to overthrow Jordan king

by

It’s not enough the fake Muslim Saudis are guardians of the Kaba…go there and see their evil faces plastered on the walls all over the place. Now they want Jerusalem holy sites.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is said to have supported an Israeli plot to overthrow the Jordanian King Abdullah II in exchange for guardianship of the holy sites in the occupied city of Jerusalem, Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper reported.

The paper quoted a Jordanian security official as saying that the attempt to overthrow King Abdullah II was a “scheme” involving Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

According to the unnamed official, “the large and complicated” coup involved many parties, but the king succeeded in thwarting it calmly while preserving the internal and regional balances.

READ: Events in Jordan were planned by Trump, one of region’s countries, says Ex-Qatar PM

“The king’s vigilance and the rapid movement of the military and security forces have thwarted the coup’s attempt to remove him and replace him with his brother Prince Hamzah Bin Al-Hussein,” the source said.

Israel, the source continued, planned to overthrow King Abdullah II due to Jordan’s opposition to the US’ peace deal for the Middle East dubbed the ‘deal of the century’, which Amman viewed as a plan to “find an alternative homeland for the Palestinians and annex the Jordan Valley to Israel”.

The paper added that the Saudi crown prince agreed to support Israel’s scheme in return for the transfer of the guardianship over the holy sites in occupied Jerusalem from Jordan to Saudi Arabia.

With US approval, it continued, Bin Salman authorised the former chief of the royal court, Basem Awadallah, to make the necessary preparations for the transfer of power at the family level, while ousted Fatah chief Muhammad Dahlan was assigned with mobilising Palestinians in Jordan and local tribes.

According to the report, Saudi Arabia armed some southern tribes, issuing them citizenship in return for carrying out military actions if necessary.

READ: Saudi backs Jordan on arrest of former head of Royal Court

Mecca belongs to all Muslims, and Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be allowed to run it

Petroleum and the pilgrimage. The two combined give Saudi Arabia the chance to punch well above its weight, affording one of the world’s most regressive regimes the chance to exercise an outrageous influence on Islam. It’s time to think of alternative arrangements.

It might seem obvious to you why Saudi Arabia is bad for Islam.

Because the House of Saud controls Mecca, the direction of Muslim prayer and location of the hajj pilgrimage, and Medina, where the Prophet Mohammed built the first Muslim society, died and is buried, the Kingdom is linked to Islam.

And vice versa. Though there is only one Muslim-majority country in the world where women can’t drive, because it is the country that rules over Islam’s holy land, it is assumed that Islam does not want women to drive.

Because it is one of the few Muslim-majority countries that suffers an absolute monarchy, it is presumed Islam prefers unaccountable government too.

In so many ways, Saudi Arabia stains the reputation of Islam. But Saudi Arabia has another kind of influence on Islam.

Every year, millions of pilgrims descend on Mecca to circumambulate the Ka’ba, the cubical shrine we believe was built by Abraham to honor God, and restored by Mohammed to His worship.

Many are from poor countries, and are visibly bedazzled by Saudi conspicuous consumption, the magnificence of the wealth on display, the awesomeness and indescribable hugeness of the great mosques that have been constructed to accommodate their numbers.

God has given the Saudis money beyond measure, and power over His holy land; this must mean God approves of their Islam.

I know how many feel. God has given the Saudis money beyond measure, and power over His holy land; this must mean God approves of their Islam.

And what an Islam it is. The official Saudi interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, was born in violent revolt not only against Shi’a Islam, and the strong traditions of spirituality embedded in Shi’a and Sunni Islam, but even against the Sunni Ottoman caliph.

Far from being the world’s leading Sunni power, Saudi Arabia has usurped the mantle of Sunni Islam, helped in its power projection by its small population, great wealth, and the collapse of its erstwhile rivals.

(The Ottomans, after all, are long gone.) Saudi Arabia uses oil money to push its Wahhabism onto the Muslim world, and to change Mecca and Medina too.

In recent decades, the Saudis have rebuilt much of Mecca and Medina. Some of this has been necessary.

Some of this has been very good. But some of it has come at a great cost to Islam’s dearest relics, monuments and oldest mosques, which have been bulldozed without the least concern.

In recent decades, the Saudis have rebuilt much of Mecca and Medina. Some of this has been necessary. Some of it has come at a great cost.

To be fair, some of the criticism levelled at Saudi Arabia for these urban transformations is unreasonable.

Think about it this way: Thanks to modern technology, and rising standards of living, millions of people not only want to go to Mecca, but can afford to.

It’s no longer a journey of months, but of days, even hours.

They speak different languages, represent different customs, and all want to not only worship in the same mosque, but get to the Ka’ba at the center of it.

While it is nice to imagine Mecca and Medina could retain the features and architecture of old cities, it is also fanciful.

When you are dealing with traffic flow in the hundreds of thousands, slippery stones and narrow alleys aren’t just problematic.

They can be deadly.

Too, skyscrapers might ruin the alleged vibe of an ancient city, but as every modern urbanist knows, building up is often the only realistic option.

So it’s not surprising, or terrible, that Saudi Arabia has built the world’s third-tallest skyscraper right outside the Great Mosque of Mecca.

But the bigger question is: Why is it the first-ugliest building in the world? In an age of cell phones and, God help us, a religion that features a regular call to prayer, what is the purpose of attaching a gaudy clock to the top?

The biggest question: These high towers are part of the progressive income stratification of a city dedicated to a leveling religion.

We’re all equal on the pilgrimage, wearing the same robes, praying side-by-side, but then when we get to our hotels, the stratification resumes.

There’s far too much money in Mecca, squeezing out the average pilgrim, and even worse, this money has been introduced even while sacred history is wiped away

So while, yes, the needs of modern religious life might mean old mosques, shrines and historical sites are in the way, that doesn’t demand destroying them.

Flush with ample funds, the Saudis could have easily rebuilt Islam’s sacred heritage elsewhere.

They haven’t even tried. They appear to be going to war with Islamic history, probably so that nothing is left that might challenge the idea that Wahhabism is an intrusion into Islamic history, and not faithful to it.

There’s far too much money in Mecca, squeezing out the average pilgrim.
This money has been introduced as sacred history is wiped away.

If you think the Islamic State’s war on antiquities is horrifying, you are right. But it is not exceptional.

It has its roots in a perverse and excessive iconoclasm, which has seen Saudi Wahhabist mandates literally crush, demolish, smash, erase, and break down the very sites and landscapes that Muslims worldwide know so well.

