Muslim Nations Call on Migrants to Hate Their Western Benefactors
Because the Koran and Muhammad said so.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Imagine if a U.S. governmental agency told all Americans who live abroad that they are obligated to hate the nations that are hosting them.
That’s precisely what the Muslim nation of Qatar (a “U.S. friend and ally”) is doing. According to the world famous website, Islamweb.net—which is directed and financed by the state of Qatar—any Muslim who lives in a non-Muslim nation is obligated to hate his adopted nation and its “infidel” citizens (even while receiving benefits from them).
This comes in the form of a fatwa (an Islamic sanctioned decree) titled “Conditions that Legitimize Residing in Infidel Nations” (all translations in this article my own). Along with “preserving and upholding his Islam,” the “first condition” for any Muslim who lives among non-Muslims is that he/she has “enmity and hatred for the infidels.”
This, incidentally, applies to those millions of Muslim migrants voluntarily immigrating into and flooding Western Europe. If they take their Islam seriously, they are duty bound to hate and be disloyal to those nations welcoming them in and providing them with free food, shelter, and healthcare.
After stating that Muslims who emigrate to the West must have “enmity and hatred for the infidels, staying far from their loyalty and love—for loyalty and love for them contradicts the faith,” the fatwa proceeds to give its evidence, that is, it goes on to quote several supporting verses from the Koran, including:
You will never find a people that truly believes in Allah and the Last Day loyal to those who defy Allah and His Messenger—even if they be their parents, children, siblings, or extended family [Koran 58:22]….
Oh you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends and allies, for they are friends and allies of each other; and whoever among you befriends them is from among them. Allah does not guide the unjust people [Koran 5:51].
After quoting Muhammad in a sahih (authentic) hadith, saying, “Whoever loves a people is from among them,” the fatwa concludes by saying “loving the enemies of Allah is among the greatest dangers for a Muslim, for loving them necessitates cooperating with and following them, or at least not rejecting them—hence why the prophet said, ‘Whoever loves a people is from among them.’”
(Here it should be noted that just merely being a non-Muslim makes one an enemy of Allah; no action is required.)
This teaching by Qatar’s Islamweb.net is not out of the mainstream. For example, on the equally popular Islam Q&A, the same question is answered with the same exact answer: Any Muslim who lives among non-Muslims must have “enmity and hatred for the infidels, staying far from their loyalty and love—for loyalty and love for them contradicts the faith.”
Remember all this the next time you hear that “xenophobia” is responsible for Muslim failure to assimilate into the West. This may be true, though not because Western people “fear the stranger”—as commonly supposed—but rather because Muslim migrants hate the infidel.
Biden’s Immigration Bill Would Be an Act of National Suicide
Figures don’t lie - but liars can figure.
On February 28, 2021 the New York Times reported: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would Offer Path to Citizenship For Millions.
In reviewing the Biden administration’s catastrophic immigration proposals, the first question that should come to every American’s mind is, how does this benefit America and struggling Americans?
This is especially true because the Biden immigration bill would likely result in the lawful admission of more than 100 million immigrants!
I wrote about this issue in my article: “What Biden’s Immigration Policies Would Do To America: America’s adversaries can’t wait for this massive betrayal.”
Incredibly this fact has been ignored by the mainstream media, but we will explore the true magnitude of the Biden Amnesty shortly.
News coverage of immigration almost always focuses on the aliens and those who profit from the admission of foreign workers but never on the citizens of our nation.
For decades the compliant media have viciously attacked advocates for effective and fair immigration law enforcement as being “Anti-Immigrant” while lauding advocates for open borders and what would amount to immigration anarchy as being “Pro-Immigrant.”
This tactic is intended to mislead and intimidate Americans into accepting what should be unacceptable. Since we think of America as a “nation of immigrants,” anyone who would dare suggest that the U.S. government should make certain that our immigration laws are fairly but effectively enforced is attacked as being “anti-American,” “xenophobic” and “racist.”
The 9/11 Commission was crystal clear: the terror attacks of 9/11 and other such terror attacks were only possible because of multiple failures of the immigration system. Yet the media and our political leaders never make that connection.
The 9/11 Commission did not suffer from racism or xenophobia but simply sought to protect our nation from the continuing specter of international terrorism.
