Britain is today enthusiastically bombing Yemen in the slipstream of the US Airforce. A Yemeni resistance movement has had the temerity to obstruct and deter international shipping from its convenient route through the Red Sea, threatening inflation on consumers in the West. The Houthis demand is that 2 million Palestinian civilians are supplied with the basic necessities to maintain life in the Gaza strip. Instead of seeing this aim as a noble and humanitarian one, the West has, instead of curbing the Zionists in their ethnic cleansing and genocide operation, decided to bomb the Houthis and Yemen.

Chris Hedges (It may be Genocide but it Won’t be Stopped) has written on the ICJ Verdict and the Houthis:

” The ruling by the International Court of Justice was a legal victory for South Africa and the Palestinians, but it will not halt the slaughter. …. The only active resistance to halt the Gaza genocide is provided by Yemen’s Red Sea blockade. Yemen, which was under siege for eight years by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Britain and the U.S., experienced over 400,000 deaths from starvation, lack of health care, infectious diseases and the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, residential areas, markets, funerals and weddings. Yemenis know too well — since at least 2017 multiple U.N. agencies have described Yemen as experiencing “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — what the Palestinians are enduring.”

The US/UK knows this will not deter the Houthis because they are made of sterner stuff than most. And Biden will not launch a full scale war on them, fearing the consequences to Western interests from the Muslim world – and in fact the bulk of humanity, who are sickening from the hypocricy of it all. So the Yemenis are to be frightened off, from their efforts to relieve the plight of the Palestinians. But it seems that all the military might of the West can’t put the wind up the Houthis who still stand tall over the Red Sea straits.

How despicable is the West these days? 

About 15 years ago, in the course of reading up the background to British-Ottoman relations in the period before the Great War for the writing of a book (Britain’s Great War on Turkey, Athol Books) I came across something that surprised me. I had understood that Britain had planned for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the decade before the Great War. But I had never realised that the British had indicated their intentions so openly to the world prior to 1914. And the fact that it did throws a completely different light on the War declared on the Ottomans in 1914 – proving the case that Ottoman Turkiye was the victim of an Imperial predator, despite all the muddying of the waters produced by British Great War propagandists.

The intentions of Britain toward the Ottoman Empire were openly advertised on 5^th March 1911 in a prominent article in The New York Times. This was entitled, “England Bent on Ousting Turkey from Mecca.” The article’s subheading declared that it was Britain’s aim to: “Seek To Restore Complete Independence Of Arabia And To Help The Tribes Set Up One Of Their Princes As The True Caliph – Great Advantages That Would Follow.”

The obviously well-informed article was penned, “By A Veteran Diplomat” who seemingly was one who was kept in the know about England’s policy. The “Veteran Diplomat” wrote:

“George V. may be described as the greatest Moslem ruler of the universe. In this sense: that of the near 200,000,000 members of the human race who accord their spiritual allegiance to the Prophet, some 140,000,000 are subject to his sway, and are content with his rule… In India alone, there are nearly 900,000 Mohammedans… and their loyalty to Kaisr-i-Hind constitutes the strongest bulwark of his throne against internal revolution and foreign invasion.

These are considerations which dominate all others in the policy of England with regard to Turkey, and indeed toward the entire so-called eastern question in which Austria, Italy, France, Russia, but above all, Germany, are also concerned. It is necessary to bear them in mind, in order to understand the role which the British Government has been playing for a number of years past in Arabia, where it is credited with a determination to emancipate from the despotism of the Turks, the cradle of Islam, namely, Arabia, and the Holy cities of Medina and Mecca, which mean even more to the Moslem than Jerusalem to Christian or Jew.

The English have never dreamt of attempting to subject Arabia to their own control. Their aim is to restore the complete independence of Arabia, and to help the tribes to set up as their sovereign one of their princes, who by reason of his authentic membership of the family of the founder of Islam, would as the true Caliph, command the homage of all the various tribes of Arabia, and the spiritual allegiance of Mohammedans in every further part of the world.

A Prince who thus owed his temporal throne, and his religious supremacy, to England’s assistance, might fairly be expected to entertain sentiments of gratitude, which would be shared by his people in connection with the recovery of their national independence, and emancipation from Turkish misrule. 

