This is baby Udai. He was five months old when this picture was taken. He died five days later, finally succumbing to the ravages of starvation. According to his parents, he vomited yellow fluid from his nose and mouth before finally ceasing to breathe.

Baby Udai was one of 1.3 million under-fives currently suffering from malnutrition in Yemen. According to Save the Children, almost 90% of Yemeni children are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, and almost 10 million have no access to safe water, making the current crisis in Yemen the “largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now”, although “not enough people are talking about it”. Around half of the country is on the brink of famine, and according to the UN 21.2 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, compared with 12.2 million in Syria. As Professor of International Human Rights Law Dan Kovalik writes in the Huffington Post, the US-UK-Saudi-led destruction of Yemen clearly constitutes genocide. According to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, any of the following three acts constitute genocide: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. As Kovalik writes, “there is no doubt that the Saudi-led coalition, with U.S. [and UK] help, is carrying out all three of these wrongful acts, and a on a massive scale”.

UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia have totalled around £6bn over the past year alone, while leading human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, alongside the UN, have simultaneously compiled clear evidence that the Saudi-led bombing coalition is targeting Yemeni civilians. According to Donatella Rovera, the Senior Crisis Response Advisor at Amnesty International, “The Houthis and their allies are the declared targets of the [Saudi-led] coalition’s 5-month-old air campaign. In reality, however, it is civilians . . . who all too often pay the price of this war. Hundreds have been killed in such strikes while asleep in their homes, when going about their daily activities, or in the very places where they had sought refuge from the conflict”. Moreover, a “coalition-imposed blockade on commercial imports remains in place in much of the country and the ability of international aid agencies to deliver desperately needed supplies continues to be hindered by the conflict”. The U.N. World Food Program has also warned that the primary victims of the mass starvation now ravaging Yemen are “women and children”.

UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond claims that the Saudi-led coalition is “defending the legitimate government” of President Hadi in Yemen. This offers an interesting insight into official lexicon: a government is “legitimate” if it is serving our interests, and “illegitimate” if it is serving the interests of its population while not showing proper respect for American and British business interests. Hammond’s declaration is reminiscent of that of American intellectuals that America went to war in Indochina in defence of the South Vietnamese government, which was itself a US creation. As noted by British expert on international affairs Finian Cunningham, “Hadi was kicked out because he reneged for three years on a promised transition to democracy, as demanded by the Yemeni population”. Hadi has, for three years, allowed American drones to rampage across Yemen, murdering suspects and massacring countless innocent civilians in the process, with British support. The potential for the Yemeni working class, who now comprise a large swathe of the population opposed to the regime, rising up and taking power for themselves is too great a risk for the US and Britain, who treasure having a reliable puppet regime firmly in power. The effect of the political turmoil on American corporate interests is already evident; the Wall Street Journal reported in March of 2015 that American oil corporations such as Occidental Petroleum have flown their staff out of Yemen in response to the uprisings. This is clearly intolerable; destruction of the country and genocide of the population is preferable to having American corporate and hegemonic interests threatened by the stupid natives wanting to manage their own affairs.

All of this is met with astonishing silence in Britain, even though our role in this atrocity goes far beyond simply supplying Saudi Arabia with the weapons used to murder civilians; statements from the Saudi foreign ministry reveal that British and American military personnel are in the command and control rooms in which airstrikes are planned and launched, making this very much an Anglo-American war. The silence in the press and in Parliament over this mass-murder campaign has been shameful. Aside from some courageous reporting in The Independent and The Guardian, and snippets here and there in other newspapers, the genocide of the population of some Third World country is simply not deemed important. As the intellectual and political class fuss and fight over Brexit, which has been characterised by petty squabbling on a farcical level, Yemen has been dying a slow death, and it’s all been funded and supported by us. We killed baby Udai, just as we’re killing the children of Yemen right now. A referendum on Brexit is important, but perhaps an even more important referendum would be on whether we should be committing genocide in poor, starving nations, or on whether we should have a press which reports these things to us so that we can actually do something about it, instead of remaining complicit.

