The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The culturally

appropriate two segments today both about some powerful but little

understood organizations in the Middle East.

Shereen Allademy will tell us all about the Huthies,

and Orly Dahir will tell us more about Hezbollah.

The Huthies, based in northern Yemen,

are causing a lot of trouble by attacking ships in the Red Sea in support of

Palestinians under attack in Gaza. What the late Bob Fitch called the capitalist

hyena press has been denouncing them as a bunch of Iran-backed maniacs. Not in those exact words, but the underlying concept, for daring

to interfere with global commerce, which is bad, while Israel is committing mass murder, which

is apparently okay. In response, the U.S. has been bombing Yemen to little

effect. The Biden said that the bombing will nonetheless continue. The Saudis who led a coalition

that waged war in Yemen in the name of fighting the Houthis for nearly a decade,

discovered that to be a fruitless enterprise. They finally gave up on the war

recognizing that they'd lost after imposing misery and starvation in the country of

33 million,

were the GDP equal to less than a tenth of Elon Musk's net worth.

Who are the huthies? Where did they come from? What do they want? To answer those questions,

let's hear from Shirin Aledamy, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a non-resident fellow with a Quincy Institute.

A native of Yemen, she's been very active since 2015 in trying to resist the war on her native country

which was led by Saudis and fully backed by the US.

Sharon Aledeme.

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