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A special feature by Kalinga Seneviratne* to mark UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day.

SYDNEY (IDN) — In recent months, there has been alarming one-sided reporting in the so-called mainstream media—both internationally and nationally—that sounds more like public relations handouts from the big pharmaceutical companies from the West. This ‘vaccine consent’ journalism and the labelling of anyone questioning the safety or ethics of the vaccine roll out as “conspiracy theorists” is slowly but surely killing the “watchdog” role of journalism.

The Libertarian Media Function Theory (LMFT) that we have been teaching in mass communication courses for over half a century as the basis of a ‘free media’, says that the media should have absolute freedom to play the role of a “watchdog” and there should be no censorship because the people are rational, and they should be allowed to make up their minds once they receive a diversity of viewpoints from the news media.

The theme of this year’s UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day (May 3) is ‘Information as a Public Good’ and is focusing on topics such as transparency of online platforms and the importance of media and information literacy. But it is equally important to focus on the transparency of mainstream corporate media and whether they are acting in the public good, when labelling those who wish to raise concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine roll out as “conspiracy theorists”?

The “watchdog” model of journalism has been on the decline around the world in the past two decades and the ‘manufacturing vaccine consent’ journalism we see today vindicates Noam Chomsky’s theory that the libertarian model is dead in the West. He argues, that as the power of corporate media increase, what we have is a “manufacturing consent” model of “propaganda” journalism to promote the interests of whoever owns or funds the media—be it governments or corporations or powerful interest groups.

Robin Marantz Henig writing in the National Geographic in July last year noted that, except for AIDS, other recent epidemics—such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014—did not go global. “It was easy to attribute susceptibility in other countries to behaviours that didn’t exist in ours,” argued Henig.

“Chinese Virus”

Thus, when Covid-19 spread to the West, the Anglo-American (as well as the Indian) media was quick to grasp US President Donald Trump’s assertion that this is a “Chinese Virus” and politicized the pandemic with reporting sprinkled with racism. This mentality has continued to this day, when non-western vaccines are dismissed as “untrustworthy” even though medical evidence seems to indicate that these are safer (because these uses tested technology, not new experimentations) and as effective as the western ones.

This racism led to the initial Chinese concerns of a possible American or European origin of Covid-19 were not taken seriously while calling for an investigation of American concerns about the virus escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was considered —even by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Among Chinese concerns was the closing down of a US army deadly germ research centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland in August 2019 by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over safety concerns.

In October 2019, an exercise called “Event 201″[1], organized by John Hopkins University’s Centre for Health Security, was held, simulating a pandemic, which causes 65 million deaths. The press release said: “Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually become efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic”.

It goes on to describe the virus as originating in pig farms in Brazil and quietly spreading to the community. It then spreads by air travel to Europe, the US, and China, and ultimately creates health scare chaos globally. The event was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is also a huge donor to the WHO contributing over $400 million a year[2].

While promoting Covid-19 vaccination with evangelical zeal, in an interview with Britain’s Sky News on April 25, Gates opposed the lifting of patents on Covid-19 vaccines, which countries like South Africa and India have been pressing for, to make these more widely available and especially at cheaper prices.

“The thing that’s holding things back, in this case, is not intellectual property,” Gates said. “It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You’ve got to do the trial on these things. And every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”[3]

A taboo subject

But questioning or investigating the effectiveness of the trials done on the western vaccines is a taboo subject in the mainstream media today. Even when development of blood clots or deaths following the taking of these vaccines are reported, it is dismissed as “insignificant” compared to millions that have been vaccinated.

In New Zealand, when an airport cleaner who had taken a western vaccine was diagnosed with Covid-19 in late April, the media covered it up arguing that no vaccine will give 100 percent protection. At the same time, when a Chinese medical officer said that their vaccines don’t yet give protection in the 90 per cent range, this was amplified in the Anglo-American media as an admission of the ineffectiveness of the Chinese vaccines.

But, when a peer reviewed article in the British medical journal Lancet[4] said Russia’s Sputnik V was found to be about 95 percent effective after clinical trials, that news was basically ignored or downplayed by the same media.

According to an analysis released on April 22 by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, major western vaccine producers—Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca—have paid out a combined $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders over the past year. The new report notes that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are projecting revenues of $33.5 billion this year from their mRNA vaccines[5]

In recent weeks, there have been many video clips circulated through social media sites where western activists have accused the rich pharmaceutical companies of using their financial resources to influence the mainstream media to promote their vaccines. UNESCO should be investigating these as part of their media literacy programs.

Many of the western countries’ inability to control the pandemic compared to initial successes in Asia (except for India), has badly dented Western egos. As 2020 was coming to an end, it seems they were racing to prove that they were still the masters of knowledge and the sciences. But when the Russians beat them by launching the Sputnik V vaccine the Western media dismissed it as not properly tested.

But no such questions were asked when the Pfizer vaccine was launched a couple of months later. President Trump hailed it as a “medical miracle” and said the vaccine “will save millions of lives and soon end the pandemic.” [6]

Writing in the South China Morning Post recently, Chandran Nair, the founder and CEO of the Hong Kong based Global Institute for Tomorrow noted that for months, the Russian, Chinese, and Indian vaccines have been dismissed as a serious option to combat Covid-19 and viewed with suspicion.[7].