It would be of inestimable advantage to Great Britain to have Arabia, and above all, the Holy cities of Mecca and of Medina, in the possession of friends rather than of foes, and to have as Caliph, that is to say, as chief representative of the Prophet, here on earth, one who is imbued with sentiments of good will toward the English, rather than an enemy, such as the present Sultan of Turkey and his three immediate predecessors.

The Turkish Sultans, in the same way that they secured possession of Arabia, and of the holy places of Islam, by conquest, obtained the title of Caliph by fraud, which while they fail to deceive the more highly educated Mohammedans, impress the masses of the believers.

Until about forty years ago or so the English, for some reason or another, believed in the pretensions of the Sultans to the Caliphate. It was, indeed, this impression, even more than the dread of seeing Constantinople fall into the hands of Russia, that led Great Britain to champion the cause of the Ottoman Empire and to expend vast quantities of British blood and treasure in its defence at the time of the Crimea War, and to subsequently, in 1877, threaten to open fire on the Russian army if it ventured to enter Constantinople…

The English thought that they owed it, as a great Mohammedan power, to their Moslem fellow-citizens in India to protect the chief of the latter’s church. But the now deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid, by his readiness to lend himself to every anti-British intrigue at Constantinople, and by his reluctance to accept English advice, ere long convinced the statesmen at Calcutta and at Downing Street that as the spiritual head of Islam he constituted not only a perpetual source of trouble but likewise a very serious danger to the Moslem possessions of the British crown.

Realizing the hopelessness of the situation at Stamboul, where the Sultan, with his policy of playing one European power against another, was always certain to find some foreign government ready to outbid England, for the sake of temporary advantages at the latter’s expense, the British authorities in Downing Street and at Calcutta proceeded to investigate the claims of the Turkish Sultans to the Caliphate, and after a most careful inquiry, in which the most learned members of the Mohammedan Church took part, came to the conclusion that the pretensions of the Turkish ruler were unfounded, and were based wholly on usurpation and on false assertions.

The Koran… strictly and explicitly provides that the Caliph of Islam – its supreme Pontiff – must be a linear descendant of the Prophet who founded the faith… The Sultan cannot be considered as being even in the remotest degree descended from Mohammed…

On making this discovery, England ceased to protect and champion the cause of the Sultan, and turned from him, in the first place to the late Grand Sherif of Mecca, who was an authentic descendant of the Prophet, and since his death, some years ago, to the Sheikh Hamid Eddin, ruler of Hadramaut… whose rights to the Caliphate have the strong endorsement of the great Mohammedan university El Ashar at Cairo… the headquarters of the orthodoxy of Islam.

Sheikh Hamid Eddin who enjoys the enthusiastic support of the population of the southern half of Arabia and most of the important Sheikhs and tribes of Northern and central Arabia has now the entire peninsula up in arms against the Turks, with an army of over 100,000 warriors under his command… who, bye the bye, are splendidly armed and possessed of abundant… arms and resources… according to Turkish and German assertions, supplied by the English, and certain it is that while England is very strict in her punishment of gun-running in the Persian Gulf when the weapons, the ammunition, and the machine-guns are destined for Persia, or for the Indian frontier tribes, she offers no opposition whatsoever to the landing of war material of this kind at points on the coast of Arabia…

Slowly but surely is England extending her influence among the various Arab tribes… In fact, Great Britain, which already controls the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and which has secured footholds on the southwestern and southeastern corners of the peninsula is in a fair way of becoming the principal friend, the recognised protector, and predominant power in Arabia, the cradle of Islam.

No English statesman contributed more to the cultivation of English friendship with Arabia than Lord Curzon… Viceroy of India…

I do not know for certain whether it was Lord Curzon who first instituted this policy. But, at any rate, his name has been identified therewith throughout the Orient, and it was largely owing to his action that in Persia, Afghanistan and Morocco… the pretensions of Sultan Abdul Hamid to the Caliphate were not only denied but also derided to such an extent that any Moslem who ventured to offer the Friday prayer for him in a mosque as Commander of the Faithful would have been summarily executed as a traitor…

Every follower of the Prophet, no matter what his station in life, is expected to make at least once before he dies a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Some of the pilgrims are men of great wealth… exposed to… the certainty of being shamefully robbed, owing to the appalling conditions of Turkish misrule at Mecca and Medina.

