Yemen and the Houthis w/ Helen Lackner
23 Jan 2024
Featuring Helen Lackner on the Houthis, the politics of their attacks on Red Sea shipping, and the long history of Yemen from British colonial Aden through the current civil war.
Transcript available here.
The Huthis are genuinely committed to helping Palestine. If you’re looking at the Huthi ideology, which is very limited and very simple, its main foreign policy is support for Palestine and being anti-Israeli and anti-American. So, these actions on their part absolutely fit in perfectly with their own beliefs and ideologies. And they’re doing this essentially through their commitment for this cause.
I want to pick up another element of what you were saying, which is this Iranian proxy bit. I find it particularly frustrating and irritating, because, one, it assumes that the Huthis take their orders from Tehran, which is absolutely not the case. They are not proxies. They have their own mind, and the support for Palestinians is a fundamental element of their ideology. And the second element of that proxy business is that it implies that the Huthis, or indeed all the others who are being accused of being Iranian proxies, have no agency of their own and have no ideas of their own. It’s an incredibly arrogant and patronizing position, which I find incredibly irritating.
These are two really important elements, which are worth getting out of the way before we move on to other things.