Non-Western vaccines face deep-rooted racism

Looking at the way the world talks about non-Western vaccines shows “structural Western privilege and deep-rooted racism” argues Nair. He adds that when Sinovac’s Brazilian partner noted an efficacy rate of around 50 percent for preventing mild illness, Western commentators jumped on it while ignoring the far more positive news on Sinovac’s ability to stop moderate and severe illness.

“However, when Johnson & Johnson released similar numbers in their trial, the vaccine was still hailed as an important addition to the vaccine portfolio … in preventing moderate to severe illness—much like Sinovac’s offering” Nair points out.

According to Bloomberg’s ‘Vaccine Tracker’ 6 of the 10 top countries in the world on a dose per capita basis, use the Russian, Chinese and Indian vaccines. 57 countries according to recent statistics have ordered Russia’s Sputnik V and this includes 3 European countries —Austria, Hungary and Slovenia—even though EU medical authorities are yet reviewing it.

While the international media focused on whether the WHO would approve a proposal to investigate the origins of Covid-19, the World Health Assembly in November 2020 adopted a much more important resolution that the international response to the pandemic should be considered a “global public good” and any unjustified obstacles must be removed. It was specifically pointed out that flexibilities allowed in the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) need to be strengthened.

On October 2, 2020, India and South Africa had presented a proposal for a waiver of a number of provisions in the TRIPS agreement as a legal-institutional response to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Western nations, particularly the US, UK, Canada, and EU are resisting such changes to the IPR regime that favours big pharmaceutical companies.

While ‘Big Pharma’ resists shedding any of their controls over IPRs, the media need to investigate how much public monies have been spent on vaccination development that these companies are benefiting from. This is “watchdog” journalism in the public interest.

Beneficiaries of research in public-funded universities

In an article in the World University News (WUN), questions were raised on who is benefiting from years of research in public funded universities in vaccine development since the SARS and MERS epidemic. For example, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use what is called mRNA research. “Basic research on DNA vaccines began at least 25 years ago and RNA vaccines have benefitted from 10 to 15 years of strong research,” says immunologist Akiko Iwasaki of Yale School of Medicine.

WUN also points out that the Moderna vaccine has benefited from university research that used RNA sequencing to attack earlier coronavirus strains such as SARS and MERS. Thus, Moderna has collaborated with Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop their vaccine, while Astra Zeneca use a different ‘viral vector’ technology, it has worked with Oxford University and benefitted from years of research into selecting the vector[8].

WUN points out that Pfizer has not taken any US federal government money to avoid any government control of their IPR, but Bill Gates Foundation has helped to “surcharge the research”. With Gates so passionately promoting the uptake of Western vaccines, the media needs to question his financial stakes in such vaccines. He also needs to be questioned about what made him fund “Event 201” and his continuing advocacy of vaccines that benefit a handful of pharmaceutical companies. After all, a major emphasis of the “watchdog” theory is that journalists must question people in powerful positions.

Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank (ADB)—which is controlled by Japan and Western governments—announced on March 12 that they will be giving a loan of $400 million to the Philippines to buy vaccines and the vaccines they could buy are only the ones approved by the WHO (so far it is only Western ones). The ADB will pay the vaccine manufacturers direct, and the Philippines has to pay back the loan within 10 years. Philippines is the first recipient of ADB’s new $9 billion Asia Pacific Vaccine Access Facility (APVAX).

If the Chinese offered such a loan to buy Chinese vaccines the Western media will be shouting their guts out claiming this is a “debt trap”. The ADB loan sniff of such a trap and the ethics of this should be questioned.

“The big question is whether Western nations can shed their sense of superiority and moral authority which is integral to their approach to actively retaining and preserving economic power within the globalised system, at a time when they are feeling most insecure from the rise of others such as China,” argues Nair.

Western mainstream media focus on Covid-19

As we focus on press freedom, it is also important to question the focus of especially western mainstream media reporting of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There has been far too much focus on deaths and Covid-19 test results, and the recovery rates have all but ignored. Currently in India, some 19 million have tested positive to Covid-19 and about 200,000 have died, but that means 18.8 million have recovered. Same applies to the US, where 33.1 million have tested positive and just over 590,000 have died, which means about 32.5 million have recovered.

If the recovery rates were emphasized instead of death rates, would there have been less fear generated in the community? After all, every year most countries go through a flu epidemic where thousands die, and millions recover. We have learned to live with it because the media has not focused on death rates.

There is also another important issue that needs to be addressed on World Press Freedom Day. That is how, civil liberties have been curtailed around the world to fight the pandemic. Forget the Global South, western nations have used ‘bio-security” protocols or laws to muzzle the media that question government policies such as lockdowns, vaccine passports and freedom of assembly.

As mentioned earlier, the very essence of a “free media” is access to a diversity of viewpoints, the media need to facilitate it if it is going to be the “watchdog”. [IDN-InDepthNews – 02 May 2021]

* The writer is the author of ‘Myth of Free Media and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era’ (Sage 2020).

Photo: Vaccine equity and not vaccine consent should be part of the watchdog model. Credit: WHO / P. Phutpheng

IDN is the flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate.

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[1] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html

[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2020-05-29/gates-foundation-donations-to-who-nearly-match-those-from-us-government

[3] https://observer.com/2021/04/bill-gates-oppose-lifting-covid-vaccine-patent-interview/

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00191-4/fulltext#:~:text=Lancet.,(published%20online%20Feb%202.)&text=report%20their%20interim%20results%20from,across%20all%20participant%20age%20groups.

