Alt Left: About That Attack on the Saudi Aramco Facilities, with an Aside about Sunni-Shia Relations in the Arab World

Over at Moon of Alabama, one of my favorite websites, b, the man who runs the site and is one of my favorite writers, unfortunately fell for the US manufactured propaganda about the Aramco attack. For some reason, the US didn’t want to pin it on the Houthis who did it, so instead they pinned it on Iran.

This was complete with fake photos of  missiles in the desert, actually from previous Houthi attacks. The US said the attack came from a military base in Southwestern Iran. We even named the base. It was all a lie.  I don’t know why we didn’t want to blame the Houthis. I suppose we just want to pin everything bad on Iran because it’s the US boogeyman.

This lie was coordinated by the Saudis, some of the most pathetic propagandists around, complete with a laughable press conference where missile parts were displayed. All were said to be from the latest attack and were said to be Iranian weapons. This was the “proof” that Iran did it. However, the display was faked. I looked at all of those weapons. Those were all Houthi weapons, not Iranian weapons. They look different and I know how to tell them apart. The Houthis have been shooting missiles at Saudi Arabia for some time now, and I suppose this was the wreckage of those missiles.

The part of the lie that b went along was that the Aramco attack was carried out with Iranian weapons. He is wrong.  Iranian weapons were absolutely not used in that attack.

First, how do I know all this stuff? I have a source close to the Iranian government. Journalist like me. That’s where I got all the information below.

Ok, here’s what happened. Those were Yemeni weapons that were used. However, they were manufactured from Iranian prototypes.

I do not believe that the Iranians help the Houthis build these missiles. I can tell you though that Hezbollah absolutely helps the Houthis build all those missiles because Hezbollah are experts at rockets and missiles. Yes, there are Hezbollah people in Yemen.

The Iranian role is, among other things, that they have advisors embedded in the Houthis. Hezbollah also has advisors in the same role. And Iran smuggles a lot of weapons to the Houthis. But many of these are just prototypes. They come in on innocent-looking fishing boats. Yemen is awash in ammunition and weaponry of all kinds. No need to import a thing. Also, the Houthis seize a very large amount of material.

Iran also at times helps the Houthis plan and carry out attacks. In this particular attack, the missiles were manufactured by Houthis with Hezbollah assistance. The missiles were based on Iranian prototypes, but they were modified in various ways. The attack was planned for four months with deep Iranian assistance. And the Iranians absolutely helped the Houthis carry out this attack, which definitely came from Yemen and not Iran.

You need to recognize that the Houthis are nothing but the official Yemeni military. At one point, 80% of the military had gone over to the Houthis.

Also, Sunni and Shia mean nothing in Yemen. Until 2014, there was no such thing as Sunni and Shia in Yemen. Everyone was just a Muslim. And the Houthis are not necessarily Shia. That’s another lie. Most of them are Shia, yes. But there are many Sunni Houthis, and quite a few Houthis will tell you that they are neither Sunni nor Shia! This is because the Houthi Shia are a peculiar sect that is virtually Sunni in practice. They only differ in one or two things.

The sectarian mess started when the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE came in and stirred up the hornets nest. Before that, the Saudis had sent many missionaries into Yemen to convert the Houthis to Wahhabism. It’s not so much Sunni versus Shia in Yemen, but more Wahhabism versus traditional Yemeni Islam, Sunni or Shia. Wahhabism Islam in its extreme hatred of the Shia among other things is very much against typical Yemeni Islam. Many Houthis converted to Wahhabism. This was part of what led to the original Houthi rebellion against the government several years back. Rage against conversion to Wahhabism.

The Yemenis are quite used to having Houthis rule the land historically. The Houthis have ruled Yemen for most of the last thousand years, often with the enthusiastic agreement of the Sunni.

After the war against the Houthis started, the UAE and the Saudis shipped 3,000 Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters from Syria to Yemen to fight the Houthis. Remember when the US said that the Houthis used an anti-ship missile to attack a cargo freighter in the Red Sea? First of all, yes the Houthis do have anti-ship missiles. They are embedded along the rocky coast in tunnels cut into the rock. But they are usually hidden from sight.

And they are extremely hard to find because the launch site just looks like a rocky coastline. Iran has a huge number of anti-ship missiles borrowed into the coastline, and those are also almost impossible to find. If any war starts, those anti-ship missile will pop out of that rocky coastline and attack any warships in the Gulf. Iran has the whole east shore of the Gulf lined with these hidden anti-ship missiles.