The opening of the railroad from Damascus to Medina, a little over a year ago, has not to any extent improved matters. For owing to the chaos which now prevails in all parts of the Ottoman Empire the railroad in question from which so much was expected no longer furnishes any safety of conveyance…

The cause of the present rebellion in Arabia… is the indignation on the part of the Arabs against the Young Turk Party now in control in Constantinople in giving the infidel within the gates equal political rights with the faithful, at the expense of the latter.

At Constantinople German influence has long since superseded that of Great Britain and has become dominant with the Sultan and his ministers who affect to look upon the Kaiser as the protector of Islam. Indeed the Germans have every thing their own way at Stamboul. When last summer the Sublime Porte was in desperate straits for money, it found the English and French money markets closed to it, but was able to get the funds from Germany…

It is to offset this that England is bent on ousting Turkey, Germany’s friend and ally, from Arabia, and from possession of the Holy Places of Islam. If the Turks lose Mecca and Medina, the last vestige of the Sultan’s claim to obedience on the part of the faithful, as Caliph, will disappear. Indeed, it would mean the break up of the Turkish Empire, as now constituted, and the transfer whatever influence the Padishah at Stamboul has enjoyed in the past, over Mohammedans, to the new guardians of the cradle of their faith, the friends of Great Britain.”        

At the time, I had to check the year of The New York Times article’s publication – that it was really 1911 and not 1915 – when the policy became fully activated through the Arab Revolt. The thing that surprised me was the annunciation of a prepared Arab revolt by Britain in 1911. I had never read of any substantial uprising against the Ottoman administration in this period and then searched for information about it without success. So, what had happened to Britain’s scheming in 1911?

It seems that Britain was scratching around in the region trying to incite rebellion against the Ottomans by taking it upon itself as “a Great Mussulman Empire” to confer Islamic legitimacy on any rebels she could find. There was indeed a small conflict between Sheikh Eddin of Hadramaut, an area of Yemen on the South-Western tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Ottomans in 1911. But it does not seem to have come to very much. And it certainly had nothing to do with Arab nationalism.

Hadramaut and Aden, at the Southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, had been taken into the British sphere of influence after the purchase of the Suez Canal and the Sultan had been “persuaded” to recognize them as a ‘protectorate’ of England back in 1873. But the English had had its eyes on Southern Yemen for more than two centuries before that.

 Yemen was an Ottoman possession since 1538. The Ottomans acquired a taste for its local coffee – Mocha and absorbed the local tribal leaders into the Islamic empire. During the Napoleonic Wars when France established a presence in Egypt it was discussed in London whether to seize Yemen to shut the Red Sea at the tip of the Peninsular to deny other powers access. The defeat of Napoleon in Egypt temporarily ended such discussions as Britain went onto other things in the world.

In 1838 the East India Company’s Governor of Bombay, Sir Robert Grant thought it necessary to “seize places of strength in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf” area for India’s Defence. The small port of Aden in Southern Yemen seemed ideal for his purpose so in January 1839 negotiations were opened with local tribal leaders to secure its peaceful cession to Britain. Negotiations failed so Commander Stanford Beresford Haines of the Indian Navy led a squadron of ships and 700 British and Indian troops in an assault. The town was bombarded, and the local Sultan surrendered with Aden becoming the first colonial acquisition of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Aden was thus acquired by the East India Company and detached from the rest of Yemen for the next 128 years, until 1967. Aden was part of British India and administered as such after Britain took over direct control of the sub-continent after the “Indian Mutiny,” until the 1935 Government of India Act. At that point, fearing India would be lost, Aden was stealthily taken out of the India Office and given to the Colonial Office. When India gained its independence in 1947, it expected that Aden would be part of its possessions, but the British declared that it was obviously part of the Arab and not Indian world and kept it for the Empire until an insurgency during the 1960s made it too costly to hold.