[5]https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/04/22/big-pharmas-appalling-26-billion-in-shareholder-payouts-could-fund-vaccines-for-all-of-africa/ fbclid=IwAR05q9p95chYTF4BHrk72lgI1CWGPmLrUUzmDdh3nGtPJt_XPE-NI4Wdcrc

[6] https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/trump-hails-approved-coronavirus-vaccine-medical-miracle

[7]https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3125085/vaccine-apartheid-how-white-privilege-woven-fabric-globalisation

[8] ttps://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2021022413060258

2 May 2021

Source: www.indepthnews.net

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

At a recent virtual J Street Conference, US Senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren broke yet another political taboo when they expressed willingness to leverage US military aid as a way to pressure Israel to respect Palestinian human rights.

Sanders believes that the US “must be willing to bring real pressure to bear, including restricting US aid, in response to moves by either side that undermine the chances for peace,” while Warren showed a willingness to restrict military aid as a “tool” to push Israel to “adjust course”.

Generally, Sanders’ increasingly Pro-Palestinian stances are more progressive than those of Warren, although both are still hovering within the mainstream Democratic discourse – willingness to criticize Israel as long as that criticism is coupled with equal – if not even more pointed – criticism of the Palestinians.

Seraj Assi explained this dichotomy in an article published in Jacobin Magazine: “Sanders’ stance on Israel-Palestine could undoubtedly be more progressive. He has consistently voted in favor of US military aid to Israel, which subsidizes occupation, settlement expansion, and systematic violence against Palestinians. He still opposes the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign, signing onto an anti-BDS letter to the UN Secretary-General in 2017 and reiterating his opposition to BDS”, years later.

However, as Assi himself indicated, Sanders’ position on Palestine and Israel cannot be judged simply based on some imagined ideal, but within the context of the US’ own political culture, one in which any criticism of Israel is viewed as ‘heretical’, if not outright anti-Semitic.

Sanders’ influence on the overall Democratic political discourse is also palpable, as he has paved the way for more radical, younger voices in the US Congress who now openly criticize Israel, while remaining largely unscathed by the wrath of the pro-Israel lobby, mainly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Gone are the days when AIPAC and other pro-Israel pressure groups shaped domestic American political discourse on Israel and Palestine. Nothing indicates that the tide has completely turned against Israel, as this is nowhere close, yet. However, a decisive US public opinion shift must also not be ignored. It is this popular shift that is empowering voices within the Democratic Party to speak out more freely without jeopardizing their political careers, as was often the case in the past.

In order to decipher the roots of the anti-Israeli occupation, pro-Palestinian sentiments among Democrats, these numbers could be helpful. While Sanders, Warren and other Democratic officials who are willing to criticize Israel but vehemently reject BDS, the public within the Democratic Party does not hold the same view. An early 2020 Brookings Institute poll found that, among Democrats who had heard about BDS, “a plurality, 48%, said they supported the Movement, while only 15% said they opposed it.”

This indicates that grassroots activism, which directly engages with ordinary Americans, is largely shaping their views on the Movement to boycott Israel. Ordinary Democrats are leading the way, while their representatives are merely trying to catch up.

Other numbers are also indicative of the fact that the vast majority of Americans oppose pro-Israeli efforts to promote laws and legislations that criminalize boycotts as a political tool, as such laws, they rightly believe, infringe on the constitutional rights to free speech. Expectedly, 80% among Democrats lead the way in opposing such measures, followed by 76% independents, then 62% among Republicans.

Such news must be disturbing for Tel Aviv as it has heavily invested, through AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, in branding BDS or any other movement that criticizes Israel’s military occupation and systematic apartheid in Palestine, as anti-Semitic.

Israelis find this new phenomenon quite confounding. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been repeatedly criticized in the past, even by mainstream Israeli officials and media pundits, for turning Democrats against Israel by unabashedly siding with former President Donald Trump and his Republican Party against their domestic rivals. Hence, Netanyahu has turned the support of Israel from being a bipartisan issue into a Republican-only cause.

A February 2020 Gallup poll perfectly reflected that reality as it found that a majority of Democrats, 70%, support the establishment of a Palestinian State, in comparison with 44% Republicans.

The rooted support for Israel among establishment Democrats is too deep – and well-funded – to be erased in a few years, but the pro-Palestine, anti-Israeli-occupation trend continues unabated, even after the defeat of Trump at the hands of Democratic candidate, now President, Joe Biden.

The last year, in particular, was possibly difficult for the Israel lobby, which is unaccustomed to electoral disappointments. Last June, for example, the lobby painted itself into a corner when it rallied behind one of the most faithful Israel supporters, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, depicting his opponent, Jamaal Bowman, as ‘anti-Israel’.

Bowman was hardly anti-Israel, though his position is relatively more moderate than the extremist one-sided views of Engel. In fact, Bowman had made it clear that he continues to support US aid to Israel and openly opposed BDS. However, unlike Engel, Bowman was not the perfect candidate whose love for Israel is blind, unconditional and ever-lasting. To the embarrassment of the lobby, Engel lost his seat in the US Congress, one which he had held for more than 30 years.

Unlike Bowman, Cori Bush, a grassroots activist from Missouri who has ousted the pro-Israel candidate, Congressman William Lacy Clay, has defended the Palestine boycott Movement as being a matter of freedom of speech, despite a relentless smear campaign describing her as ‘anti-Semitic’ for merely appearing in photos with pro-Palestinian activists. Last August, Bush – a black woman from a humble background – became US Representative for Missouri’s 1st congressional district, despite all pro-Israeli efforts to deny her such a position.

