by Andrew Anglin, The Unz Review:
This has always been the Houthi position: “stop the slaughter and we’ll open the Red Sea.”
Of course, due to media reporting, most Americans think they’re bombing these ships randomly because they’re “Islamic terrorists.”
I’ve been over this repeatedly, but we’ll do it again: “Islamic terrorist” is a very specific thing, and the overwhelming majority of these groups that get this label do not fit the definition. Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRGC, and the Houthis, among others (including some Sunni groups like the Taliban), are military groups that happen to be Islamic. They don’t commit acts of violence because of their religious beliefs, they commit acts of violence in self-defense against the Anal Empire. They would be doing the same things if they had a different religion.
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BREAKING:
⚡ 🇬🇧 The first official pictures and video of the British sunken Rubymar vessel near Aden after a Houthi strike have been released pic.twitter.com/HpyeZvvG86
— Lou Rage (@lifepeptides) February 27, 2024
There are very few actual “Islamic terrorist groups” that commit violence specifically because of their religion. The most obvious and well-known would be ISIS. Of course, ISIS just happened to be funded by and allied with the US and Israel, so you can figure that out.
Calling the Shia resistance groups “Islamic terrorists” would be like calling the Russian military “Christian crusaders.” Of course, in some sense, you could call the Russians that, but the actual reality is that their motives are not related to Christianity, but to the national interests of the state of Russia. Of course, the Russian military uses Christian flags, icons of Christ, and so on, and you see images of priests blessing their weapons, but that is simply because Russia is a Christian nation, so they are going to use that regalia, in the same way that Islamic groups, acting in their national interests, use Islamic regalia.
You could also throw in the IRA. The IRA had a lot of Catholic symbols, and talked a lot about Catholicism, but a lot of them were Marxists and presumably atheists too, and the goals of the campaign they waged against the English was not fundamentally religious in nature, but a matter of resisting and occupation. People don’t refer to the IRA as “a Catholic terrorist group.”
The Houthis have regional interests they are defending. On the macro scale, they are backed by Iran, and Iran wants to free Palestine in order to secure a dominant position in the region (or at least support Palestinian resistance in order to gain regional credibility and support).
Individual members of the Houthi forces are I’m sure mostly very religious, and view themselves as doing God’s work. But that does not make them “Islamic terrorists,” it makes them a resistance for that happens to be Islamic.
Aside from the “Islamic” term, you’d also have to deconstruct “terrorist,” maybe. Though that isn’t really worth while. A smaller force fighting a bigger force is always going to use tactics that can be labeled “terrorist” by the modern definition of the term.
Typically, “terrorist” is a specific action designed to inspire terror as a means of changing policy. An example would be running over a bunch of people with a big truck in France in order to get the people to demand that the French government stops funding wars in the Middle East. You would also include in this the Israeli “mowing the lawn” technique of occasionally mass bombing Palestine in order to break their will to resist by inspiring fear.
Sending drones at cargo ships is explicitly not “terroristic,” as it has a definitely, clear military goal. It is a guerrilla action, and guerrilla actions are currently always labeled terrorism, but the primary goal is not to inspire terror, but rather to inflict a financial cost on the enemy.