If you think I am exaggerating, don’t. Several years ago, I helped lead a small group of American Muslims on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

We had a Saudi guide with us who, during our bus tour around Mecca and Medina, refused to let our driver stop at mosques of historical significance, because he thought we might cross the line and worship in a manner unbecoming of an austere and hardheaded Wahhabist. He treated us like children.

Which, of course, none of us were: Wahhabists, or children. (In revenge, I spent the ride back happily pointing out sites of Ottoman significance, while describing the House of Saud’s unseemly alliance with non-Muslim powers against their fellow Muslims.)

My fellow pilgrims were incensed. They had paid, scrounged up and saved, and here they were, in their holy city, and they weren’t allowed to stop at, for example, the mosque where Mohammed was commanded by God to turn away from the first direction of prayer, Jerusalem, to the current direction of prayer, Mecca.

(It matters if you’re Muslim.) They felt outraged. They felt they were denied the chance to experience their Islam because someone else had decided their interpretation of Islam mattered more.

And that is precisely the point. Mecca and Medina are ruled by Saudi Arabia, but they belong to the Muslim world.

They are our collective sacredness. They shouldn’t be an individual possession. Islam is a very egalitarian religion.

(As some Muslims joke, people who dislike organized religion should join Islam, because we’ve mastered disorganization.) Islam has few hierarchies, and those that exist are not widely shared.

Why then does a regime which represents a sliver of Muslims, exports and enforces an ideology that is historically antithetical to Islam’s rich traditions of pluralism, spirituality and cosmopolitanism, allowed to control our holy cities?

Why don’t everyday Muslims get a say?

Mecca and Medina are ruled by Saudi Arabia, but they belong to the Muslim world.

This is, for the moment, a matter of conjecture.

The European Union includes some of the world’s wealthiest, most progressive and secure societies.

Yet before the refugee crisis, they are hopelessly divided, and their cooperation pushed backwards.

If Europe now can’t do it, how can the present Muslim world manage to come to any kind of alternative arrangement, some more inclusive shared administration of its common properties? T

The Muslim world is deeply and badly divided; it is hard to imagine how any kind of cooperative agreement could ever be reached, and also, depressingly, not difficult to conceive of other Muslim-majority governments who would make a different kind of mess out of Mecca and Medina.

As it is, Saudi Arabia has the wealth to pour into subsidizing the pilgrimage, and Muslim piety in the Holy Land, in a way few other countries can.

But for how long? Years back, pilgrimage was the preserve of the lucky few.

It was too far, too risky, too expensive. My own great-great-grandfather began a travelogue describing his own journey from northern India to Mecca, but he died on the return trip.

Today, we have Snapchat hajj channels. Aircraft make the world much smaller. News travels fast. Muslims live all over the world.

What I mean to say is, in the past, the idea that Mecca and Medina belonged to all of us was deeply felt, but at best an abstraction.

In the years to come, it will be harder for Saudi Arabia to deny the desire of the world’s Muslims to see their holy cities reflect their pieties, and to cease the imposition of a view of Islam which is not only deeply alienating to the rest of the world, but deeply unpopular within the Muslim world.

How that happens is anyone’s guess. But it will happen. I’d say hell or high water, but in the case of a sacred desert, neither seems quite right.

But not as wrong as what is happening to the center of my sacred universe.

International Zionism and Satanism Are Indistinguishable

by

Appearing on Russia Today, Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy director Grant F. Smith said the Senate investigation focused around, “Looking into groups who brought $36 million dollars into the U.S. to plant stories in the U.S. media and promote Israeli foreign policy objectives in the United States,” adding that the documents from the investigation were extremely relevant “because they reveal a vast effort to divert U.S. attention from the Israeli Dimona nuclear weapons facility by saying it was merely a research center,” even as Israel now obsessively hypes the supposed threat of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

When the individuals responsible for the illegal program were outed, the activities of the group were merely transferred into the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), noted Grant, which continues today as the foremost Israeli lobbying entity.

November 7, 2018

There are essentially three Zionist powerhouses in the world: Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Those powerhouses want to rule much of the world with an iron fist.

They have been meddling in covert activities and diabolical espionage for more than sixty years, and the Jamal Khashoggi murder is a recent manifestation of clandestine enterprises through the decades.

One can historically argue that covert activities are engrained in the Zionist powerhouses. By 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini understood that idea very clearly precisely because it was already creating chaos in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Khomeini then had to attack that idea. He fleshed out a principle which continues to be true to this very day. Khomeini posited then:

“There is no crime America will not commit in order to maintain its political, economic, cultural, and military domination of those parts of the world where it predominates.

It exploits the oppressed people of the world by means of the large-scale propaganda campaigns that are coordinated for it by international Zionism.

“By means of its hidden and treacherous agents, it sucks the blood of the defenseless people as if it alone, together with its satellites, had the right to live in this world. Iran has tried to sever all its relations with this Great Satan and it is for this reason that it now finds wars imposed upon it.”[1]

“International Zionism” is an apt description of what was going on then.

The United States and England had already overthrown a democratically elected president in Iran by the name of Mossadegh in 1953,[2] and both countries were expanding aggressively in the Middle East to keep a diabolical empire alive and well.

By 1954, the CIA again overthrew a democratically elected official by the name of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.[3]

The documents for this unfortunate coup are readily available at the National Security Archive.[4]

If one peel the ideological onion, then the logic becomes pretty clear: the United States has been in the business of overthrowing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere for a century.[5]

So it is no surprise to see that Trump is treading on the same diabolical path.

Going back to the Ayatollah Khomeini, he made an attempt to solve the “international Zionism” problem by appealing to Muslim unity.

But that again was another problem because countries like Saudi Arabia were already prostrating before “international Zionism.” As E. Michael Jones puts it,

“At the very moment he invoked Islamic unity, Khomeini was forced to concede that Islam was breaking up into two warring factions.

The grand climactic battle of the anti-Communist crusade disguised this split for decades, but now, as intra-Islamic wars raged in Yemen and Iraq, Khomeini showed himself more of a prophet than a politician who could bring about Islamic unity.

Either way, the Great Satan was exacerbating division as a means of achieving geo-political goals.”[6]

Khomeini obviously lit up a prophetic fire which again is still relevant today.

“International Zionism” is still sucking the blood of virtually every nation on earth through covert activities, espionage, and deceptive means. And by metaphysically rejecting the moral and political order and embracing chaos and destruction, international Zionism has essentially become Satanism.