Indeed, it is important to acknowledge the role played by individuals in the undeniable shift within the American political discourse on Palestine and Israel. However, it is ordinary people who are making the real difference. While the Israel lobby still wields the dual weapon of money and propaganda, politically engaged grassroots activism is proving decisive in garnering American solidarity with Palestine, while slowly translating this solidarity into actual political gains.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

29 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Manlio Dinucci

General Scott Miller, US and allied forces commander in Afghanistan, announced on April 25 the beginning of foreign troops withdrawal that should be completed by September 11, according to President Biden’s decision. Is the US ending the war waged for almost twenty years? In order to understand this communication, it is first of all necessary to consider the results of the war.

The toll in human lives is largely unquantifiable: the “direct deaths” among the US military would amount to about 2,500, and the seriously injured soldiers are over 20,000. The contractors (US mercenaries) killed would be about 4,000, plus an unknown number of wounded men. Losses among the Afghan military would amount to around 60,000. Civilian deaths are in fact incalculable: according to the United Nations, they would have been around 100,000 in just ten years. It is impossible to determine the “indirect deaths” from poverty and disease, caused by the social and economic consequences of the war.

The economic balance is relatively quantifiable. For the war – the New York Times documented on the basis of data compiled by Brown University – the US spent over 2,000 billion dollars, plus over 500 billion for medical assistance to veterans. The war operations cost $ 1,500 billion, but the exact amount remains “opaque“. Training and arming the Afghan government forces (over 300,000 men) cost 87 billion. 54 billion dollars were spent on “economic aid and reconstruction”, largely wasted because of corruption and inefficiency, to “build hospitals that never treated patients and schools that did not educate any student, and sometimes they didn’t even exist”. 10 billion dollars have been spent on drug fight with the following result: the opium cultivated acreage has quadrupled, so much so that it has become the main economic activity in Afghanistan, and today supplies 80% of opium illegally produced in the world.

The United States has become heavily in debt to finance the war in Afghanistan: so far, it had to pay 500 billion dollars, again with public money and it will rise to over 600 billion dollars in 2023. Furthermore, 350 billion have been spent so far for the US military who have suffered serious injuries and disabilities in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will rise to 1,000 billion in the next decades, more than half of this expense due to the consequences of the war in Afghanistan.

The political-military balance of the war, that shed rivers of blood and burned enormous resources, is catastrophic for the United States, except for the military-industrial complex which made enormous profits with it. “The Taliban, who have grown stronger, control or contend much of the country,” wrote the New York Times. At this point, Secretary of State Blinken and others propose that the United States officially recognize and finance the Taliban, since thus “they might govern less harshly than feared after taking partial or full power — in order to win recognition and financial support from world powers”.

At the same time, the New York Times reported, “the Pentagon, American spy agencies and Western allies are refining plans to deploy a less visible but still potent force in the region, including drones, long-range bombers, and spy networks.” According to Biden’s order the US is withdrawing its 2,500 soldiers, the New York Times reported, “but the Pentagon actually has about 1,000 more troops on the ground there than it has publicly acknowledged, belonging to special forces under both Pentagon and CIA ”, in addition to over 16,000 US contractors that could be used to train Afghan government forces.

The official purpose of the new strategic plan is “to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States”. The real purpose remains the same as twenty years ago: to have a strong military presence in this area at the crossroads among the Middle East, Central, Southern and Eastern Asia. It is an area of primary strategic importance especially towards Russia and China.

*

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

27 April 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Yanis Iqbal

On April 12, 2021, a meeting was held in Germany between US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and UN Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths. In a press statement following the meeting, Griffiths said: “The war in Yemen has lasted over six years. In these six years Yemenis have increasingly and appallingly, lacked access to food and medicine; more than six years with no basic services; with restriction of movement in, around and out of the country; and over six years of the children of Yemen being deprived of schooling, and being deprived of their future. A generation has been lost.”

Griffith’s lamentation of Yemen’s tragedy occurred against a backdrop of intensifying conflict in the city of Marib – the last governorate under the control of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. The spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen, Basheer Omar, told a news outlet, “If the looming battle continues and reaches the city centre, then 350,000 residents will flee.” “Civilians in Marib have been suffering a lot…They need life-saving aid and medical assistance.” “We urge the conflict parties to agree to a ceasefire to allow our teams, along with the teams of the Yemen Red Crescent Society to get access to these areas to help provide humanitarian help to those in need and to retrieve the dead bodies.” Why is Yemen bleeding so profusely?

The Rise of Houthis

Houthis are one of the central actors in Yemen’s ongoing conflict, fighting against imperialist aggressions. They belong to a religious movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam. The Zaydis name their sect after Zayd ibn Ali, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who was martyred in the year 740, while leading a rebellion against the Umayyad monarchy. It is important to note that Zaydism has few theological or practical differences with Shafi‘ Sunni Islam, which is dominant in most of the rest of Yemen. Their beliefs and rituals are so close that people of both groups pray together in the same mosques.

Houthis rose to prominence in the early years of the 21st century. In 2000, Riyadh signed the Treaty of Jeddah which “resolved” the boundary disputes dating back to Saudi border claims made in 1934. The Saudi border regions of Asir, Najran, and Jizan were originally Yemeni regions annexed by Saudi Arabia with British support following the defeat of Imam Yahya-ruled Kingdom of Yemen in 1934. They contain Shiite Zaydi tribes whose allegiance may lie more favorably with the Houthi movement than with the Saudi government.