A review of a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens will confirm that our laws have nothing to do with racism or xenophobia but about keeping out aliens who pose a threat to public health, public safety, national security, and the jobs and wages of Americans.
Facts are stubborn things -- unless you ignore them or lie about them!
Here is an excerpt from the New York Times article that is certain to warm your heart -- if you consider heartburn to be a way of warming your heart:
The centerpiece of the legislation is an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States as of Jan. 1. After passing background checks and paying taxes, they would be allowed to live and work in the United States for five years. After that, they could apply for a green card, giving them permanent status in the United States and the opportunity to win citizenship after three more years.
But the bill tries to make the most far-reaching changes in immigration law in more than three decades. It would sweep away restrictions on family-based immigration, making it easier for spouses and children to join their families already in the country. And it would expand worker visas to allow more foreigners to come to the United States for jobs.
Unlike previous efforts to overhaul immigration, the legislation does not include a large focus on increased border enforcement. Instead, the bill adds resources to process migrants legally at ports of entry and invests $4 billion over four years in distressed economies in the hopes of preventing people from fleeing to the United States because of security and economic crises.
To begin with, the supposed cutoff date of January 1, 2021 is completely meaningless. No record of entry is created by aliens who evade the inspections process. Any alien who can enter the United States without inspection can easily game this process and simply claim to have entered the United States by whatever cutoff date is established and purchase bogus supporting documents.
It will be difficult if not impossible for the adjudications officers to determine if the information in the applications for amnesty is truthful or fraudulent. I wrote an extensive article about the nexus between immigration fraud and national security in my article: Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill - 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as a key embedding tactic of terrorists.
Simple background checks are inadequate to make proper decisions. The only thing worse than no security is false security!
The pressure will be on to approve applications to clear the backlog. It takes only minutes to approve an application but can take days or weeks to deny an application. Without the resources to conduct actual field investigations, fraud will permeate the adjudications process.
This will not only undermine the integrity of the immigration process but also irrevocably undermine national security and public safety.
The official report 9/11 and Terrorist Travel - Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States addressed immigration fraud thus:
Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.” Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, overstayed his tourist visa. He then applied for permanent residency under the agricultural workers program, but was rejected. Eyad Mahmoud Ismail, who drove the van containing the bomb, took English-language classes at Wichita State University in Kansas on a student visa; after he dropped out, he remained in the United States out of status.
There will be no interviews and no background investigations because of the huge number of applications. The numbers of aliens will likely exceed 20 million. Yale reported that as of two years ago, there were 22.1 million illegal aliens present in the U.S.
The actual numbers would likely be far greater than the Yale estimate.
Furthermore, all legalized aliens would have the absolute right to have all of their minor children and spouses join them legally in the United States.
If, on average, each legalized alien has four children, Biden’s massive amnesty program would likely enable more than 100 million lawful immigrant children to gain entry into the United States. They would all have to be educated in our failing school systems.
How will Biden provide 100 million young immigrants with jobs as they age and join the already overflowing labor pool?
The spouses of these newly-legalized immigrants would also be able to enter the United States.
Imagine the incredible impact that this would have on America’s economy, environment, education, healthcare and infrastructure. Consider the inflationary pressure this would create and lead to more homelessness throughout the United States.
To borrow the radical Left’s expression -- this would certainly not be sustainable.
If this would not be disastrous enough, Biden would also open the floodgates to foreign workers as was noted in the the New York Times article I cited above. This would be insane at any time, but especially now with so many Americans suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic with an abject shortage of jobs, vaccines and hospital beds.
My January 2, 2019 article, Open Borders Facilitate America’s Race to the Bottom included this excerpt:
Greenspan supported his infuriating call for many more H-1B visas by the following “benefits” for America and, as you will see, the last sentence of his outrageous paragraph addresses the notion of reducing “wage inequality” by lowering wages of middle class, highly educated Americans whom Greenspan had the chutzpah to refer to as “the privileged elite”!
Consider this excerpt from his testimony:
First, skilled workers and their families form new households. They will, of necessity, move into vacant housing units, the current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our banking system.
The second bonus would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.
It is clear that the goal of the Biden administration is to destroy jobs and wages for Americans.