Yemeni civilians living on bread crumbs.

This principle was articulated by St. Athanasius, who posited that any metaphysical idea which ontologically denies Logos and its central place in the universe will end up being Satanic.

In a Satanic universe, what is true is actually a lie and what is a lie is by definition true.

In fact, opposition to Logos “was deemed to involve an active allegiance to Satan.”[7]

An “active allegiance to Satan” means that innocent people have to die in order to preserve a wicked ideology.

If you doubt this, then take a look at what happened in Iraq in 2003, where the warmongers sent a six-trillion dollar bill to the American people.

In short, an “active allegiance to Satan” is the political ideology of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and indeed Israel, specifically when it comes to dealing with important issues in the Middle East.

The Jamal Khashoggi debacle again makes this very clear. The recent war in Yemen is another example.

The sad thing is that there are people out there who preposterously think that the murder of Khashoggi was a set up by a “a rogue group connected to Turkey, NATO and others” in order to embarrass both Saudi Arabia and the United States!

So in the Zionist world, everyone wants to get a piece of the pie. The only people who cannot get even a decent meal are the poor souls in Yemen, people who are now living on bread crumbs.[10]

Millions of people are being starved to death as food is used as a weapon across the Middle East

by

“The idea,” said the “Israeli” official, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to “make sure Gaza didn’t starve.”

Alwaght– Severe malnutrition could claim lives of at least 400,000 Yemeni children under 5 this year, four UN agencies warned on Friday as Saudi Arabia and its allies are waging a brutal war against the already impoverished Arab state.

The six-year-old aggression led by Saudi regime has rendered 80% of the population reliant on humanitarian aid

In a report published on Friday, the agencies projected a 22% increase in severe acute malnutrition among children under 5 in Yemen, compared to 2020, Reuters reported.

Severe acute malnutrition means there is a risk of death from lack of food. Aden, Hodeidah, Taiz and Sanaa are among the worst-hit areas, the report said.

“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley said in a joint statement with the Food and Agriculture Organisation(FAO), UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Starving people in Iraq

Another 2.3 million under 5s are expected to suffer acute malnutrition in 2021. Acute malnutrition among young children and mothers in Yemen has increased with each year of the conflict, they said, driven by the high rates of disease and rising rates of food insecurity.

Around 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are projected to be acutely malnourished this year.

Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen war in 2015 in a bid to reinstall Yemen’s former pro-Riyadh government.

The military campaign has turned the poor Arab country into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, with tens of thousands of civilians killed and many more suffering the calamities of the war.

Along with Saudi-led aggression, economic decline and the Coronavirus pandemic, a shortfall of donations last year is also contributing to the worsening humanitarian crisis.

Nutrition and other services that keep millions from starvation and disease are gradually closing across Yemen amid the acute funding shortage.

The agencies said they had only received $1.9 billion of the $3.4 billion required for the country’s humanitarian response. Programmes have started to close and scale down.

⚠ While We’re Distracted

by

Once again, COVID-19 is being used as a “smokescreen” to distract worldwide attention while illegal and aggressive movements are taking place in specific regions of the planet, as has recently become clear with the Israeli advance in the West Bank and the arrival of thousands of American troops to Yemen

MSNBC Has Done 455 Stormy Daniels Pieces This Year—ZERO on US-Sponsored Genocide in Yemen

How might we understand what it would mean in the United States for fourteen million people in our country to starve?

The world pays constant attention to the coronavirus, occupying the news agencies with a high coverage of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, on the global periphery, geopolitics continues at full throttle, with several conflicts occurring unnoticed by most people outside the affected regions.

The case of Yemen is a clear example of what we are talking about here.

Recently, the conflict in the country completed five years of uninterrupted fighting, reaching the regrettable marks of more than 10,000 killed in the confrontation, in addition to almost 100,000 killed by the social ills caused by the war, such as hunger, mainly among children.

The Long, Brutal U.S./Israel War on Children in the Middle East

The poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula has become a strategic area in strong dispute and a real geopolitical thermometer for Middle East tensions, especially between the two regional powers most involved in the conflict, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are increasing their rivalry day after day.

The most noteworthy attitude is that of Saudi Arabia, which, aligned with the western axis, has been taking increasingly aggressive stances in the country, causing unnecessary suffering to the local population and prolonging the terror and fear in the region.

Human Rights Watch data show that Saudi Arabia has been behind fundamental rights abuses against the Yemeni population, especially in the al-Mahrah region, since at least June last year, when such crimes began to be investigated. HRW Middle East Director Michael Page stated in an interview with PressTV:

“Saudi forces and their Yemeni allies’ serious abuses against local-Mahrah residents is another horror to add to the list of the Saudi-led coalition’s unlawful conduct in Yemen (…) Saudi Arabia is severely harming its reputation with Yemenis when it carries out these abusive practices and holds no one accountable for them”.

Among the abuses reported by HRW, we highlight illegal arrests, torture, kidnappings and compulsory transfer of detainees to Saudi Arabia.

Once again, COVID-19 is being used as a “smokescreen” to distract worldwide attention while illegal and aggressive movements are taking place in specific regions of the planet, as has recently become clear with the Israeli advance in the West Bank and the arrival of thousands of American troops to Yemen

In addition, other international crimes had previously been reported by the organization as being committed by the American coalition against Houthi resistance in the region, including bombing homes, businesses and hospitals.

In February, at least 30 Yemeni civilians died from airstrikes conducted by Saudi military in the north of the country, in the district of Jawf al-Maslub.

The attack was said to have been conducted in response to the downing of a Saudi aircraft by the Houthi forces. In the words of Houthi movement spokesman Yahya Saree:
Yemen Is Today’s Guernica

“As usual, when the most brutal US-Saudi aggression receives painful strikes in the military confrontation fields, it replies with great folly by targeting civilians.”

In March, a fleet of 450 American soldiers landed in Yemen, in addition to an uncertain number of troops from the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

According to information from al-Mashhad, this was the first stage of a project to send 3,000 American and British troops to Yemen, which will land in the regions of Aden, Lahai, Saqtari, Shabweh and al-Mohreh, thus completing a true siege of the country in all geographical directions.

Saudi warplanes targets horses’ stables in Yemen

In addition, two American warships docked at Balhaf, Yemen’s main natural gas export port. American movements would be motivated in the region to supposedly “fight terrorism”, but several military analysts have already made it clear that the United States intends to intervene in the Yemeni government and install fixed bases in the region, “stabilizing” the situation in the country.