The devastation currently being wrought on Yemen is off the record. The situation is strikingly similar to the situation in East Timor from 1975 to 1999; most of the violence and savagery was carried out by a regional aggressor, in this case Indonesia, but could only continue with the eager support and participation of America and Britain. The destruction of East Timor was arguably the worst genocide of the 20th Century after the Holocaust; up to a third of East Timor’s population was exterminated. Ordinary citizens in America and Britain were kept almost completely uninformed about the situation in East Timor by the mainstream media, which meant that no large-scale protest movement could form, which in turn meant that the crimes could continue unabated. The devastation in Yemen has not yet reached the level of devastation in East Timor at the height of atrocities; there is still some hope that the crimes will stop, and a few pieces of Yemen may survive if we’re lucky. If not, Yemen will almost certainly become extinct “as a cultural and historic entity”, as the historian Bernard Fall warned would happen to Vietnam in 1967 during the American onslaught.

When jihadis carry out indefensible and abhorrent attacks in Brussels or Paris, the media and political figures rush to condemn what has happened and remind us of the humanity of the victims. When we destroy a starving Third World country for the sake of advancing strategic interests, the reaction is the same every time: “meh”. The people we slaughter are unpeople – they’re not really human and their lives don’t matter. While our leaders complain about the intolerable burden of a few refugees fleeing our crimes wanting to enter Britain in search of a better life, human misery is reaching new peaks all over the world; much of it is down to us. We have the choice of allowing it to continue or making it stop.

“We take extraordinary care… There is unintended damage. There is collateral damage”.

– Victoria Clarke (Pentagon spokeswoman).

Babies killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, their bodies crammed into an ice-cream freezer. (Source: AFP).

Iraqi children bloody and traumatised after their parents are shot dead by US soldiers in Tal Afar. (Source: Getty Images).

An Afghan boy injured by a NATO airstrike lies wounded on a hospital bed. (Source: Reuters / Stringer).

Faisal, 18 months old, is treated for severe acute malnutrition in Yemen, a victim of the US/UK-backed Saudi bombing campaign. (Source: UNICEF).

Six of these children, from the al-Amouri family, were killed by a US airstrike in Syria. (Source: Middle East Eye).

A man and baby killed by a NATO airstrike in Tripoli. (Source: AP).

A baby born with birth defects due to American use of depleted uranium in Fallujah, Iraq. (Source: Dr. Samira Alani / Al-Jazeera). 

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people”.

– Howard Zinn.

The nation seems to have lost its collective mind over Labour MP Ken Livingstone stating that Hitler supported Zionism. Specifically, he said: “Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. At first when I read about this, I was shocked but not sure about what to think of his suspension from the Labour Party. However, I then went and did some research into whether Ken’s remarks had any truth behind them. Well, it turns out that he’s completely correct; Hitler did indeed support Zionism in 1933, when his government struck up a deal with German Zionist Jews to allow them to emigrate to Palestine and leave Germany. Ironically, this was partially in response to Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi regime, somewhat mirroring the current desperate efforts of the Israeli regime and its loyal servants in the West to crush the BDS movement.

While Ken’s comments were somewhat ill-advised at a time when the Labour Party is being repeatedly smeared with accusations of anti-Semitism, it is no less despicable and abhorrent how the media, the political class and large segments of the public are clamouring to attack him in total oblivion to the facts. No one in the media seems to be pointing out that what he said is completely true; instead, he is being labelled an anti-Semite and even a “Nazi apologist”. All of this is an indication of the totalitarian culture in the UK which has been successfully whipped up by Zionist elements, in which any criticism of Israeli crimes is immediately viewed as an attack on the Jewish people as a whole. The irony of this is that it is the people accusing anti-Zionists of anti-Semitism who are in fact being anti-Semitic; they are the ones equating all Jews everywhere with the State of Israel, regardless of whether they are supportive of Israel or not. In fact, Jews have been at the forefront of the BDS campaign, recognising that Israel is an apartheid state and that its racist and criminal destruction of the Palestinian people is an extreme injustice. By equating Jews with Zionism, these people are defining what constitutes being a legitimate Jew; if a Jew is anti-Zionist, they are not a ‘real’ Jew, and therefore the Jewish community as a whole is inextricably linked with the crimes of the Israeli regime, while those Jews who oppose Israeli atrocities are ostracised and victimised.