I wrote about the nefarious purpose behind this betrayal of Americans by their own government in my article, For Dems to Succeed, Americans Must Fail.
Struggling Americans would be forced to rely on the government for economic subsidies. The money would come with many strings attached, pleasing the radical totalitarian control freaks who seek permanent and total control over our nation and our citizens.
This is the time for all Americans to reach out to their elected “representatives” to let them know how they want to truly be represented and not betrayed by our politicians.
Church Desecration in Europe Under Islam
A few days after Muslim migrants firebombed an 800-year-old Swedish church twice over the course of four days -- once on Jan. 20, 2021 and another on Jan. 24 -- a Feb 4 report came out saying that 829 “hate crimes” against churches in Sweden have been reported between just 2012-2018, or about 138 attacks on average every year.
Thus, the churches of Sweden join those of other Western European nations that have taken in sizeable Muslim migrants. In France, for example, two churches are vandalized every day. According to a 2019 PI-News report, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered -- meaning such attacks are only going from bad to worse.
They are also getting increasingly vile. As one example, vandals used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nimes in 2019; consecrated bread was also found thrown outside among garbage. One week later, vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur; they mangled the arms of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner and burned altar materials.
Similar reports are coming from Germany. After reporting how four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched over the course of four weeks in 2019, PI-News, a German news site, explained: “In this country, there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on summit crosses, on holy figures on the way, on churches and recently also on cemeteries.”
Although mainstream media regularly claim that the vandals -- who are seldom caught to verify their identities -- are “mentally ill” or part of “right-wing extremist” groups, as the recent Swedish report states, PI-News offers a hint: “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles lit, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu Akbar.’”
Similarly, another German language report from late 2017 noted that in the Alps and in Bavaria alone, some 200 churches have been attacked and many crosses broken: “Police are currently dealing with church desecrations again and again. The perpetrators are often youthful rioters with a migration background.”
Another telling indicator is that those European regions with large Muslim migrant populations often see a concomitant rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols. Before Christmas, 2016, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, where more than a million Muslim migrants reside, some 50 public statues of Jesus and other Christian figures were beheaded and crucifixes broken.
In 2015, following the arrival of another million Muslim migrants to Dülmen, a local newspaper said “not a day goes by” without attacks on Christian statues.
France, where one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations resides -- and where churches are attacked every single day -- is also indicative that where Muslim numbers grow, so do attacks on churches. A January 2017 study revealed that “Islamist extremist attacks on Christians” in France rose by 38 percent, going from 273 attacks in 2015 to 376 in 2016; the majority occurred during Christmas season and “many of the attacks took place in churches and other places of worship.”
As a typical example, in 2014 a Muslim man committed “major acts of vandalism” inside a historic Catholic church in Thonon-les-Bains. According to the report with pictures (since removed) he “overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows.” He also “trampled on” the Eucharist.
For examples of Muslims being caught red-handed desecrating churches in other European nations, see here, here, here, here, and here.
Should there still be any doubt concerning the true identity of those most responsible for vandalizing churches throughout Europe, one need only turn to the treatment of churches in the Muslim world itself, or even in areas that have very large Muslim populations.
Thus, Muslims in Kenya torched five separate churches between Jan. 20 and Jan. 24 -- the very same days Muslims twice firebombed an 800-year-old church in Sweden. “A majority of the church members were afraid to attend services [in or near the ruins] in the aftermath of the burning of the churches, fearing that the arsonists might follow them right into their homes, risking the lives of their families,” a local source said.
As occurred when vandals in France used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in 2019, so these Kenyan arsonists also “committed the heinous acts of scooping human feces onto the buildings,” the source added.
The fact is, the vile desecration of churches has for centuries been a Muslim trademark -- a sort of “Islam was here.” As copiously documented in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, during their invasions of Christian nations, Muslims ritually desecrated hundreds of thousands of churches (Caliph Hakim b’amr Allah alone reportedly destroyed 30,000 churches during the early eleventh century). Think what ISIS did but on an exponential level -- and not for a handful of years but for over a millennium in dozens of nations spread out over three continents.