The US lied again. Are you surprised? The Houthis absolutely did not attack a civilian cargo ship. Instead, they attacked one of those Saudi-UAE ships that was bringing in Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters from Syria to fight in Yemen. They scored a direct hit on the ship. I am not sure about casualty figures. The US then screamed that the Houthis were attacking civilian shipping, the  pathetic Western media ate it up, and we attacked one or more of the anti-ship missile sites along the coast. I have no idea if we hit anything.

So the US government retaliated against a lethal attack on Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters by Shia rebels by attacking the people who attacked our proxy jihadists. See how the US supports Al Qaeda and ISIS? That’s not the end either.

The US, Israel, and the Saudis and UAE are going all over the Arab World stirring up sectarian hate against the Shia for whatever reasons they have. The Gulf Arabs are psychotic about the Shia and Iran. For the US and Israel, the psychosis is more calculated and cynical. Most Sunni Arabs, particularly in the Gulf and Mesopotamia and to a lesser extent in the Levant suffer from this psychosis. The delusion is: “Iran is coming to conquer all of the Arab World and convert us all to Shiism.”

This nonsense is particularly prominent in Iraq because the Persian Safavids did indeed conquer the eastern half of Iraq. But that was 500 years ago. The hysterical Sunnis act like it was yesterday.

I hate to bring up Nazis, but the Sunni hate for Iran and the Shia is like the Nazi hate for Jews. Remember the Nazis said, “The Jews are coming to kill us all.”? The Turks said the same about the Armenians. The Hutus said the same thing about the Tutsis. They all said, “They’re going to kill us all!” about the victims who never attacked them who they were about to genocide. Before a genocide takes place, the genociders generally project their exterminationist murderousness onto their victims.

And this is what the Sunnis do in regard to Iran. It doesn’t make sense. Iran has not invaded another nation in hundreds of years. The last thing they need is to be occupying a hostile population of Shia-hating Sunnis. They have enough issues with their own Sunnis and even their own Arabs, who are actually Shia Arabs!

The Shia are the underdogs of the Arab World. They’ve been treated as second-class citizens for centuries. Until Hezbollah came on the scene in Lebanon, the only jobs the Sunnis would let the Shia have were garbage collecting. I exaggerate but you get the picture. So the advent of Hezbollah was not only a blossoming of Arab Resistance to the Zionist enemy – it was also a liberation and empowerment of the Shia of Lebanon and in a broader sense, across the Arab World, particularly in Iraq and Yemen.

It’s not only in Lebanon. The Shia are also under the boot in Saudi Arabia, where they suffer pervasive discrimination and are impoverished even though they sit on the oil fields.

The Saudi Shia are better armed than you think. The Saudi military almost never goes into the Shia part of Saudi Arabia. It’s too hostile. However several years ago, they invaded this region. As soon as the military entered the neighborhood, basically the entire neighborhood opened up on them with automatic weapons. This is the sort of reception the Israeli military usually gets in West Bank Palestinian habitations. Keep in mind that I believe it’s illegal to own weapons, much less an AK-47, in Saudi Arabia. But that whole neighborhood was armed to the teeth.

There was a bit of a war, but the Saudis mostly gave up. When you come into a neighborhood, and the first thing that happens to you is the 10-story apartment complexes on all sides of you open fire, a lot of soldiers probably think it’s time to go back to the base. Further, Saudi soldiers are notoriously conflict-averse.

The leader of the Saudi Shia was a man named Al-Nimr. He was a good, kind, Shia religious leader type like the Iraqi Sistani or the Iranian Khameini. A man with a big heart. He supported civil rights for the Shia, but he was a quietist. That means he didn’t support armed revolt. He always pushed only for peaceful change. Al-Nimr was arrested during this uprising along with ~100 other Saudi Shia. They were all charged with treason and executed. I have no idea what the others did, but Al-Nimr was accused of fomenting a violent revolt, a lie. He was executed too, by beheading of course. That’s how the Saudi animals roll.

The Shia are the majority in Bahrain, but the country is under minority rule of Wahhabi Sunni who hate the Shia. The majority Shia are deeply oppressed and impoverished. At the same time that this Saudi revolt took place, the Shia in Bahrain also rose up. The Saudis sent their military, including tanks, into Bahrain to smash the revolt.

This Sunni hatred for the Shia takes on almost genocidal formations in the form of Al Qaeda in Iraq under Zarqawi and the subsequent ISIS. ISIS has flatly stated that part of its program is to kill all ~150 million Shia in the world. They’re all targeted for death. And the Gulf Arabs, the US, the UK, and Israel are supporting this murderous and at times genocidal project to the hilt.