Now is the critical time to step up the pressure on the Israeli government to end its atrocities against the Palestinian people. According to Israeli journalist and dissident Gideon Levy, the first signs of fascism are beginning to materialise in Israel. The country currently has the most right-wing, extremist government in its history, and as its attempts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians become more and more horrific and criminal, so too the attempts in Britain and the wider Western world to whitewash Israeli atrocities and crush efforts to support the Palestinians gradually intensify. Likewise, as human beings we must also fight to combat anti-Semitism in all its forms; it is true that a minority of people who identify as pro-Palestinian are actually simply anti-Semites, but it is also true that much of the most extreme anti-Semitism comes from the Zionist movement, as Zionists continue to abuse and alienate those Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation. Justice will prevail in the end, but we cannot let ourselves be silenced.

The debate over whether or not Britain should leave the EU has become the dominant issue in the mainstream British media. Week after week on the BBC’s Question Time, for example, ‘Brexit’ seems to be the only topic up for discussion. The elites and corporate media factions are busy warring over this issue, whereas it is hard to know whether the public even cares a great deal. In fact, numerous audience members on Question Time have expressed their frustration at not knowing which way to vote, due to the disinformation and misinformation disseminated by both sides of the debate.

What this demonstrates more than anything is the media’s power as agenda-setters. They choose which topics dominate public discourse, and thus which topics deserve attention and which topics do not. The reason why the EU debate seems to be the only topic being discussed these days is because the corporate media has been endlessly clamouring over it, as have the dominant elites in society. What we have ended up with is warring establishment factions with vested interests in the outcome of this debate, using the influence they have in the media and in public discourse to try and manipulate the public into making a vote which will ultimately end up benefitting one elite faction over another. When debate is vigorously occurring within the establishment framework, the value and significance of this debate should automatically be treated with great skepticism. It is highly unlikely that the outcome of this debate will end up changing the lives of ordinary citizens for the better; what is more likely is that whatever benefits result from the outcome will be for those at the top, rather than for those at the bottom.

This is not to say that the debate over leaving the EU is entirely worthless. It is an important issue. But the supreme status it has been afforded in public discourse has come at a cost to other stories and issues of equal, if not greater, significance. For example, two weeks ago a VICE News investigation revealed that Britain has been secretly colluding with American drone strikes in Yemen by providing crucial intelligence support, which have killed up to 1,651 people, including up to 261 civilians. This should have been a national scandal, given the fact that the natural conclusion of these revelations is that the British government has been systematically lying about its role in America’s covert war in Yemen; in 2014, UK Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hugh Robertson stated: “Drone strikes against terrorist targets in Yemen are a matter for the Yemeni and US governments”. The fact that hardly a whisper of any of this was made in the mainstream press should surprise no one who has been paying attention to the state of national public discourse for the past few years, but it is no less disturbing.

A mural depicting a US drone in Sanaa, Yemen. (Source: Khaled Abdullah, Reuters). 

Similarly, the London-based group Privacy International recently obtained previously confidential files from the British government as part of an ongoing legal case challenging British spies’ bulk collection of data. The files reveal an incredibly invasive regime of mass surveillance aimed at ordinary British citizens, whom the security services themselves recognise are not a threat to national security or even suspected of a crime. The documents reveal that the security services are able to scoop up and store extremely intimate and personal details about people’s private lives, such as their “political opinions, religious beliefs, union affiliation, physical or mental health status, sexual preferences, biometric data, and financial records”. For anyone remotely interested in not living in an Orwellian dystopia, this should be of particular concern. However, yet again, the mainstream press has excluded this story from the headlines, in favour of obsequious, fawning displays of reverence and awe for the Queen’s birthday.

There is nothing inherently wrong with covering stories that are more trivial in nature. But when these come at a cost to real issues which would horrify the British public if they were aware of them, then this is inexcusable. Similarly, the debate over the EU is beginning to seriously overshadow stories of real significance that reveal the immorality and corruption with which the government exercises its power in secret; in other words, stories that should be the first to hit the headlines in a democratic society with a free press. But such a society was only ever an illusion.