With the signing of the Treaty, a program to separate the countries with walls, fences, and security posts began. Those who moved back and forth across these lands for all their lives were now required to obtain visas to pass through newly fenced areas. A former member of parliament, Husain al-Houthi emphasized the right of local communities in Sa’ada to use sources of water and grazing lands increasingly rendered inaccessible by expanded Saudi border patrols and the privatization of some key tracks of lands as per International Monetary Fund (IMF) “structural adjustment” demands.

Houthi-led resistance resulted in six cycles of fighting in Sa’ada between 2004 and 2010. The first lasted from June 22 to September 10 2004; the second lasted from March 19 to April 11 2005; the third lasted from November 30 2005 to February 23 2006; the fourth lasted from February 16 to June 17 2007; the fifth lasted from May 2 2008 to July 17 2008; the sixth lasted from August 11 2009 to February 11 2010.

In its campaign of orchestrated violence against the Houthis, Yemen’s government of Ali Abdullah Saleh enlisted the support of al-Qaida sympathizers and Salafi jihadists. The latter’s presence was the outcome of a long and toxic process. Sa’ada played host to a network of Salafi madrasas, sponsored in part by money from the Saudis, who established a religious footprint throughout Yemen from the 1980s onwards.

Many viewed the spread of Saudi-sponsored Salafism as an attempt to weaken Zaydi socio-political influence. This, in turn, spurred the foundation of a Zaydi educational trust, called the Youthful Believers, and disputes with the authorities over the Youthful Believers’ educational curriculum, coupled with allegations that the government was replacing Zaydi imams with Salafi preachers, contributed to the complex development of the battles in Sa’ada.

Waging War

In September 2014, Houthi rebels situated in Sa’ada took over the capital city of Sana’a in alliance with ousted Saleh’s Republican Guards. The Houthis were disappointed with the undemocratic character of the National Dialogue Conference (NDC). The NDC was initiated during the 2011 Arab Spring agitations in Yemen when most of the members of Saleh government came out openly against his rule and demanded his resignation. Street protests and internal opposition within the government led by figures like Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and Sadiq al-Ahmar led to Saleh’s resignation in 2012.

The transitional government was headed by Saleh’s vice president Hadi. The mandate of the NDC was to involve all the stakeholders in Yemen and come up with a new constitution. However, the proceedings of the NDC were marred by frequent Gulf interventions due to which most of the parties, including the Houthis, had suspicions regarding its operations. After the assassination of two of its delegates during the proceedings of the NDC, the Houthis demanded greater representation in the transitional government and questioned its right to take central policy decisions.

The dominance of pro-Saudi Islah Party members in the transitional government was also problematic for the Houthis. Established in 1990, the Islah Party combines Sunni Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, a more extremist faction led by al-Zindani, and a third one composed of northern tribesmen, mostly from the Hashed confederation (led by al-Ahmar family).

With Houthis’ entry into Sana’a, Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis assembled an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015. Bombing of Yemen by lackeys of imperialism did not defeat the Houthis.

Houthis succeeded in capturing the crucial port city of Hodeida in the Red Sea after a lengthy war. This city is the entry point for most of the crucial food and other imports and a major export hub for Yemeni goods. It is estimated that Hodeida is a gateway for almost 80% of goods trade to the country. Given its strategic significance, the Hadi government and the Saudi-led alliance wanted to take control of the port. The control over the city would have strengthened the Saudi alliance’s bargaining power vis-à-vis Houthis, in the United Nations (UN)-led negotiations. The Houthis, however, established firm control over the city.

Ending the Genocide

No significant efforts have been made toward ending the genocide in Yemen. On February 4, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he was ending US participation in “offensive” attacks and “relevant” weapons shipments. He did not clarify the exact meaning of “offensive operations” and “relevant arms sales”. On February 24, 2021, a letter from 41 Congress Members asked him what he meant by his vaguely-worded statement and inquired whether he would support Congress ending the war. The letter requested a response before March 25, 2021. There seems to have been none.

Since the start of the war in 2015, USA has provided full backing to the Saudi-led coalition, including technical support, training fighter jet pilots, targeting assistance, selling arms, and supplying military hardware. The same is the case of UK and France. Western powers will keep making Yemen bleed until they extract unconditional surrender from Houthis. Yemen’s location on the southern coast of Arabian Sea and eastern cost of the Red Sea has geo-political significance. The Red Sea is crucial for international trade. It connects the Suez Canal. Around 8% of the worlds’ trade happens through the Suez Canal. Imperialist countries will never allow a neo-colony as significant as Yemen from slipping out of their hands.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com.

14 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By V A Mohamad Ashrof

The quantity of information that we are exposed to every single day is astounding: we now in 2021 take in five times more information than we did in 1986. With our attention spans eroded to approximately eight seconds in our digital landscape, we have learned that to consume is to skim. Most of the text content is forced to be skipped. The American Press Institute found in 2014 that six in 10 people reported not reading beyond the headline in the past week.

About 73% of Americans report feeling certain degree of information overload, yet we continue to interface with it on a variety of devices and media, both professional and social. ¹ It is estimated that the average millennial picks up the smartphone 150 times a day. This is purely technology addiction. In 2008, a statistical study conducted at Scotland’s Dundee University found that adults over the age of 55 who grew up in a household with a black-and-white TV set were more likely to dream in black and white. However, younger participants, who grew up in the age of Technicolor, nearly always experienced their dreams in color. ² This shows the etching impact of the media over the mind.