The crisis in Yemen is a real humanitarian catastrophe, with dimensions similar to those of the Civil War in Syria. However, the attention given to the poorest country in the Middle East is minimal, especially in times of the pandemic.

Once again, COVID-19 is being used as a “smokescreen” to distract worldwide attention while illegal and aggressive movements are taking place in specific regions of the planet, as has recently become clear with the Israeli advance in the West Bank and the arrival of thousands of American troops to Yemen.

The ZIO-United States are starving hundreds of thousands of Syrian children to death, following the same strategy that caused 576,00 Iraqi children to die due to UN sanctions imposed the 1990’s.

Yet, another factor that is absolutely ignored, being even more serious than military aggression, is the public health crisis and food insecurity generated by Saudi aggression.

Yemeni Health Minister Saif al-Haidri recently warned of the neglect with which international society has dealt with the situation, which he called a “disastrous in the shadow of war”. These are his words:

“approximately five and a half million children under the age of five are suffering from malnutrition (…) One child dies every ten minutes in Yemen (…) 80 percent of children in Yemen live in a state of stunting and anemia due to malnutrition (…) Two hundred thousand women of childbearing age or some of they are pregnant or have given birth to malnourished children, which threatens the lives of children”.

Indeed, while the world is distracted by the coronavirus, crimes against humanity are committed with impunity and millions of people starve to death without any humanitarian assistance.

Yemen has yet to record any cases of COVID-19, but what can we expect for the near future when Western troops arrive in the country at all times, since the US and Europe are the regions most affected by the pandemic? What will be the future of the Yemeni crisis? Will the West bring peace or the pandemic to the poorest country in the Middle East?

Zionist Saudis make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

by

2

‘To be here… is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,’ Saudi head of Muslim World League says during tour of Nazi death camp with the American Jewish Committee. Have they ever stood with Palestine?

Al-Issa’s outreach to Jewish organizations also coincides with a broader alignment of interests and ties emerging between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which share a common foe in Iran.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Muslim religious leaders joined members of a US Jewish group at Auschwitz on Thursday for what organizers described as “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit the site of a Nazi German death camp.

The interfaith visit came four days before the 75th anniversary of the camp’s January 27, 1945, liberation by Soviet forces and as world leaders gathered in Jerusalem to commemorate the Holocaust.

The secretary general of the Muslim World League, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, and the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, led the tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland.

The Nazis operated extermination and concentration camps in Poland when Germany occupied the country during World War II.

The American Jewish Committee said that Al-Issa, who is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, led a delegation of 62 Muslims, including 25 prominent religious leaders, from some 28 countries during the “groundbreaking” visit.

At one point, they prayed with their heads pressed on the ground at Birkenau, the largest part of the camp and the most notorious site of Germany’s mass murder of European Jews.

A delegation of Muslim religious leaders perform prayers during a visit to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, in what organizers called “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit, in Oswiecim, Poland, January 23, 2020. (American Jewish Committee via AP)

The AJC delegation included members of the organization, among them children of Holocaust survivors.

“To be here, among the children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish and Islamic communities, is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” Al-Issa said.

“The unconscionable crimes to which we bear witness today are truly crimes against humanity. That is to say, a violation of us all, an affront to all of God’s children.”

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe.

In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most of them Jews from across the continent.

The visit comes as Saudi Arabia works to be seen abroad as a moderate and modernizing country following decades of adherence to a hard-line interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism.

The Muslim World League, under al-Issa’s leadership, has embraced the effort.

Muslim religious leaders are guided during a visit to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, in what organizers called “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit, in Oswiecim, Poland, January 23, 2020. (American Jewish Committee via AP)

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s strategy to modernize the kingdom is aimed in part at attracting greater foreign investment and fostering a national Saudi identity that is not founded solely on conservative religious values.

Al-Issa’s outreach to Jewish organizations also coincides with a broader alignment of interests and ties emerging between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which share a common foe in Iran.

On Friday, members of the delegation will visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and attend Muslim and Jewish religious services there.

A call on the Muslim world to join forces against the Saudi-Zionist regime

by

The evil ‘isms’ plaguing the world: imperialism, Zionism, Christian Zionism, and Wahhabism.

President Hassan Rouhani addressing the regular government session on September 7, 2016 (president.ir)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has called on the Muslim world to join forces and bring the Saudi regime to justice for its atrocities in Muslim countries of the Middle East.

“The countries of the region and the Muslim world should take concerted efforts aimed at resolving the existing problems and punishing the Saudi government,” Rouhani said on Wednesday.

The Iranian chief executive highlighted Riyadh’s support for terrorism, adding that the regime is “practically spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen through its crimes in the region.”

The kingdom, where radical Wahhabism is freely preached by its clerics, is accused of providing ideological and financial support to the Takfiri terrorists, who have been sowing death and destruction in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

The Saudi regime has also been waging an indiscriminate military campaign against Yemen since last year, killing around 10,000 people in the Arab world’s most impoverished nation.

Rouhani further lambasted Saudi authorities for their “tactlessness and ineptitude” in overseeing the Hajj pilgrimage last year, when thousands of Muslim pilgrims, including 465 Iranians, died in a human crush.

Rouhani further slammed Saudi rulers for creating obstacles to prevent the dispatch of Iranian pilgrims to this year’s Hajj rituals.

Hajj serves as a time when the Muslim world’s interests and unity should be paraded to the world, but the Saudi kingdom, “has even stopped short of verbally apologizing to Muslims” for the Mina tragedy, Rouhani added.

The tragic incident took place when two large masses of pilgrims converged at a crossroads during the symbolic ceremony of the stoning of Satan in Jamarat in September 2015.

Saudi Arabia claims that nearly 770 people were killed in the incident; however, Iran, which had the greatest number of deaths among foreign nationals, has put the death toll at about 4,700.

Iran has canceled the participation of its pilgrims in this year’s Hajj rituals because of Saudi Arabia’s refusal to guarantee the safety of pilgrims.

Saudi Arabia, which has also cut diplomatic ties with Iran, has halted flights to and from Iran.

Trump Backs Off From Ongoing Public Yemen Genocide

by

-Yemen, a War for Profit, Saudi Genocide Backed by Obama to Trump. We are bombing Yemen back into the stone age, starving kids & blockading the nation.

-In a speech he delivered in commemoration of the killing of the Houthi movement’s founder, the movement’s current leader said: “everything that is happening in our region serves the Zionists.”