Bernie Sanders is by far the best candidate in the current US presidential race. His stance on issues of social justice is admirable, and he would be far more tolerable as President than Clinton, Cruz, Trump or Kasich, all of whom exist in the same militaristic, hawkish, neoconservative spectrum. However, it seems that he has a blind spot when it comes to the issue of Palestine.

In 2014, Bernie Sanders voted in support of the Israeli attack on Gaza (known as ‘Operation Protective Edge’), which slaughtered over 2000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, including up to 500 children and over 200 women. The opinion of journalist Max Blumenthal is that the reason he did this was obviously to please Party fundraisers. Blumenthal goes on to ask the obvious question that can be drawn from this: “if they [Bernie Sanders and other liberals] are willing to abandon millions of people to the malevolence of one of the most powerful militaries in the world because of fundraiser pressure, who else could they abandon?”. What does voting in favour of a brutal slaughter say about Sanders’ integrity?

Furthermore, his comments on the Palestine issue at best reflect great ignorance as to the reality of the situation. In a recent interview with the New York Daily News, Sanders opposed the continued building of settlements on Palestinian land, but said that there “are going to be demands being made of the Palestinian folks as well”. So, demands will have to be made of the people being dominated and occupied, who have been suffering under systematic subjugation over a number of decades, who are being subjected to continuous repression and humiliation, and who, in the words of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, are being “ethnically cleansed”. The US will have to be tough on these people, too. What this reflects is a common condition in mainstream Western discourse: an inability or unwillingness to see that Palestine and Israel are not two equal sides. As pointed out by Max Blumenthal, “this is not a conflict; it’s a conquest”. Yes, there is resistance on the Palestinian side to Israeli terror, but this is in no way comparable to the brutal, vicious and unrestrained aggression on the Israeli side. This is not to excuse Hamas rockets or suicide bombings which sometimes result in civilian casualties; it is to point out how in liberation struggles and resistance movements throughout history, oppressed and persecuted people have always sometimes resorted to unjustified tactics. But to compare the oppressed to the oppressors and make them equal indicates at best ignorance about the situation, and at worst wilful distortion of the facts.

Furthermore, Bernie had said that Israel “overreacted” in the attack on Gaza which he voted for. But overreacted to what, exactly? If it was to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths some weeks before, then in what way was the destruction of Gaza a response to this? The kidnappers were not in any way affiliated with Hamas, the leadership in Gaza. So why would you carry out a murderous assault on a group of people totally unconnected with the incident, rather than carry out a criminal investigation and bring the perpetrators to justice? The answer is obvious: the attack on Gaza was not in response to anything. The Israeli government used the kidnappings as an opportunity to stoke hysteria and bloodlust in the Israeli public, which they could use to justify their latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Holy Land. The US Senate does not even pretend that the Israeli assault was in response to the kidnappings – instead, it states that it was in response to “unprovoked rocket attacks from the Hamas terrorist organisation”. Ignoring the fact that these rockets are more like high school science projects and mostly land in empty fields, the fact remains that there were no Hamas rockets fired into Israel prior to an escalation of Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank; the first Hamas rockets were fired on July 7 – almost a month after Israel’s Operation Brother’s Keeper began. So, the conclusion is clear: Operation Protective Edge was an unprovoked act of aggression carried out against a defenceless civilian population detained in the world’s largest open-air prison, not an “overreaction” to anything.

While it is true that Bernie Sanders is more progressive than the other candidates with regards to Palestine – refusing to speak at an AIPAC conference and simply recognising that the Gazans are human beings, which has led to him being accused of ‘blood libel’ by the former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren – he should still be held to account over his unsettling remarks on the issue and his support for the 2014 destruction of Gaza. If he truly is a ‘progressive’, he would own up to his mistakes and reverse his support for the Israeli government, rather than continue to make vague criticisms of Israel and refuse to talk frankly about Israeli aggression without constantly bringing up “Hamas rockets”, as if they were in any way comparable.

Illustration: Electronic Frontier Foundation/Hugh D’Andrade

Last week, the UK government pushed forward its Investigatory Powers Bill (or Snoopers’ Charter) through Parliament, which vastly increased their surveillance capabilities and powers to penetrate the electronic communications of ordinary citizens. This extremely authoritarian piece of legislation moved forward with disturbing ease in the House of Commons, gathering 281 votes in favour with only 15 against. There has been extraordinarily little public protest over this, either.