Most recently, according to a Feb. 17, 2021 report, the ninth church to be torched in Muslim-majority Sudan recently occurred. Before it was set aflame, local Muslims shed light as to why they attack churches: “In every city or village where Muslims live, they should not allow anything that belongs to infidels such as church buildings to be there,” one Muslim wrote on social media; another insisted that, wherever Muslims allow the existence of a church, that place becomes “disgraced.” In short, and in the words of the Rev. Kuwa Shamal, of the Sudanese Church of Christ, “They targeted the church because they do not want to see any sign of the cross in the area.”
As seen from what is happening to churches throughout Western Europe, at least some Muslim migrants feel this way even when they are the minority in and guests of the West.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
The Khashoggi Passion Play
The Biden administration inflicts major damage.
The Biden administration’s decision to publish the intelligence report on Jamal Khashoggi’s death in late 2018 was as predictable as it was destructive to U.S. national security and to the security and stability of the Middle East.
It was predictable for two reasons. First, this is Obama’s third term. And in Obama’s first term he played a central role in overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the anchor of the U.S.’s alliance system in the Sunni Arab world in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological anchor of every Sunni terror group in the world.
Obama’s consistent policy for eight years was to side with the jihadists. Obama’s anti-colonialist worldview bred his anti-Western sensibilities. He and his neo-Marxist advisors viewed the jihadists as the “authentic” voice of the Islamic world. They were favored because they were “revolutionary” and anti-Western. In every conflict that pitted either conservative Sunni leaders, Iranian anti-regime forces, or Israel against jihadists from Hamas to Hezbollah, to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Houthis, to Iran, Obama and his people supported the jihadists. For this reason, Obama admired both Turkish dictator Erdogan and the Qatari ruling family. Like him, they supported jihadists.
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS) and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ) from the UAE were big problems for Obama, Robert Malley and their ilk. They appeared out of nowhere.
Young and vigorous, they seek to liberalize their conservative societies. They are deeply opposed to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. They are open to peace and cooperation with Israel. They support Israel in its campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah. And they are certainly “authentic” Arab Muslims. When the UAE declared the Muslim Brotherhood, and Obama’s key supporters and ideological allies at CAIR terrorist organizations, Obama and his comrades were so angry they could barely put together a coherent sentence.
This brings us to Khashoggi. As Lee Smith reported after he was found dead in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, there were a lot of things about Khashoggi that made him a strange hero for Americans of any stripes. He was a Qatari agent of influence. He was a former Saudi intelligence officer who sided with the Wahabist jihadists in the royal family who supported al Qaeda. He was friends with Osama bin Laden and mourned his death. The al Qaeda, ISIS, Iran and Hamas supporting Qatari regime was essentially writing his columns in the Washington Post.
On its face, Khashoggi’s receipt of a green card made no sense given his open support for al Qaeda. On its face, his gig as a columnist at Jeff Bezos’s paper made no sense given his relationship with Saudi intelligence and with the Qatari ruling family. But they made perfect sense in the context of the efforts made by Obama’s deep state friends, particularly former CIA director John Brennan, who opposed MBS from the outset to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.
When seen in this light, it is clear that Khashoggi, a terror supporting Qatari agent who opposed the modernizing, pro-American, anti-jihadist and pro-Israel Saudi Crown Prince was an important political warfare asset for Obama’s clique. His job was to discredit MBS and legitimize the terror-supporting Qataris while making pro-jihadist progressives feel good about themselves.
I’m not saying his murder was justified. I am saying he doesn’t deserve the tears of anyone who opposes jihadist terror and jihadist regimes, cares about human rights or wants to avoid a major war in the Middle East.
Whatever Khashoggi’s ties with Obama’s clique during his lifetime may have been, the way they responded to his murder made clear what they hoped to do with his death. They wanted the old, bad Saudi Arabia back. They wanted the Muslim Brotherhood funding, al Qaeda-spawning Wahabists of Riyadh back. They wanted the Prince Bandars and Prince Turkis of the days of yore, not the guy that gave women drivers licenses.
They immediately set out lionizing Khashoggi as some sort of Nelson Mandela so that they could turn MBS into Hitler or whatever. As Smith reported in another article, Robert Malley, who is now in charge of Biden’s Iran policy, was the first pushing the line that in response to Khashoggi’s death, the U.S. should end its support/alliance with Saudi Arabia in retribution and side with the Iran-controlled Houthis against Saudi Arabia.
