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November 12, 2009

Muslims Bombing Muslims

Denis Keohane
Muslims (Saudis) are shelling and bombing Muslims (Yemenis) and we are not getting hourly photos of the civilian casualties!

It seems like the same old sad story from the Middle East. The side with the powerful military apparatus shelling and bombing the far lesser equipped rebel fighters! The wealthy side putting up a fence between themselves and where the poor struggle to survive! A constant drumbeat of reports and heart wrenching pictures of the growing and tragic civilians casualties....oh wait! There's a divergence from the normal template so skip that last item.

In this case the rich nation doing the shelling and bombing and building the fence is Saudi Arabia. The poor side of the fence would be Yemen, and the rebels are insurgents in the Yemeni civil war that have moved into Saudi territory. According to AP, 175,000 have been displaced, and rebels are claiming the Saudis are randomly bombing, including residential areas.

Reuters reported:

Saudi warplanes and artillery were reported in action for a third day on Friday in the border area of Jabal Dukhan, which means "mountain of smoke", in efforts to dislodge Yemeni rebels accused of infiltrating across the undemarcated frontier. The official Saudi Press Agency said operations would go on until Saudi territory was ‘cleansed of any hostile element'.


Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday it will keep up air strikes against Yemeni rebels until they pull back from its borders...'We are not going to stop the bombing until the Huthis retreat tens of kilometres (miles) inside their border,' Deputy Defence Minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan said...He appeared to confirm reports by Shiite Zaidi rebels that Saudi warplanes continued to pummel them inside Yemen, a week after a rebel raid into Saudi territory sparked air and ground bombardment of their positions...Earlier the rebels, also known as Huthis after their leader, said a Saudi air strike on a Yemeni village near the border killed two women and wounded a child.

The rebels said two women were killed and a child wounded! That's it? Let's not beat around the bush. How prominent a news story would this be if it were Israel shelling and bombing rebels with claims of women and children killed in those strikes? Would there be numerous photos of the women's funeral and videos of the child in the hospital and barely restrained (if at all) condemnation of the ‘powerful' side?

Someone relying on media reports alone could come to the stunning conclusion that the Saudi air and artillery forces must be the world's pre-eminent surgical strikers, especially as compared to U.S. and Israeli IDF forces. The constant media meme is that the U.S. and Israel kill civilians routinely out of either a cavalier attitude towards such deaths or worse, an intent to terrorize the civilian populations.

We might also want to inquire of the Saudis how they provide the much needed counseling to their artillerymen and pilots who must be suffering from the debilitating trauma that results from having fought against and even killed their fellow Muslims! No doubt the Saudis are our superiors in that field also.

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