The American Psychological Association supported these findings in 2011. Over-usage of technology harms the brain systems connecting emotional processing, attention and decision-making. Another study links anxiety, severe depression, suicide attempts and suicide with the rise in use of smartphones, tablets and other devices.³

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is defined by The New York Times as “the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media”. Social media is blasted with pictures and posts of scrumptious dinners, raging parties and enviable travel check-ins.⁴

Phantom Vibration Syndrome is the perception that one’s mobile is vibrating or ringing when it is not; it is branded as a tactile hallucination since the brain perceives a sensation that is not present.⁵

The study also confirmed generational differences for mobile use; for example, 77% of people aged 18 to 24 responded “yes” when asked, “When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone,” paralleled with only 10% of those over the age of 65.

Bulk of cell phone users reported the experiencing of phantom vibrations, with reported rates ranging from 27.4% to 89%. The relentless use of technology has shortened our attention span. People who are online an average of 5 hours a day has suffering remembering people’s names. The incessant stimulation from electronics makes our brain accustom to “popping”, fast-paced stream of information that we find on the internet.

The internet age has changed the general attention span. Technology has also altered human physiology. It affects our memory, attention spans and sleep cycles. This is generally attributed to a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences. Technological addiction may be lead to another risk factor for alcohol and other drug abuse. People who misuse technology develop similar brain chemistry and neural patterning to those who are addicted to substances; brain scans of people with tech addiction disorder are very similar to those people with addictions to alcohol and cannabis.

Decreasing Attention Span

Attention span is the amount of time spent focused on a task before becoming distracted. Distractibility occurs when attention is irrepressibly diverted to another activity or sensation. Most educators and psychologists agree that the ability to focus and sustain attention is critical for a person to achieve their goals. Attention training is said to be part of education, particularly in the way students are skilled to remain focused on a topic of observation or discussion for extended periods, developing listening and analytical skills in the process.

Earlier, it was found that older children are capable of longer periods of attention than younger children. The average attention span in children is: 7 minutes for 2-year-olds; 9 minutes for 3-year-olds; 12 minutes for 4-year-olds; and, 14 minutes for 5-year-olds. Common estimates for continued attention to a freely chosen task range from about 5 minutes for a two-year-old child, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in older children and adults. ⁶

Attention span peaks in humans early 40’s then gradually declines in old age. ⁷ One study involving of 2600 children found that early exposure to television is associated with later attention problems such as inattention, impulsiveness, disorganization, and distractibility at age seven. ⁸

Many working professionals suffer from attention discrepancies; a number of physical and mental health issues can contribute to abbreviated attention spans, including poor diet, lack of exercise, and conditions such as depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

It is to be taken account that the type of activity used in the test affects the results, as people are generally capable of a longer attention span when they are doing something that they find enjoyable or intrinsically motivating. ⁹

According to scientific research, our attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds; 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. According to a new study from Microsoft Corporation, people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain. Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (the year when the mobile revolution surged) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds. In fact, scientists reckon we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, which are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds.

Human beings are very forgetful; 25% of teens forget major details of close friends and relatives. 7% of people forget their own birthday from time to time, and studies suggest that each week, 39% of Americans will forget one basic piece of information or lose one every day item. Moreover, we’re also easily distracted! An average office worker will check their email in box 30 times every hour and will pick up their phones more than 1,500 times per week amounting to 3 hours and 16 minutes a day. This is all the more unnecessary thing, but all have taken this abnormal behavior as normal.

When we’re browsing online, on the average web page, users will read at most 28% of the words during a visit, with 20% a more likely expectation. Research shows that the average page visit lasts less than a minute and users often leave web pages in just 10-20 seconds. Further, 59% of senior executives would prefer to watch video than read text where both were available.

“Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli — they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media,” the study shows.

Effect of Decreased Attention Span

Listening is much deeper than reading. Human beings are only been reading for a few centuries, but have talked and told stories for millennia. It is well worth the effort to learn the art. Humans are most complex animals living in a complex environment. Researchers from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom found that: “Although people have a remarkable inclination to engage in pro-social behaviors, there are substantial differences between individuals. Empathy, the capacity to vicariously experience and understand another person’s feelings has been put forward as a critical motivator of pro-social behaviors, but we wanted to test why and how they might be linked.” ¹⁰

Empathy implies a shared interpersonal experience and is implicated in many aspects of social cognition and morality. Cognitive scientist Herbert Simon (1916-2001) made this observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.” To examine developmental changes associated with empathy, Decety and Michalska collected fMRI and behavioral data from a group of 57 participants ranging from 7 to 40 years of age while they were exposed to short video clips depicting people accidentally in pain or intentionally harmed by another individual. Results at the whole-group level showed that attending to painful situations caused by accident was associated with activation of the pain matrix including the anterior medial cingulate cortex, insula, periaqueductal gray and somatosensory cortex. ¹¹

The ability to see how our actions impact others every day is essential to a healthy society. In 2010, a University of Michigan study found college students were 40% less empathetic than they were in the late 70s and early 80s, and that students were less likely to endorse statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” or “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” As narcissism increases empathy levels fall. ¹²

Constant attention galloping compels “multitasking”; which demand rapid switching from one thing to the other.As the late Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor, put it, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy. Everybody know that mindfulness improved concentration and lessened mind-wandering. Attention is critical for working memory; if we aren’t paying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place. Emotional intelligence requires self-awareness—awareness of our own minds and emotions—as well as empathy, both of which can be cultivated by honing our skills of attention.