It was a testament to Donald Trump’s common sense and his political courage that he refused to bow to their pressure. And it was equally obvious back in 2018 that if a Democrat beat Trump in 2020, the next Democrat administration would resuscitate the Khashoggi affair to try to push MBS from power.
The worst thing that happened to the Obama nee Biden crowd were the Abraham Accords. This is why the first thing that Biden and his handlers did was bow out of the U.S. side of the deal by freezing the arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords put paid their false claims that the jihadists are the authentic voice of the Arab world. The popularity of the deals among the citizens of the Gulf and much of the wider Arab world – like Morocco and Sudan — made clear that Obama (Biden) and their ilk were basing U.S. Middle East policy on the propaganda being taught in Middle East Studies departments throughout the U.S. rather than on anything even vaguely resembling the reality of the region and the views of people who actually live here.
I don’t know if MBS will survive this blow or not. There is reason to fear that at the end of the day, the leaders of the UAE and of Saudi Arabia will decide they are better off making an arrangement with Iran supported by the U.S. than standing up for their sovereignty and their interests with Israel. And if they do, it will be a disaster of epic proportions. The danger of war will rise exponentially. Jihadists of the Sunni and Shiite varieties will be empowered as never before. And Israel will be in a pretty horrible position.
But in the midst of all of this, leave it to the fake human rights activists and real terror supporters and jihad sympathizers like Malley and his comrades in Obama’s new administration to pat themselves on the back for ushering in an “authentic” era in the Middle East.
- A couple of additional thoughts on the administration’s sudden efforts to overthrow MBS.
First, by branding MBS a murderer, the administration is making it politically unfeasible for Israel to make peace with Saudi Arabia. This brings me back to my earlier point about the administration’s efforts to undermine and hopefully destroy the Abraham Accords. Hours before the administration opened this shocking offensive against MBS, I24 news reported that Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain were establishing a NATO-like military alliance. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two stories were related. Now that the administration has criminalized MBS, with the avid support of its fully mobilized media attack dogs and a stable of fake human rights groups, it can use any move towards formalizing Israel-Saudi ties as “proof” that Israel is immoral.
MBS will become a new version of Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese leader Christian leader who signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1982 only to be assasinated. Any move MBS makes towards Israel will be attacked by the progressive left and their Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian regime regime fellow travelers in Washington.
So the move against MBS is a move to block further progress towards ending the Arab conflict with Israel.
The second aspect of the U.S. move that is worth noting is that its impact so far has been the opposite of what Biden and his handlers no doubt expected. Rather than express contrition or accept guilt of any sort, the Saudis have rejected the U.S. findings and said that they will not allow the U.S. to overthrow the Crown Prince. The UAE and Bahrain have issued similar responses. Trump spent an enormous amount of time and effort working to rebuild U.S. credibility with its Middle East allies after eight years of Obama’s betrayal. The Saudis and Egyptians did trust Trump, but scarred from eight years with Obama, they were unwilling to place all of their eggs in the U.S. basket. As a consequence, Russia and China expanded their arms sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE during Trump’s tenure.
The Biden administration seems not to have considered that freezing U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE doesn’t freeze arms sales, it just freezes the U.S. out of the regional arms market. So the first victim of Biden’s policies will be U.S. arms manufacturers. And the damage they incur will likely be longstanding. No matter how hard the next Republican administration works, it will be much more hard pressed than Trump was to rebuild America’s credibility in the Middle East.
Israelis are not responding to Biden’s pro-Iran policies with hysteria. They are simply rejecting his policies.
This doesn’t mean that Biden and Malley et.al., can’t do major damage. They can and they are. It does mean that they are much less powerful than they think they are.
Exclusive – Biden Admin: Yemen’s Houthis Blocking Aid After Being Delisted as Terrorists
The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen are blocking international aid to millions of suffering people, a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News on Tuesday.
The Biden administration recently de-listed the Houthi group from the government’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) explicitly in a bid to convince them to allow aid into the country.
Despite the failure of the aid to reach those in need, the Biden administration announced millions in additional humanitarian assistance to the country this week.
