Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
President Trump has posted a video on social media showing a US airstrike in Yemen killing dozens of people who he claims are “Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.” Trump also bizarrely suggested that Ansar Allah has been sinking US ships in its Red Sea attacks, writing “They will never sink our ships again!”
There is no public information about any US ships having been sunk by Houthi attacks. As of this writing there is also no evidence supporting the president’s claim that the people killed in the airstrike were combatants; there are photos online of unarmed Yemeni tribesmen standing in the exact formation seen in the video Trump posted for normal civilian gatherings.
I’ve seen many observers comparing the video Trump posted to the leaked Collateral Murder video published by WikiLeaks in 2010, which showed US servicemen firing on Iraqi civilians and journalists from Apache helicopters while laughing and joking about the carnage they were inflicting. What hasn’t received quite enough attention is the fact that Trump actually shared his Collateral Murder-style snuff film on the 15th anniversary of the day WikiLeaks published Collateral Murder.
Within hours of Trump’s posting, the WikiLeaks Twitter account tweeted the following:
“On this day in 2010: Collateral Murder. WikiLeaks released a secret US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.”
For those who don’t know, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was savagely persecuted by the US government for the information he published in 2010, spending 2012 to 2019 trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under political asylum from US extradition attempts, and then jailed in a British maximum security prison on a US extradition warrant from 2019 to 2024 before securing his freedom. It was the first Trump administration who had him dragged from the embassy for the crime of journalism in 2019.
This is just the latest disgusting act of warmongering that Trump has inflicted on Yemen, and as always it is completely unjustifiable. It’s obviously idiotic to think bombing Yemen again will bring peace to the region; only a foam-brained moron would believe such a thing. But it’s also worse than that, because Trump wouldn’t even have any moral legitimacy in bombing Yemen if peace really was his goal.
Yemen is trying to stop an active genocide. That’s what its Red Sea blockade has always been about. That’s the only reason Ansar Allah has ever attacked ships in the region. Their explicit and publicly stated goal is to exert pressure on Israel and its allies to halt the genocide in Gaza.
Trump has no moral legitimacy in trying to stop Yemen from doing this. The New York Times reports that the Pentagon is telling Congress behind closed doors that Trump’s costly war on Yemen is failing to achieve its objectives despite daily airstrikes, but even if Trump was successful in bombing Yemen into submission, all he’d be succeeding in doing is removing economic pressure on Israel to end its ongoing mass atrocity. Trump is actually bombing Yemen to defend Israel’s right to commit genocide.
Even if Trump could mass murder his way into ending the Houthi blockade, that wouldn’t be peace — at least not the kind of peace that normal, healthy people care about. It would be the kind of “peace” that exists in a room full of corpses. The kid of “peace” that exists on a slave plantation where all the slaves have been successfully whipped and tortured into obedience.
When Trump’s supporters babble about “peace through strength”, that is what they mean by “peace”. When normal, healthy people say peace, they mean the absence of abuse. When empire loyalists say peace, they mean obedience and submission to the empire.
This is what people are saying when they claim “There was a ceasefire on October 6th,” implying that there was peace before Hamas launched its attack in 2023. They don’t mean the same thing that normal, healthy people mean by peace. Their vision of “peace” was always Palestinians lying down and submitting and slowly getting shuffled out of the way, like the indigenous victims of other western settler-colonialist projects throughout history.
That’s not peace. That’s just unresisted abuse.
But that’s the only kind of “peace” that Trump and his fellow empire managers will ever accept in the middle east. The “peace” of compliance and obedience. The “peace” of prostration before the empire. The kind of “peace” you get when you start murdering everyone in the room until there’s nobody left but corpses and those who submit to your will.
This is who these people are. This is the closest thing to “peace” that they will ever allow under their rule.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