People with a short attention span may encounter problems for any length of time without being easily distracted.

A lesser attention span can have several negative effects, including:

• Poor performance at work or school
• Missing significant details or information
• Communication difficulties in relationships
• Data wouldn’t emerge as knowledge, as the data is being bombarded haphazardly.
• Empathy and the kindness it sparks are essential human traits. Decrease in attention span decreases empathy.
• Big picture is lost, and easily carried out by propaganda.

Storytelling to Improve Attention Capacity

Storytelling is one of the ancient methods of communicating ideas and images. In the traditional societies, young children were told stories by their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts.  As young people progress through their early years, listening skills become increasingly imperative, and there’s no better way to improve attention span and listening skills than by telling stories to keep them focused. Listening to a story told will often lock it in one’s mind almost automatically. Storytelling is an outstanding means of introducing children to the wonderful world of books while building positive attitudes for reading. The exposure to oral language patterns helps increasing children’s listening skills.

– Storytelling allows the child to create images in her imagination, it evokes the students’ imagination, listening to story encourages students to use their imaginations that empowers students to consider new ideas. As a result it builds self-confidence and personal inspiration.

– Storytelling can change the difficult ideas into easy ones and make the abstract language, in a teachable way.

– Listening to stories improves listening skills and many language skills, such as vocabulary, comprehension, sequencing and story recall.

-Storytelling is effective in augmenting communicative skills. Activities such as learning how to tell a story by writing it down, talking about it, and learning to actively listen to someone else’s story teach vital language skills in meaningful contexts. The more we know the art of story-telling, the better will be able to teach.

Storytelling humanizes learning. Stories affect our emotions and make us laugh, cry, fear, and get angry. Storytelling can instigate students to explore their unique expressiveness and can heighten a student’s ability to communicate thoughts and feelings in an articulate, lucid manner. When a habit of listening to stories is inculcated in children, they learn to become better listeners. It offers them the necessary training to listen and understand more, instead of talking.

Bibliography

1. Julie Gurner, Time magazine, November 13, 2015
2. Jonathan Gabay, Brand Psychology, London: Kogan Page, 2015, p.207
3. Nasrin Izadinia et al, ScienceDirect, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 5 (2010) 1515–1519
4. Jenna Wortham, The New York Times, April 9, 2011
5. Tim Locke, Do You Have ‘Phantom Vibration Syndrome’? Webmd, January 11, 2016
6. Charles Schaefer, Howard Millman, How to Help Children with Common Problems, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1994, p.18
7. Francesca C Fortenbaugh et al; “Sustained Attention Across the Life Span in a Sample of 10,000”, Psychological Science, 2015, 26 (9): 1497–1510
8. Christakis, D.A et al, “Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children”, April 2004, Pediatrics. 113 (4): 708–713
9. David Cornish, Dianne Dukette, The Essential 20: Twenty Components of an Excellent Health Care Team, Pittsburgh, PA: RoseDog Books, 2009, p.72–73
10. Patricia L. Lockwood et al, “Neuro-computational mechanisms of pro-social learning and links to empathy,” August 15 2016 doi:10.1073/pnas.1603198113
11. Decety J, Michalska KJ, Neurodevelopmental changes in the circuits underlying empathy and sympathy from childhood to adulthood. Dev Sci. 2010
12. Kevin Mcspadden, You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span than a Goldfish, Time magazine, May 14, 2015

V.A. Mohamad Ashrof is one among the Muslim scholars of Kerala who is regularly publishing articles and papers dealing with Islam and Contemporary Affairs.

12 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

 

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

In a recent report, the United Nations Mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, concluded that, on January 3, French warplanes had struck a crowd attending a wedding in the remote village of Bounti, killing 22 of the guests.

According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants.

What is interesting about the Mali story is the fact that, despite its centrality to the geopolitics of the Sahel region in Africa, it is framed within disconnected narratives that rarely overlap.

However, the story has less to do with Islamic militancy and much to do with foreign interventions. Anti-French sentiment in Mali goes back over a century when, in 1892, France colonized that once-thriving African kingdom, exploiting its resources and reordering its territories as a way to weaken its population and to break down its social structures.

The formal end of French colonialism of Mali in 1960 was merely the end of a chapter, but definitely not the story itself. France remained present in Mali, in the Sahel and throughout Africa, defending its interests, exploiting the ample resources and working jointly with corrupt elites to maintain its dominance.

Fast forward to March 2012 when Captain Amadou Sanogo overthrew the nominally democratic government of Amadou Toumani Touré. He used the flimsy excuse of protesting Bamako’s failure to rein in the militancy of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in the north.

Sanogo’s pretense was quite clever, though, as it fit neatly into a grand narrative designed by various Western governments, lead among them France and the United States, who saw Islamic militancy as the greatest danger facing many parts of Africa, especially in the Sahel.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, Sanogo’s coup, which angered African governments, but was somehow accommodated by Western powers, made matters much worse. In the following months, northern militants managed to seize much of the impoverished northern regions, continuing their march towards Bamako itself.

The army coup was never truly reversed but, at the behest of France and other influential governments, was simply streamlined into a transitional government, still largely influenced by Sanogo’s supporters.

On December 20, 2012, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2085, which authorized the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali. Armed with what was understood to be a UN mandate, France launched its war in Mali, under the title of ‘Operation Serval’.

It is worth mentioning here that the Mali scenario had just transpired in Libya when, on March 17, 2011, the UNSC passed Resolution 1973, which was conveniently and immediately translated into a declaration of war.

