Pots were calling kettles black this weekend according to ynetnews as Saudi Arabia and their Gulf State allies declared the militant Hezbollah group a ‘terrorist organisation’.
The six-member ‘Gulf Cooperation Council’ made the announcement on Friday to the backdrop of a fall-out between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon over Hezbollah influence in the Levantine state. Saudi Arabia decided to stop security assistance to the Lebanese army and Lebanese security forces. To back up the decision, the GCC’s secretary general said:
‘Hezbollah’s incitement and terrorist acts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq are contrary to morality and human values.”
That will be the morality and human values the UK’s friends from Riyadh practice so assiduously at home.
The announcement was swiftly followed by a denouncement of Hezbollah by the Arab League, with reservations expressed by Lebanon and Iraq. Iran is not a part of the twenty-two member Arab League, which includes ‘Palestine’ and is led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Those of us with long memories will recall that no such condemnation of Hezbollah came from either the GCC or the Arab League when Hezbollah militants were raining rockets from their Lebanese bases into northern Israel leading to war with Israel in 2006. (In fact, missiles were launched as recently as December 2015.) So what is different today?
The clue is in the statement about Hezbollah’s activities in ‘Syria, Yemen and Iraq’ (not Israel, of course). In each of the three theatres of war, the Shia Hezbollah are defending their co-religionists from Sunni Muslim aggression.
The GCC states are the Kingdom of Bahrain, the State of Kuwait, the Sultanate of Oman, the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Five are ruled by Sunnis, in Bahrain over a Shia majority, and Oman is ruled by the home-based Ibadi sect.
With the exception of Iraq and Lebanon, all of the other Arab League states are Sunni Muslim, as this map from Colombia University shows. The self-styled Islamic State are also Sunni Muslims.
Syria’s President, Bashar Al-Assad, is from the minority Alawite sect of Shia Islam. He has consistently defended the Syrian Christian minority.
Supported by his allies, Russia, Shia Iran and Shia Hezbollah, he is now making considerable advances to recapture land occupied by the Sunni rebels. The Saudis don’t like that.
In Yemen, the Shia Houthi militia led by former president Ali Abdullah Saleh are fighting Sunni forces loyal to the government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who has fled to Aden. Hezbollah, funded by Iran, have given assistance to the Houthis, according to a bombastic letter allegedly sent by Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah to President Hadi. The Saudis don’t like that either.
Saud Arabia have been actively bombing the Houthi rebels, causing a humanitarian crisis. The United States, the United Kingdom, and even Israel are said to backing up the Saudi campaign against the Shia rebels, according to Iran’s PressTV news outlet.
Hezbollah are also active in Iraq, and the Jerusalem Post reported only last month that the Shia militants have made clear they will take exception to any Saudi Arabian troops sent to Syria under the pretext of fighting Islamic State.
Let us make no mistake. If Hezbollah were doing badly the Saudis would not have bothered organising a wholesale denouncement of them. The GCC and Arab League pronouncements indicate that the Saudis feel themselves, particularly in Syria, to be increasingly on the losing side. That is why the Saudi pot is now so concerned with the Hezbollah kettle.
The map is very useful, but a trifle misleading. If they are going to show Ethiopia and most of India as Sunni Muslim, they might as well show England and France as Sunni Muslim.
Careful. You could be moving in the prophetic. Like Balaam’s ass.
The point is that India is only 14% Muslim, and France is 6% Muslim, so if India is going to be marked on the map as if it were a Muslim country, why not France ?
But India is definitely NOT a Muslim country. The Muslim areas of the Raj were detached from it as far as practically possible on independence.
I wasn’t prophesying anything, but I did note that France is reckoned to be 33% agnostic, atheist etc. If I were to make a prophesy, it would be that this number is likely to be increased with more lapsed Muslims as well as more lapsed Catholics.