-The sabotage of the bank, which left millions of public employees and the extreme poor with no income, was done with permission and in close collaboration with the World Bank and the ‘Quad Group’, US, Saudi, UAE and UK governments ( www.irispdf), as a continuation from an earlier funds blockade and with full knowledge of the genocidal consequences.

-An American bomb made by Lockheed Martin struck a Yemen school bus recently, killing 51 people. Earlier, American bombs killed 155 mourners at a funeral and 97 people at a market.

Image result for genocide in yemen

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have abruptly called for an end to the Saudi-backed quagmire in Yemen, after years of backing the war over alleged Iranian involvement.

Speaking at the Congressionally mandated US Institute for Peace on Tuesday, Mattis said according to the BBC that Washington had been watching the Yemen war “for long enough.” He added, “We have got to move towards a peace effort here, and we can’t say we are going to do it sometime in the future. We need to be doing this in the next 30 days.” He said all sides should to meet with UN special envoy Martin Griffiths in Sweden.

Mr Mattis added that all sides should meet UN special envoy Martin Griffiths in Sweden in November and “come to a solution.”

Pompeo asked the Houthi government of north Yemen to cease its rocket attacks on Saudi Arabia and urged the Saudis to stop bombing populated areas from the air.

Pompeo said, “It is time to end this conflict, replace conflict with compromise, and allow the Yemeni people to heal through peace and reconstruction . . .”

How to explain this American initiative on Yemen? Well, it is very murky and unexpected but here are some considerations that may have led to this Trump admin. about-face:

1. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Istanbul Saudi consulate on Oct. 2 has much weakened the Saudi government, so that the US and France and others may now see this moment as a prime one for pressuring Riyadh.

2. The UN is now warning of an enormous die-off in Yemen of millions of people if the war continues at its present pace. No administration wants that sort of catastrophe to come about on its watch, more especially if it is itself partially responsible for the starvation.

3. There could be a massive refugee exodus across the Red Sea and up to Europe. France is also pressuring Riyadh to end the war.

4. The administration may anticipate losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats next Tuesday. Prominent Dems have already introduced resolutions for the US to get out of Yemen. This congressional pressure is likely to be much strengthened if the Dems are in a position to launch investigations and subpoena officials.

5. The Khashoggi murder made the Saudis abruptly disliked by even the Republican rank and file, and the administration may fear that their being joined at the hips with Riyadh may play poorly in the upcoming midterms.

6. US intelligence may have finally gotten through to Mattis and Pompeo that the Houthis are an indigenous protest movement and not actually very tied to Iran, which practices a different form of Shiism and has other regional priorities.

But to tell you the truth, I find this sudden coordinated maneuver on Yemen among the Trump high officials to be a little baffling and there may be more factors driving it than are apparent on the surface. One thing is certain, they aren’t doing it for their health.

Iran: Saudi Arabia Would Not Have Murdered Khashoggi Without [Zio] U.S. Protection

by


Sheikh Imran Hosein on Saudi regime Analysis

haaretz.com Oct 24, 2018

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia would not have murdered prominent journalist Jamal Khashoggi without American protection, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday Saudi authorities staged the “worst cover-up ever” in the killing of Khashoggi in Turkey this month, as the United States vowed to revoke the visas of some of those believed to be responsible.

“No one would imagine that in today’s world and a new century that we would witness such an organised murder and a system would plan out such a heinous murder,” Rouhani said, according to IRNA.

“I don’t think that a country would dare commit such a crime without the protection of America.”

U.S. protection has allowed Saudi Arabia to carry out bombings against civilians in Yemen’s war, Rouhani said, according to IRNA.

“If there was no American protection, would the people of Yemen still have faced the same brutal bombing?” Rouhani said.

Rouhani also called on Turkey’s government to conduct an impartial investigation into Khashoggi’s “unprecedented” murder.

The Saudis are so Ashkenazi

by

Saudi media reported that more than 12,000 Yemenis — 10,371 men and 2,078 women — are currently being held in detention centers across the Kingdom.

During the deportation process, they are often subject to physical and psychological abuse including beatings, rape and reportedly even the theft of their organs. The abuse often comes not just from authorities but at the hands of their sponsors (Kafeel) who enjoy vast legal rights over those they employ.

Saudi Arabia did give the now jobless masses of Yemeni deportees one option for employment: forgo training and become mercenaries for the coalition waging a bloody war against their homeland. Offering few options save starvation, Saudi Arabia capitalized on the deportees’ desperation by turning former shopkeepers into soldiers tasked with protecting Saudi troops in Jizan, Asir, and Najran from attacks by Yemen’s military. Saudi Arabia’s regular forces, equipped with the latest U.S.-supplied weapons, tend to stay far from the front lines.

Another Front in Saudi War: Kingdom Deports Yemeni Workers to Face Starvation at “Home”

Last year, Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, rolled out a new “Saudization” policy in which Yemenis were forced to pay residency fees or face deportation, pricing out millions who came to the Kingdom from neighboring states seeking a better life in the wealthy Gulf monarchy. Many of them were born in Saudi Arabia, the children or grandchildren of migrants from Yemen.

Unable to secure Saudi citizenship, owing to a policy that reserves citizenship for those of Saudi descent, most were unable to attend school and were denied any form of government aid, including healthcare. Experts estimate that at least two million Yemenis remain in Saudi Arabia and are at risk of deportation.

Saudi authorities say that Yemenis make up the majority of migrants in Saudi Arabia — around 77 percent, followed by Ethiopians at 22 percent. On March 29, 2017, Saudi officials set a three-month deadline Saudi residents of Yemeni descent to leave the Kingdom or risk fines and other legal measures, a policy that echoes Israel’s controversial policy towards migrants and refugees, which has drawn the ire of activists and human-rights groups alike. At 100 Saudi riyals a month, or $27 U.S. dollars, the fees are often out of reach for migrant workers. By the time fees reach 400 riyals in 2020, few will be able to afford them.

Refugees as a bargaining chip

Beyond the thin veil of “Saudization,” the Kingdom’s vulnerable non-Saudi population has frequently found itself at the whim of the royal family, often used as a political card to pressure foreign governments to cede to Saudi interests.

In 2013, according to high-ranking officials in Sana’a, the Saudi regime expelled some 360,000 Yemeni workers from the kingdom after Yemen’s government under former President Ali Saleh signaled that Yemen would begin to develop oil from the country’s al-Jawf Governorate, a resource long sought by Saudi Arabia.