Both scenarios proved costly for the two African countries. Instead of ‘saving’ these countries, the interventions allowed violence to spiral even further, leading to yet more foreign interventions and proxy wars.

On July 15, 2014, France declared that ‘Operation Serval’ was successfully accomplished, providing its own list of casualties on both sides, again, with very little international monitoring. Yet, almost immediately, on August 1, 2014, it declared another military mission, this time an open-ended war, ‘Operation Barkhane’.

Barkhane was spearheaded by France and included Paris’ own ‘coalition of the willing’, dubbed ‘G5 Sahel’. All former French colonies, the new coalition consisted of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. The declared goal of France’s indefinite intervention in the Sahel is to provide material support and training to the ‘G5 Sahel’ forces in their ‘war on terror’.

However, according to Deutsche Welle, the ‘optimism’ that accompanied ‘Operation Serval’ completely vanished with ‘Operation Barkhane’. “The security situation has worsened, not only (in the) the north but (in) central Mali as well”, the German news agency recently reported, conveying a sense of chaos, with farmers fleeing their land and with “self-defense militias” carrying out their own operations to satisfy “their own agendas”, and so on.

In truth, the chaos in the streets merely reflected the chaos in government. Even with a heavy French military presence, instability continued to plague Mali. The latest coup in the country took place in August 2020. Worse still, the various Tuareg forces, which have long challenged the foreign exploitation of the country, are now unifying under a single banner. The future of Mali is hardly promising.

So what was the point of the intervention, anyway? Certainly not to ‘restore democracy’ or ‘stabilize’ the country. Karen Jayes elaborates. “France’s interests in the region are primarily economic,” she wrote in a recent article. “Their military actions protect their access to oil and uranium in the region.”

To appreciate this claim more fully, one only needs a single example of how Mali’s wealth of natural resources is central to France’s economy. “An incredible 75 percent of France’s electric power is generated by nuclear plants that are mostly fueled by uranium extracted on Mali’s border region of Kidal,” in the northern parts of the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that France was ready to go to war as soon as militants proclaimed the Kidal region to be part of their independent nation-state of Azawad in April 2012.

As for the bombing of the Bounti wedding, the French military denied any wrong-doing, claiming that all of the victims were ‘jihadists’. The story is meant to end here, but it will not – as long as Mali is exploited by outsiders, as long as poverty and inequality will continue to exist, leading to insurrections, rebellions and military coups.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

12 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

April 10, 2021: Since March 29^th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course began with a focus on Yemen.

As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing  Yemen in devastating war.

Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid  by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

In response, Coe wrote:

ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was  United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been  drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

Kathy Kelly, (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is a peace activist whose efforts have at times led her into war zones and U.S. prisons.

10 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr César Chelala

The war in Yemen—the Arab world’s poorest country—has reached new heights of sickness and death by the spreading of the coronavirus pandemic in a vulnerable and fragile population. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could be greater than the combined toll of war, disease and hunger over the last five years, according to Lise Grande, the U.N.’s head of humanitarian operations in Yemen.

The country’s civilians have been the unwilling participants in a proxy war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and has left the public health system in shambles. Last December, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that the conflict in Yemen has claimed over 233,000 lives over the last six years, either directly due to the conflict or for causes related to it, calling this number “unfortunate and unacceptable.”

The conflict started in 2014 when Iranian-backed Houthi fighters seized Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, and much of the north of the country. The Houthis were confronted by a U.S.-backed Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in a bid to bring back Yemeni President Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi (who had been forced to resign) to power, without success. Since 2017, Hadi has reportedly been living in Saudi Arabia.

The effects of the war on the civilian population have been deepened by floods that have ravaged huge areas across the country, facilitating the spread of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Since January 2019 there have been over 2,500,000 cholera cases, 12-15 percent of them severe. As the medical situation further deteriorates, the humanitarian response has become more difficult.

Children have been the most affected by the conflict. For the past three years, 25 percent of civilian casualties have been children, according to statistics from Save the Children. What makes this situation even more dire is that children die either directly from the conflict or from entirely preventable causes.

The Saudi-Emirati-led coalition has placed severe obstacles to medical imports, depriving the Houthi-run public health system of critical medicines. This has proved deadly for patients on emergency care who rely on life-saving medical supplies. Houthi forces have been accused of stopping humanitarian cargo trucks, and holding them for days before allowing them to continue.

Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. This has further hindered the proper delivery of health care. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has consistently denounced those abuses. To make matters worse, 92-95 percent of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions, according to that organization.

The situation is particularly dire in rural areas, which already lack the essential resources minimally available in the cities. UNICEF reports 20 million out of the country’s 30 million people currently rely on food assistance. However, the coronavirus pandemic has made the delivery of food even more problematic.

Countries from both sides of the conflict (Iran on one side and the United States, UK, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the other) have the humanitarian responsibility to redress this situation. In 2018, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called it “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”

There is something wrong when the richest Arab countries team up with leading democracies to bomb thousands of civilians and ravage the poorest country in the Middle East. Horrified by the loss of 323 young Argentinean lives during the sinking of the Belgrano cruiser by the British during the Malvinas/Falklands war, Bruce Chatwin wrote, “I cling to the archaic idea that unjustifiable killing in peace or war eventually rebounds on the killer. The dead do haunt the living. There is such thing as blood guilt.” The same words could be applied to those responsible for the war in Yemen today.

Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant, co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award and two national journalism awards from Argentina.

10 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org