Just days after President Obama laid out his plans to defeat ISIS, a Wahhabi fundamentalist 'state', he sends Vice-President Biden as standard bearer of America's 'grief' at the death of the king that funded it. The irony of this assignment was not lost on RT, that today is running clips of Biden just a few months ago castigating the Saudis for funding ISIS (tag)
Women sit next to a graffiti that reads .Syria is free. at Taghyeer (Change) Square, where anti-government protesters have been camping for more than a year to demand a regime change, in Sanaa
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That Saudi Arabia should be funding ISIS, an entity that makes news by beheading hostages, is only logical. It punishes criminals the same way, and is currently administering one thousand lashes to a blogger, its 'humanity' evident in the decision to administer the punishment at the rate of 20 lashes a week.
Meanwhile, moving along a continuum, the U.S. has just meted out five years to Barret Brown for working with Anonynous to "investigate private government contractors working in cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance", as reported by Amy Goodman click here.
Oh, and as the cherry on that particular cake, the new chief of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Andrew Lack, told the New York Times that "We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram," rt.com/usa/225819-rt-isis-point-view-competition/. Needless to say, RT is having a field day with that and though I can't document this, Western journalists, and even the State Department have had to condemn Lack.
Turning now to Yemen, where the Houthi minority succeeded in forcing the US-backed government to resign, it would be incumbent upon serious journalists to point out that the Houthis constitue Yemen's Shia minority, nealry half the population, that they are supported by neighborning Iran, even as the US seeks to contain Iran's nuclear activities, having found nothing wrong with the Saudi's - or Israel - having the bomb.
Why are the Yemeni Shia important? Because the Arab world, having had an aborted spring, appears to be moving toward a knock-down drag out Sunni-Shia conflict, of which ISIS is the spearhead, its capital, Raqaa, located in Syria, wbose president, Assad, is supported by Iran, upon whom the US counts in its efforts to defeat ISIS, before it eventually gets rid of Assad, whose only eventual successor is likely to be a Sunni.
If this sounds like a vicious circle, it really isn't: the Shia represent the Muslim left, from Iran with its 1979 Revolution, to the Shia Alawite Assad and his Baath (Arab Socailsit) Party, to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Shia minorities in the various Gulf monarchies......
As the gilded 1% meeting in Davos feign to discover the worldwide 'problem' of inequality, there's really nothing new under the Muslim sun.
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