Jihad Watch: Novak: Yemen’s Reformers Verses the Pact of Evil

June 14, 2005

Novak: Yemen’s Reformers Verses the Pact of Evil

Jane Novak writes about jihad and corruption in Yemen in World Press:

In the remote country of Yemen, a determined and heroic democracy movement battles an alliance of Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein’s generals, and a corrupt regime that wields all the tools of the state. The terrorists are operating on the proceeds from gunrunning and oil sales. The reformers are operating on pure determination.
Throughout Yemeni security forces, military, businesses, and public institutions, an interlinked web of corruption and brutality is stealing Yemen’s resources and attacking any Yemeni who opposes it. And the majority do oppose. All the natural enemies of the jihadis are under attack in Yemen: reformers, democrats, journalists, socialists, pluralists, Shiites, Sunnis, anti-corruption advocates, human rights workers, and more. As forces unite against them, the Yemeni people unite for democracy.

In 2003, Al Qaeda praised Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh as the only Arab leader not beholden to the West. It’s clear why. Saleh has refused to freeze 143 United Nations identified terrorist affiliated bank accounts in Yemen. Some of the millions in those accounts may be proceeds from weapons sales, narcoterrorism, and oil sales. One person who might be able to provide details is Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Saleh’s half brother, prominent military commander, and reputed Al Qaeda loyalist.

Wherever there is a conflict in the region, the jihadi side seems to be armed by the Yemeni weapons pipeline, reportedly controlled by top military officials. Yemen has sold tanks and missiles to the genocidal Sudanese government. Yemen provides weapons to Eritrean and Somali terrorists, according to the Eritrean Center for Strategic Studies. “Its no secret” that weapons smuggling to Palestinian insurgents is sanctioned by the Yemeni government, an Israeli intelligence official said. The Saudis say they catch Yemeni arms dealers “hourly.”

There’s a lot of missing oil and missing oil revenue in Yemen. Parliamentary member Ali Ashal notes the official sale price for Yemeni oil is $22 a barrel, but it is sold on the market at $45 a barrel. The Canadian corporation Nexen takes nearly half of all its Yemeni oil production as royalties. It’s a sweet deal, but not for the Yemeni people. Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world. The word corruption is a rather benign term to describe the rape of the Yemeni economy by its top officials...

Read it all.

Posted by Rebecca at June 14, 2005 8:55 AM
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Comments
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Yemenis live a personal tragedy, but we in the west live a tragedy of a different though no less painful one in that we don't seem to care enough about those we can't see clearly.

Yemenis are about as primitive a people as one can find in the jungles of South America, born free, and everywhere in chains, thanks to the native oligarchy, thanks to geographical isolation, thanks to economics that preclude tampering with the steady supply of oil and the wealth it produces for the rentier parasites of both the West and Yemen itself.

When oil goes the way of coal, what then for the desert nomads and the dispossessed of the cities of Yemen? Those people have nothing but Malthusian nightmares to look forward to, and it will be worse by the time the immiseration of the population meets the apathy of the oil-free economy. The empty quarter will be all the emptier when the Arabians find themselves scrambling in a sand diorama with nothing more than useless rifles and goat bones to gnaw on. Yes, today we need Arab oil, but no, we do not need Arabs. They do not realize the jeopardy of their situation, and islam is not going to feed them. We have no interest in feeding them either once the oil is worthless. They will die unless the Western world takes the initiative to save them from themsleves. It is more than a moral tragedy in the West that we do nothing positive in the Islamic world: it is wrong and it is bad.

The average Yemeni is so addicted to drugs and so deeply sunk in the sands of superstition and ignorance that he has no hope of climbing out of it by his own volition. His life is only better than that of his women, a that comparison should make us sick to contemplate.

So what are we supposed to do, save the whole damned world and all of its violent, stupid, and primitive people from themselves?