Yemen’s governorates of al-Jawf, Shabwa, and Marib have a high potential for significant gas deposits, and according to a detailed 2002 United States Geological Survey (USGS), Yemen possesses vast offshore oil reservoirs in addition to its 3 billion barrels of proven reserves.

That wasn’t the first time the Kingdom used foreign nationals as a means to achieve policy objectives. In 1990 Saudi Arabia expelled well over one million Yemeni workers after Yemen’s government rejected the U.S. war on Iraq. The sudden influx of people returning to the country created an economic crisis that contributed to the onset of the civil war between the north and the south in 1994.

As many economic experts have observed, Yemeni economist Rashid al-Haddad told MintPress that he thinks Saudi Arabia will indeed expel more Yemenis that remain in the Kingdom if Saudi officials do not get what they want out of negotiations or peace talks with Yemen.

The impact of deportation is profound

While Saudi Arabia’s role in the scorched-earth campaign that has decimated Yemen since 2015 is finally beginning to make headlines, its economic war against the country is often overlooked.  Utilizing a cadre of devastating strategies — including a land, sea and air blockade; the destruction of infrastructure; the devaluing of currency through carefully-planned economic policy; and preventing Yemen from developing its natural wealth — the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition has brought the country to the brink of total collapse. Now, with an influx of new residents seeking a share of the war-torn country’s meager resources, Yemen, already plagued by famine and rampant poverty, faces an even more dire situation.

When he was employed in Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Za`ali was sending home about two-thirds of his monthly salary, 2,000 Saudi riyals ($530 USD), back to his family in Yemen. “Even then, with the local economy deteriorated and with the blockade, it just wasn’t enough for my family,” he told MintPress. The breadwinner for three families, al-Za`ali now struggles to secure even the basic staples needed for a single meal.

Yemen Making Daggers of Missiles

A craftsman makes traditional Yemeni daggers out of remains of Saudi coalition missiles, at his workshop, in Hajjah, Yemen. Missiles raining on Yemen from the jets of the Saudi-led coalition are killing thousands of civilians, now desperate Yemenis are scavenging the missiles to make ends meat. Hammadi Issa | AP
Millions of families in Yemen once relied on remittances from family members living in Saudi Arabia. According to surveys by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), three-quarters of those recently expelled from Saudi Arabia were sending money back to family in Yemen. Today, they find themselves in a country they are often unfamiliar with, suffering comprehensive economic collapse with no source of income, so fragile that in coming months the UN expects two in five Yemenis, around 12 million people, to face the worst famine in 100 years.

At least 3 million of Yemen’s 25 million citizens are estimated to work abroad, more than half of them in Saudi Arabia, the country that has spearheaded the destruction of their homeland. Remittances once contributed $2 billion annually to Yemen’s economy. Today, that economy is being deprived of one of its last remaining lifelines amidst an already staggering currency collapse.

Deportation process rife with sexual and physical abuse

Ali al-Za`ali recounted his experience, no less disturbing for being so common:

The police grabbed me while I was at the supermarket shop in north Jeddah. First, they took me to jail and put me in a small overcrowded cell filled only with Yemenis. When I got there two guards kicked me and beat me with a wire cable while they were hurling insults about my father and my country.”

Saudi media reported that more than 12,000 Yemenis — 10,371 men and 2,078 women — are currently being held in detention centers across the Kingdom.

During the deportation process, they are often subject to physical and psychological abuse including beatings, rape and reportedly even the theft of their organs. The abuse often comes not just from authorities but at the hands of their sponsors (Kafeel) who enjoy vast legal rights over those they employ.

Yemeni lawyer and jurist Taha Abu Talib told MintPress:

Saudi employers have inordinate power over expats outside of the law and with little accountability. The workers have no options because they need their initial employer’s approval to change jobs. The worker system means they have to face abuse or work under the table illegally.”

Eight out of the ten Yemenis expelled from Saudi Arabia who were interviewed for this story told MintPress that they were beaten, deprived of food, had their personal property stolen, or faced sexual and physical abuse.

One of the men MintPress interviewed, who wished only to be identified as A.W.S., said:

When I was in jail in Jizan, one of the guards took me into the bathroom and wanted to rape me; when I resisted he beat me with a wire cable.”

According to the International Organization for Migration, physical abuse and the theft of personal possessions is commonplace against Yemenis in the Kingdom.

Looting the deportees

Amar Haddi was expelled from Saudi Arabia last month. He was planning to open a store in Yemen like the one he once ran in the Saudi province of Jizan. Those plans were short-lived as Saudi authorities confiscated his store in Jizan when Haddi failed to sell it before the three-month deadline imposed by Saudi authorities. Today he lives in Hodeida — a city lying in ruin thanks to a seemingly endless barrage of Saudi coalition airstrikes — where food is scarce, outbreaks of disease plague residents, and work is nearly impossible to find.

Saudi Arabia claimed that it warned those marked for deportation that they would have to pay fines ranging from 15,000 to 100,000 riyals if they failed to validate their residency status or leave the country within 90 days. “I offered my shop for sale, but no one came; a three-month period just wasn’t enough,” Haddi told MintPress.

In July, Saudi authorities banned deportees from leaving the Kingdom with any four-wheel drive vehicles or heavy equipment, forcing families to leave behind their SUV’s and to instead hire cars or buses to ferry them to Yemen. Saudi authorities never provided an explanation for the ban.

“I had to go back to Sharurah city in Saudi Arabia and leave my car with a friend of Saudi nationality,”  Sameer Masudi told MintPress.

On the first day that the Saudi policy was announced, Saudi border guards detained entire families as they were being expelled back to Yemen at the Wadiah border crossing, preventing them from leaving with their family SUVs and forcing them to find other transportation into Yemen.

From civilian to mercenary

Saudi Arabia did give the now jobless masses of Yemeni deportees one option for employment: forgo training and become mercenaries for the coalition waging a bloody war against their homeland. Offering few options save starvation, Saudi Arabia capitalized on the deportees’ desperation by turning former shopkeepers into soldiers tasked with protecting Saudi troops in Jizan, Asir, and Najran from attacks by Yemen’s military. Saudi Arabia’s regular forces, equipped with the latest U.S.-supplied weapons, tend to stay far from the front lines.