State Department officials asserted the February 16 reversal of the Trump administration’s move to add the Houthi organization to the FTO list was essential to allow life-saving aid from America and its partners to reach all Yemenis. The Houthi group’s terrorist designations came with severe sanctions.
It’s a fact that Iran is sponsoring the Houthis. It’s a fact that the Houthis are conducting terror.
The reality is that revoking the terrorist designation of the Houthis is a gift to the Iranians & will allow the Houthis to continue to foment terror around the world.
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) February 10, 2021
Breitbart News inquired about the Houthis potentially benefiting from the nearly $200 million in additional American taxpayer-funded aid to Yemen announced Monday by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and what the Biden Administration is planning to do to prevent that from happening.
“We call on all parties to provide unhindered access for humanitarian actors to deliver assistance to those who need it most,” a State spokesperson responded. “Ongoing interference in international aid operations by the Houthis in Yemen has prevented millions of people from receiving the assistance they need to survive.”
“We are also increasingly concerned by attempts by parties in southern Yemen to interfere with aid operations there as well,” the official added.
Jihadis from the Sunni Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the related Ansar al-Sharia terrorist groups have reportedly captured territory in the south.
While the internationally-recognized government controls most of the territory in Yemen, nearly 80 percent of people live in the Houthi areas, which lies in and around the capital of Sanaa.
Since the Yemen civil war began nearly six years ago, the U.S. has provided more than $3.4 billion to alleviate the country’s humanitarian crisis, including more than $350 million alone since the end of September 2020 alone, Blinken acknowledged Monday.
“God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam” is the official motto of the Iran-allied Houthis, Breitbart News has reported.
“The funding announced yesterday is providing urgently-needed life-saving assistance to Yemenis affected by one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” the spokesperson told Breitbart News on Tuesday. “This funding is intended for the millions of innocent women, children, and men who are suffering because of this war.”
“We take our responsibility to safeguard valuable taxpayer resources seriously; no amount of fraud, waste, and abuse of U.S. funding is acceptable,” the official added.
After acknowledging that the Houthis continue to interfere with humanitarian aid operations, the Biden administration asserted that it relies on the “aggressive risk mitigation systems” put in place by U.S. partners in Yemen.
Those systems “ensure U.S. taxpayer-funded humanitarian assistance is directly reaching those for whom it is intended,” the spokesperson told Breitbart News.
“We have begun to see the Houthis make some progress in reducing their obstructionist behaviors, such as … [continuing to] work with our humanitarian partners and other donors to make further progress,” the spokesperson also said.
In announcing the aid Monday, Blinken implored the Houthis “to cease interference in aid operations to ensure assistance is reaching its intended recipients.”
“[Aid] agencies depend on the Houthis to deliver aid, and they pay salaries to Houthis to do so,” the Associated Press (AP) reported in early February.
In late 2020, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Houthis of “obstructing aid agencies from reaching civilians in need, at least in part to divert aid to Houthi officials, their supporters, and Houthi fighters.”
In keeping with a promise to continue targeting individual members of the Shiite group, Secretary Blinken announced Tuesday that the Biden team was sanctioning two key Houthi military leaders for obtaining weapons from Iran to carry out attacks against civilians in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Consistent with previous remarks, the secretary of state on Tuesday criticized the same group he delisted as terrorists for “malign and aggressive actions,” including “preventing humanitarian aid access [and] repressing the Yemeni people in areas they control,” among other things.
According to the spokesperson from State, the U.S. is supporting ongoing humanitarian operations across the country to provide food, water, sanitation, and support efforts to contain the Chinese coronavirus, among other things.
The State official acknowledged that in March 2020, Houthi interference forced the U.S. to partially suspend NGO assistance in northern Yemen, the Shiite group’s stronghold that borders Saudi Arabia.
Still, the U.S. continues “to support our [United Nations] partners countrywide, critical life-saving NGO activities in northern Yemen, and remain fully operational in the south,” the spokesperson added.
Soon after the Yemeni capital fell to the Houthis, a Saudi Arabia-led Sunni coalition launched an ongoing effort in early 2015 to restore the internationally recognized government.
After Trump’s move to add the Houthis to the U.S. terrorist lists, the Biden Administration has condemned the group’s attacks on civilians and infrastructure in Saudi Arabia several times.
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