The detaching of the Southern part of Yemen from the rest by Britain has had implications for its governing ever since. The British expanded north and east from Aden, eventually establishing protectorates over more than a dozen of the many local statelets. In 1904 a joint commission surveyed the border, and a treaty was concluded, establishing the frontier between Ottoman North Yemen and the British possessions in South Yemen. The British occupation retarded the political development of the South and the formerly Ottoman part is the most politically energetic region of the country. The Houthis emerged out of Yemen’s mountainous North around 2004 from a Shia revivalist movement founded to shore up Zaidism, which local religious and social leaders feared was under threat from the encroachment of Sunni ideologies from the South.

The 1911 event occurred during the emergency of the Italian invasion of Libya when Ottoman forces were stretched in defending the Muslims of North Africa from European Imperialism. The Ottomans’ difficulty was England’s opportunity, it seems. The Sultan requested that the Shereef of Mecca help in relieving a besieged Turkish garrison in Obha in the Asir territory, which he duly did with an army of Bedouins, slaves and mercenaries. And the Turks dismissed the whole affair as “a quickly suppressed uprising of roving robber-bands in the pay of England.” (C.S. Hurgronje, The Revolt in Arabia, p.27)

When Sheikh Eddin disappointed, England returned to the Husseins five years later (having courted Ibn Saud and the Wahhabbis in between) and the Arab Revolt of 1911 became a dry run for the main event which was to take place in 1916.

George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening (1938) is a search for Arab nationalism. What emerges from this search is the clear fact that Arab nationalism hardly existed prior to 1914. It was confined to a small group of largely European-educated intellectuals before the Great War. Most of these had been part of the Arab elite that had been patronised by the former Sultan and had been neglected by the Young Turks to the extent that they took umbrage. Some of it was also the result of American Protestant missionary activity in the region and could be mostly located in its hinterland of activity.

Arabs had their representatives in the Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul, in both the lower and upper chambers. They were found in the Sultan’s Cabinet, in high administrative posts, as Valis or provincial governors, and in 1909 an Arab had been appointed Prime Minister. There was considerable local autonomy and Arabs were frequently in charge of the regions in which they lived when things were stable.

The position of the Arab in the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, far superior to that of the Irish in the British Empire – even if Home Rule had been conceded to John Redmond. 

Arab leaders may have desired greater influence in Istanbul and more local autonomy – fearing the encroachment of Young Turk centralization and secularizing – but they did not desire to be ruled by the Husseins, for instance, as a cover for the control of non-Muslims. The mass of Arabs seem to have lived lives of reasonable contentment within the loose Islamic state of the Ottomans and did not want “liberation” by the so-called self-conferring “great Moslem Power of England.”

Antonius’s book reveals that nothing came of England’s intrigues in Arabia in 1911. When Sheikh Eddin disappointed the Shereef of Mecca did not respond either – despite all the arms flooding in to assist him in a Holy War. There just seems not to have been the will for jihad against the Ottoman ‘oppressor’ on the behalf of the Imperial ‘protector’ of Islam. And many Arabs, I would guess, would curse the day that there ever was.

In 1911 Britain’s efforts proved to no avail. It required the catastrophe of a Great War to lure the Arabs into a state of nationalism and a disturbing of the structures in which they existed. However, by then they were to find out that Britain had another project in mind – Zionism – that would aggravate their new world for evermore.

However, in 2023 the Houthis were to emerge from Yemen to provide the chief geopolitical resistance to the Zionists and their backers from the West, who provide the aircraft, bombs and missiles for the ethnic cleansing and attempt at genocide in Palestine. It was the British who wished to employ the Prophet in their Imperial Service, so how can they complain about the real deal? As Zaydi Shiites, the Houthis describe themselves as Ansaru Allah which translates as “the Partisans of God.” This God-given vocation is attained through their historic linkage to Zayd bin Ali, the great grandson of Ali Ibn Abi Taleeb, prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law, whom they regard as “a model of pure caliph”

Some Houthi poetry:

هنا شعب ما بين ألف دولة وسلطنة تفرّق دمه يا مجلس الأمن باجتماع

Here is a nation between a thousand countries and a sultanate.

You disperse its blood, O Security Council, in a meeting!