A 25-year-old deportee, who wished to be identified only as A.S., recounted how he had been captured by Yemeni troops while fighting on the Najran border as a mercenary for Saudi Arabia. He told MintPress that he had the choice of either fighting for the Saudis or living in extreme poverty in Aden: “I am not in favor of the Saudi campaign against my country, but I am fighting with them for the sake of money.” A.S. is not alone. He is one of many desperate Yemeni deportees forced to fight and die in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border region.

With Syria lost, Daesh outlives its usefulness to Israel

by

Given Israel’s proven collaboration with Daesh over the course of the Syrian conflict in order to aid its own regional ambitions, the recent decision to revoke the citizenship of 19 Israeli Daesh members is hardly the straightforward counter-terrorism measure it is being made out to be. Just more Zionist baloney.

While the recent decision to revoke the citizenship of alleged Daesh members has largely been framed as the Israeli government cracking down on terrorism, such narratives ignore Israel’s own past support for the terror group over the course of the Syrian conflict.

>

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — On Wednesday, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced that it would revoke the citizenship of 19 Israelis who are alleged to have fought on behalf of Daesh (ISIS). The move comes after a new law went into effect, giving Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri the ability to strip Israelis deemed to be members of foreign terrorist organizations of their citizenship.

The alleged Daesh members were identified by Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, which provided the Interior Ministry with the names of 20 Israeli nationals who had joined Daesh. However, for reasons that are still unclear, one of the individuals on that list, who was left unnamed, did not have his or her citizenship revoked. Reports in Israeli media have claimed that the majority of individuals on the list were Israeli Arabs, though some were identified as Jewish Israelis.

Overall, Shin Bet estimated that 60 Israeli citizens have left the country since the conflict in Syria began in 2011 in order to fight on behalf of armed opposition groups, including Daesh and the Al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front. Fewer than 10 are believed to have returned to Israel since fighting in Syria began. The Jerusalem Post further notes that “dozens” of Arab Israeli citizens have been arrested by Israeli authorities in recent years for allegedly seeking to join terror groups like Daesh.

With Syria lost, Daesh outlives its usefulness to Israel

While the recent decision to revoke the citizenship of alleged Daesh members has largely been framed as the Israeli government cracking down on terrorism, such narratives ignore Israel’s own past support for the terror group over the course of the Syrian conflict.

Indeed, from early on in the conflict, Israel made it clear that it “preferred” Daesh’s presence in Syria to the presence of Syria’s legitimate government, a preference soon followed by a report published by an Israeli government-funded think tank that called Daesh a “useful tool” against Israel’s regional rivals — Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

Since then, considerable evidence, including a 2014 United Nations report, has shown that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have long been in regular contact with Daesh, even bringing wounded Daesh members into Israel for treatment. Particularly jarring was the 2016 statement made by Israel’s military intelligence chief, Major General Herzi Halevy, that Israel does not want to see Daesh in Syria defeated.

Even the very Israeli who declared ISIS an illegal terror organization, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, later went on to candidly admit last year that Israel maintains open communications with a Daesh cell active in the Golan Heights, even though communicating with any group deemed terrorist by the state is, without exception, illegal under Israeli law. Not only that, but Ya’alon also went on to describe a specific incident in which Daesh apologized to the IDF after opening fire on an IDF position, suggesting that the Israel-Daesh relationship is deeper than “open communications.”

Given Israel’s proven collaboration with Daesh over the course of the Syrian conflict in order to aid its own regional ambitions, the recent decision to revoke the citizenship of 19 Israeli Daesh members is hardly the straightforward counter-terrorism measure it is being made out to be.

Instead, it is likely an indicator of the quickly approaching end of the Syrian conflict, which has seen the Syrian government largely reconsolidate its territory despite the efforts of largely foreign-funded opposition groups. Indeed, though Daesh was once a “useful tool” to the Israeli government, it’s failure to dislodge the Syrian government means that the group has outlived its usefulness — as have the handful of Israelis who joined the group over the course of the conflict.

Israeli warplanes in Yemen

by
Image result for US bomb wedding in yemen

Saudi-Led Coalition Bombs Yemen Wedding with US Weapons, Killing 131 Civilians

Back-drop quicki–The Israeli goal is to take out Iran. But first they needed US to take out Syria for them to neutralize Syria and make the path clear for Israel to reach Iran without getting a bloody nose.  US planned to use a chemical attack false flag in Syria to blame on President Al-Assad but before they could, Syria agreed to become a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which it did and is. That took away US excuse to invade Syria for “humanitarian” reasons. So the US sent Al-Qaeda to Iraq and came back with “ISIS” to terrorize the Syrians etal, thus the US used ISIS terrorists as an excuse to go into Syria.

As it happened, Putin went into Syria also to fight ISIS with Iran’s help. That was for the purpose of embarrassing the US since they created ISIS to last long enough for Israel to get to Iran. Putin exposed the fact that US wasn’t fighting ISIS at all and Israel was aiding the wounded. Yemen was a part of the counter-terror coalition in the region and realized that US was not fighting ISIS but on the contrary was aiding the terrorists. They saw the war on ISIS was a fraud. So Yemen quit the coalition. Saudi Arabia soon led a coalition against  Yemen.

presstv.com

Houthi said Israeli jets have been seen in Hudaydah’s skies over the past few days amid a push by Saudi mercenaries to seize the city, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.

“Yemen is actually fighting against a Saudi-Zionist coalition,” he said, referring to a military campaign which Riyadh has been carrying out against Yemen since 2015.

Several Western countries, the US and the UK in particular, are widely known to be helping Saudi Arabia in the aggression, but this is the first time claims of Israeli complicity have been made.

Referring to close ties between Israel and terrorist groups in Syria, Houthi noted that the Takfiri elements in Yemen are also the “mercenaries and servants” of Tel Aviv and Washington.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have no diplomatic relations, but latest reports say the two regimes are working behind the scenes to establish formal contact.

A senior Israeli nuclear expert revealed recently that Tel Aviv was selling Saudi Arabia information that would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear weapons.

PressTV-Israel ‘selling nuke information’ to Saudi

Israel is providing Saudi Arabia with the kind of information that allows Riyadh to develop nuclear weapons, warns an Israeli nuclear expert.

Ami Dor-On, a senior nuclear commentator with the Israeli military organization iHLS, said the cooperation has been made possible in the wake of widening ties between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hudyadah situation

Hudaydah, home to about 400,000 people, is a lifeline for aid to war-torn Yemen. Riyadh claims the Houthis are using the key port for weapons delivery, an allegation rejected by the fighters.