The freedoms which we value so highly in Britain are gradually slipping from our fingers. Under the Snoopers’ Charter, the government will now store the records of websites visited by everyone in the UK for 12 months incase the police or the intelligence services want to have a look at what we’ve been doing, phones and computers can now legally be bugged and companies must assist the government in peeling back layers of encryption from communications if they are ordered to do so. The government can now also legally monitor journalists and their sources, raising serious concerns about what consequences this will have for freedom of the press in Britain, which is already under severe attack.

The Tory government has taken frightening steps in recent months to destroy civil liberties and basic freedoms in Britain, from outlawing speech that it deems ‘extremist’ in nature and keeping Julian Assange arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian Embassy to effectively legitimising the extrajudicial assassination of British citizens. The introduction of the Snoopers’ Charter is simply the latest in a long line of steps towards corroding our freedoms and increasing state control over the lives of ordinary citizens under the pretext of fighting terror. And for those who believe that these tyrannical measures are only aimed at ‘extremists’, then take a look at how David Cameron outlined his government’s approach towards fighting ‘extremism’:

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance. This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach”.

Meaning: the government will no longer leave you alone if you simply ‘obey the law’. Obeying the law is no longer enough if you don’t want to be targeted by the government. The era of ‘passive tolerance’ is gone. Now, citizens must actively subordinate themselves to the interests of the State and not only must they stay within the bounds of the law; now, they must make active efforts to stay within bounds within the law that only the government has the power to define. Meaning one mustn’t express the wrong opinion, as even though it is legal for them to do so, this is no longer enough to protect them from being targeted by the law, subjected to surveillance or even imprisoned by the State. And all of this is necessary in order to defend British Values – such as democracy, the Rule of Law, and tolerance. Yes, it is necessary to abolish freedom of speech, in order to maintain respect for tolerance. And as for the Rule of Law, that never really existed. Because if it did exist, then David Cameron and the other members of the government involved in the destruction of Yemen would be in prison for war crimes. If the Rule of Law did exist, then half the government would be facing legal action for engaging in acts of ‘extremism’ as they themselves define it. The law has never applied to those at the top. The law is a weapon used by the State to subjugate and repress ordinary citizens who don’t possess the power or the privilege to defend themselves.

This is not a war against terror; it is a war against dissent. Of course there are people out there who do wish to do us genuine harm, but the way to combat those people is not by destroying our own freedoms so they don’t have to. If British Values really do exist, and are not just propaganda churned out by the authoritarian extremists who wield unlimited power in this country, then surely we should be reasserting and strengthening those values, not just here at home but overseas as well, so that the people of the world will see that we are serious when we say we want to fight terror and defend democracy? Surely it is insanity to become the very people we are claiming to oppose? Once again, it is up to ordinary citizens to fight back. We must put pressure on the government to take steps towards curbing mass surveillance, rather than expanding it. We must make our voices heard. Before it is too late.

How did we get here? How did we stray so far from all that is good? I wonder, if King Arthur were to be resurrected and journey through the halls of old, out of the gloom and into the fragile daylight… what would he say? What would he see?

Upon a high-raised hill in Avalon,
Four dragon sentinels with burnished scales
Keep ward and watch, and whether the sleets and hails
Of winter beat their caves, or in May magic the lawn.
Like a dull emerald smitten with the dawn,
Up brightens, guard and gleam; and still the Grail’s
Enchaliced splendors shake over those sweet dales,
Where, ‘neath a thick-leaved canopy unwithdrawn
Since the old days of Vivien’s sorcery,
Sleeps Merlin in a nest of nightingales–
Thus one clear moment–then the vision fails,
As his, who lone on a wreak-littered lea
Has mocking glimpse of star-mist on the sails,
Of some great ship that lies out to sea.

‘Avalon’, by Robert Elliot Gonzales.

Torture, illegal wars, a blind eye turned to atrocities, support for some of the most brutal regimes on Earth, the ever-increasing power of the Deep State…

This is what we’ve become. It is up to the few of us who can really see what’s going on to fight back.

Hope is not lost yet…