The solution to this problem is solved by following the course set by my poorly esteemed relative william Walker, who with a gaggle of lumpen-proletarians, conquered parts of Central America for fun and profit. Yes, it is our duty to save those who can be save, and if our only real motivation to do so is through the love of money and personal power, then so be it. Let us form armies of private citizens who will conquer the world and its miserable people living in hellish traditional cultures, and let us rule over them like Spartans over the Helots till we and they are one, true and free Americans no differnent from ourselves than New Yorkers are from Los Angeleans today.

Yemenis are a backward and vile lot, mean and violent, and human and deserving of life like any others; and if they have to pay the price for the freedom of their children of leaving their children to others to raise into life for the sake of living rather than of dying in a home-made famine, then let us bring Athens to Arabia and to the world via Sparta. Let a thousand William Walkers bloom in the deserts of the world. Let us turn the tragedy of our Human comedy into something we can leave behind with pride for having lived our time as men of worth.

Posted by: sonofwalker

at June 14, 2005 11:50 PM

My, my, suffering from quite a case of white man's burden, are we?

I am happy to report that the Yemeni people are not backward, vile, mean or violent. Actually Ive never met a nicer, kinder, more polite bunch of people ever. The tragedy that is Yemen today is not a result of any inherent character flaw in the Yemeni personality. It is a result of a brutal, extremely authoritiarian, throughly corrupt dictatorship that is strongly linked to al-Qaeda. The economy is savaged by Yemeni leaders and the population attacked with the military and the courts.

The Yemeni people themselves are quite intelligent, couragous, and determined to create a better world for themselves and their children.
The Yemeni democratic reform movement is quite strong, committed, and struggling along in near obscurity.

My article does not call for saving them. In a fair fight they can save themselves. Rather, an end to US support of the dictatorial regime may balance out the power inequity where the King Ali Abdullah Saleh has absolute power and the people have none.

Posted by: Jane

at June 15, 2005 8:25 AM

I'm guessing that when Jane isn't writng puff pieces she's teaching kindergarten. I do not suggest the Yemenis have some racial character flaw, and that if Jane has never met nicer people she simply hasn't been anywhere to speak of.

Aside from taking offense at Jane's smug superiority in the face of my neo-colonialist postion, what is left to write? The Yemeni people are from a different mental universe that those who rule them? Not hardly. If one hangs out at the Moevenpik, well, yes, they are nice middle-class people, just like anyone else--only different. The majority of Yemenis, like the majority of peasants anywhere, suffer from the opression of 'the idiocy of rural living,' and it is a cruel and miserable live they live, regardless of the colourful clothing they wear. Look at the people who live there as traditional Yemenis, not those who do business with foreigners. Look at the majority of Yemenis, people no damned different from any others who have nothing in mind but countless generations of stupidity to rely on for their world-view to help them cope with the modern world, in which they are desperately failing.

Jane's typical philobarbarism, her sentimentality, her reduction of primitives to images on postcards is dangerous to the very lives she claims to respect. How on earth any group of people can be the politest, or anything else, well, it comes down to Jane's good intentions that do nothing for anyone other than Jane.

I have no particular problem with Jane in herself, but the romantic version of tribal primitives wears thin in view of infant morality, entrenched misogyny, boy-rape, blood feuds, lack of sanitation that kills people for no justifiable purpose other than ignorance of germ theory.

If the Janes of the west would live with beduin for months at a time and see what life is like beyond the veil of middle-class sentimentality, if they would find out the daily details of the people they think are like extras in a historical romance movie, they'd see genuine people suffering abject misery, terrible suffering, and violent death. Then the Janes of the world would have more to contribute than niceness politely put. Or not.

Though it'll make me unpopular at this site (again) I'll state that Modernist armed intervention is the only genuine solution to the problems facing the primitives of the world. No links to Carlos Marighella this time. The Janes out there can do it themselves.

Or the Janes can go to my own particularly strident site for more of the same only moreso.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/

I usually post late, and I'm sorry to say I have not written anything specifically about the Yemen. However, peasants are all much the same regardless of the 'diversity' they supposedly have. One size fits all, as it were.

To conclude, it is a crime to ignore the suffering of people who are locked into a slavery of the mind and who die because of it. Not Kipling, dear, Che.

Posted by: sonofwalker

at June 15, 2005 2:52 PM