The city, which lies on Yemen’s western Red Sea coast, has witnessed renewed tensions over the past few days. Saudi-backed forces have closed in on Hudaydah, sparking fears of an all-out assault.

The UN and humanitarian organizations have warned that a potential Saudi attack on Hudaydah could result in a disaster.

Jan Egeland, a former UN aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Doha-based Al Jazeera broadcaster on Saturday that a Saudi attack would make the situation “much worse.”

“We must avoid war at all costs in Hudaydah, not only because of the hundreds of thousands of people who would get in the crossfire but also because the port and the lifeline will be destroyed,” he said.

Egeland further demanded “a ceasefire and peace talks” to resolve the crisis in Yemen.

“What we asked for is that the United States, the United Kingdom and France who have influence over the Saudi-led coalition – they sell arms, they have close military relations, close diplomatic and intelligence cooperation – guarantee that attacks stop,” he added.

Earlier this week, the UN voiced grave concerns about the situation around Hudaydah.

PressTV-UN concerned over Saudi offensive on Hudaydah

The United Nations voices grave concern over the Saudi-backed militant attack on Yemeni city of Hudaydah.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also warned that fighting in Hudaydah would make “an already catastrophic situation even worse.”

“The ICRC is line with international humanitarian law urges all the parties to the conflict to respect civilian lives by taking every possible measure to protect civilians,” the Geneva-based humanitarian institution said in a statement.

Yemenis conduct retaliatory attacks

Separately on Saturday, al-Masirah reported that Yemeni army soldiers and fighters from allied Popular Committees had destroyed seven Saudi armored vehicles in the kingdom’s southern regions of Asir and Najran.

The Yemeni attacks came in retaliation for the Saudi-led military campaign on the impoverished state.

Yemeni forces further managed to prevent the advance of Saudi and Sudanese mercenaries in Asir and killed dozens of them, the report said.

Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a war on Yemen in March 2015 in support of Yemen’s former Riyadh-friendly government and against the Houthis.

The military campaign has killed and injured over 600,000 civilians, according to the Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights.

Saudi Arabia has also imposed a blockade on Yemen, which has smothered humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine to the import-dependent state.

Global Palestine, where are the Palestinians?

by
Image result for israel does not have the right to exist

Good news for Palestinians? Well, where are they?

Saudi Arabia, Egypt set up $10B fund for planned mega-city in Sinai. How about dropping some of that now into Palestine? They are dying! Or, is that the point?

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits Egypt to deepen alliance between two regional powerhouses • Mega-city is part of plan to wean Saudis off oil revenue • Egyptian court dismisses challenges to Red Sea island deal with Riyadh.

Known as Neom – from the Greek prefix “neo” (new) and the first letter of the Arabic word “mostaqbal” (future) – the mega-city is being billed as “the world’s most ambitious project” and is intended to become a transnational city and economic zone.  Prince Mohammed’s stated objective for the project is to wean Saudi Arabia, the world’s top crude exporter, off oil revenues.

Meanwhile in Gaza

Home to nearly two million Palestinians, the Gaza Strip has been reeling under a crippling Israeli blockade since 2007 and poisoning of agriculture and livestock, killing the fishermen shooting the children.

Israel spraying herbicides on Gaza farmlands: official

“Connected Gaza”, part of a megacity stretching from Amman to Tel Aviv through Jerusalem, with Haifa to the north and Gaza to the south, all bound together with infrastructure, trade, and specialization, with spatial focus around four centres called Gateway Gaza, Core Gaza, Wadi Gaza, and Beach Gaza. The idea is to consolidate to the north with strategic transport infrastructure (a port that relieves congestion in Israeli ports and allows interaction between Israeli and Arab goods and clients), serve from the east with trunk infrastructure, connect with history through improved local road networks, and recover natural systems- rehabilitating the depleted aquifer in particular.

gaza-slide

Connected Gaza identifies 30 foundation projects, 7 integrated projects and 40 local projects – categorised as ‘Urgent’, ‘Early Win’, ‘Low-Cost’, ‘Risk-Incentive’, ‘Iconic’, and ‘Symbiotic’ (i.e. fulfilling both Palestinian and  neighbours’ needs). The overall plan, which integrates economic strategies such as de-emphasising food and agriculture as a job creator, lowering water imports, refocusing on high-value exports and consumption, and supporting a knowledge economy through ICT training and high-value services in education and back-office finance.

gaza-slide-2

The initiative anticipates that it will be in the mutual self-interest for political and security conditions in the region to improve. A trans-national city-region, with a knowledge-based economy of 3.5 million people, 1.1 million new jobs, focused on trade and exchange will be both the incentive and the result. ‘Thinking way in the future and then stepping backwards allows policymakers to speak rationally and confidently about the future.

Sanders-Led Group Introduces Bill Calling for Removal of US Forces From Yemen

by
weizmann_and_feisal_1918

The purpose of the Wahhabi sect was to bring about an Arab revolt against the Ottomans and pave the way for a Jewish state in Palestine. photo: Chaim Weizman, head of the world Zionist organization and and Prince Faisal 1918

Saudi Arabia Jewslims was born in the desert of Nejd and has since imposed its violence to the region on the back of religious radicalism.

Image result for US forces in yemen

US forces in Yemen

“By continuing to blindly back Saudi Arabia’s starvation campaign, on top of fueling Yemen’s suffering, the US is creating more enemies and fueling the very extremism the War on Terror is supposed to be eradicating,” said Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy at Peace Action, in a statement on Wednesday. “Congress knows this, but Saudi Arabia’s legions of lobbyists on Capitol Hill have convinced some members of Congress to bury their heads in the sand.”

The US has been heavily supporting Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen for years, supplying the kingdom with weaponry and military intelligence. Last August, the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that American troops are on the ground in Yemen.

While American complicity in the Yemen crisis is rarely discussed on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives last November overwhelmingly approved a resolution declaring that US military assistance to Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen is not authorized.

In Zio-America, the ‘Syria experts’ have turned into ‘Iran experts’ overnight

by
Related image

The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion.

Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change.

When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed “Syria experts” who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran.

The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state.

Image result for iran and regime change

The Iranian expats are equivalent to the anti-Castro Cuban expats. They serve imperialism because imperialism serves them.

From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy

The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a “senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an “Iran expert,” Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists.

It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.”

During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran’s elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region.

Blind Eye

Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA.

People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson

Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest

Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change.

Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice” in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes.

The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down.

Death Toll

The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters

Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad

The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles.

No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war.

Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert” and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran.

Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way.

rt.com