ملايين الأنفس كنها غير كاينة  تحاصر وتعزل منقطع ذكرها انقطاع

Millions of souls made to be dead, intentionally besieged and isolated to be invisible.

صواع الأمم مدسوس في كل شاحنة وما تحجز إلا من لقت عنده المتاع

The measuring cup of the UN is cleverly tucked in every truck And they only sanction those with bare human substance.

بغبة سنين القحط واشد الأزمنة تصادر سفن سد الرمق حيلة الصواع

With the desire to inflict more hardships and years of famine, Ships of sustenance and human aid are taken away in the name of the ‘measuring cup.’

تداهن وتتغذى الوحوش المداهنة على أكباد وقلوب المساكين الجياع

Pleasing and feeding flattering monsters on the livers and hearts of the hungry poor.

أمين الأمم نايب زعيم القراصنة والإنسانية هيئة لوحشية الضباع

The Secretary General of the UN is the deputy leader of the pirates.  And their humanity is nothing but an assembly of hyenas’ brutality.

ماشي حقوق إنسان عند الفراعنة ولاشي كرامة ميْت في عالم الضباع

The oppressing Pharaohs (the Saudis) know no human rights, and there is not even dignity for the dead in the world of hyenas.

لنا رب ما يغفل ولا تأخذه سِنة ولاشي خسارة في سبيلة ولا ضياع

We have a lord who neither forgets nor ignores, There is no loss in his way, nor forfeiture.

وهو وحده المانح ومنه المعاونة وتأييده التأييد ودفاعه الدفاع

He alone is the Giver and the Sustainer, And His support is the real support and His defense is the defense.

تضيق الدنى وتضيق وتضل فاهنة سكينة وعزة ومجد وشموخ وارتفاع

This world can be difficult and constrained, but remains demeaning, there is always tranquility, dignity, glory and uplifting.

وشعب اليمن غير الشعوب المدجنة يقوده علم والاصطفاء غير الاقتراع

Unlike other pampered nations, The nation of Yemen is guided by knowledge and noble selections rather than elections.

شموخه سما فوق السماوات ثامنة يماني يتوه الكون في صدره الوساع

His glory is the eighth above the heavens, a Yemeni undefeated by the world with his wide chest.

ومن يعتصم بالله هو بايمكنه وشعب اليمن باينتزع حقه انتزاع

And whoever holds fast to God, He will support, And the people of Yemen can forcibly snatch their rights

على الله وحده لا سواه المراهنة وصدق التحرك والتولي وإلا تباع

On God alone we rely, He is the true inspiration of movement, leading and following.

ولا بد ما يلقى اليهود الصهاينة نهاية يهود ابناء قريضة وقينقاع

And eventually the Zionist Jews will face the end of the Jews of Gereida and Qaynuqa.

(Note on references: In the Holy Quran, section 12 verse 69-79, the King’s measuring cup (ṣwāʿĀlmalk) is the object that Prophet Yusuf secretly hid in his younger brother’s bag. After provisions were provided to Prophet Yusuf’s brothers, the soldiers of the Palace accused the caravan of stealing the king’s measuring cup. This allowed Prophet Yusuf to start searching his brothers’ bags first and end the search by returning the cup. This planned setup allowed prophet Yusuf to use the king’s stolen cup as an excuse for keeping his younger brother from the company of his other cruel brothers. This Quranic story is invoked in the zamil to explain how the UN has orchestrated a setup, similar to prophet Yusuf’s use of the King’s missing cup, in order to lawfully grant the Saudi-led coalition legitimate reasons for attacking Yemen and its people.

The names Gureida and Qaynuqa’a refer to two Jewish tribes that lived in the city of Medina in Arabia and were expelled from the area for breaking an important treaty known as the Constitution of Medina. Trouble began when a Jewish Goldsmith looking for money stripped a Muslim woman naked. After communal violence erupted out of this incident the Prophet defeated the private Jewish army which had been organised. Eight of the clauses of the Constitution of Medina had given specific rights to the Jews who lived among the Believers. One stated: “And the Jews of Banu ‘Awf shall be considered as one community (Ummat) along with the believers—for the Jews their religion, and for the Muslims theirs, be one client or patron. But whoever does wrong or commits treachery brings evil only on himself and his household.”