China and Russia get a free pass

It’s not about religion. It’s not about the economy. It’s not about territorial disputes. It’s not even about national interests.

The on-going world war is all about a clash between good and evil. Or, to be more specific, between relative good, as represented by the West, and absolute evil, as represented by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and their proxies.

Any doubts on that score should have been dispelled by Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, who promised that Russian and Chinese ships would be guaranteed safe passage through the Red Sea.

Since the Houthi pirates style themselves as Muslim fundamentalists, one would think China and Russia would be the last countries to rate such preferential treatment. After all, they are the only countries guilty of genocide against Muslims in the past few decades.

I’m using the word ‘genocide’ advisedly, to mean something different from any old mass murder. The UN defines that crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Both Russia and China are guilty of just that, in spades, and Muslims figure prominently among their victims.

After the Second World War, the Soviets deported most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus and Crimea. Half of them never made it back, and many of those who did, or rather their children and grandchildren, were murdered en masse during the two Chechen Wars in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Russians conducted those wars along genocidal lines, with the clear intention of reducing the Chechen population as much as possible. I could entertain you for hours with the horror stories I heard and witnessed when visiting the refugee camps on the Chechnya-Dagestan border in 1995, but let’s just say that the Russians largely succeeded in their gruesome task. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens (Muslims!) perished, many of them killed with singular, mindless cruelty simply for their ethnicity.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese set out to exterminate the Uyghurs, a Muslim group living in the north-western region of Xinjiang. During the past decade, the Chinese government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in so-called re-education camps.

That didactic effort included such educational tools as torture, forced labour, suppression of religious practices, forced sterilisation and also forced abortions and contraception. Some 16,000 mosques were razed or damaged as part of the lesson. The UN report described the persecution of the Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity, but those pious Houthis don’t seem to mind the plight of their Muslim brothers.

They only feel religious solidarity when the Israelis try to defend themselves against acts like the one committed by Hamas on 7 October, when more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. In other words, the Houthis are driven not by love of their fellow Muslims but by hatred of Jews. That is to say by evil.

Hatred of Jews dovetails neatly into the global crusade against the West currently under way. The Ukraine and Israel, along with the Western countries that support them, find themselves on the receiving end of various terrorist activities, from outright war conducted by terrorist means to old-fashioned piracy. And there are strong indications that all such hostile actions are coordinated under the general umbrella of war on the West.

The West’s only chance of survival is to close ranks, acknowledge what is happening and start acting accordingly. Cowardly vacillation, something that seems to come naturally to our governments, is a sure recipe for war, not for peace.

Specifically on the subject of Red Sea terrorism, everyone knows the Houthis are merely Iran’s proxies. Hence the countermeasures must be directed not just against those bandits and their bases in Yemen, but also against those who send them out to damage the West.

Iran must be made to understand that crimes against the West will have dire consequences for its own regime. To make sure that message is properly understood, punitive raids must be launched not just against Yemen and the Houthis, but against Iran.

Downgrading its ability to produce nuclear weapons should be the first and most important task, especially since many reports say Iran is close to getting its first bomb. A massive hit on Iran’s infrastructure should do it, and the West still has a window of opportunity to deliver that. But that window will close the moment the mullahs start brandishing nuclear devices as a blackmail weapon.

No such direct action is necessary against Russia. All we have to do is start supplying the Ukrainians with the weapons they need, and they’ll be happy to do it for us. Yet instead the West is suffocating even the meagre military aid currently reaching the Ukraine.

Western intelligence has to be dumping heaps of data on ministerial desks showing that the fear of escalation currently paralysing the West is guaranteed to produce escalation. And yet our governments refuse to acknowledge the obvious: the Ukraine and Israel are only the first victims of a world war gathering momentum, and it’s the West that’s the ultimate target.

Instead, NATO governments are trying to twist Israel’s arm to accept a ceasefire and, eventually, the “two-state solution”, meaning suicide. No doubt the Ukrainian government is under a similar pressure to negotiate away their birthright, giving the Russians the pause they need to regroup, rearm and remobilise.

By granting Russia and China safe passage through the Red Sea, and denying it to the US and Britain, the Houthis have drawn the battle lines with undeniable clarity. We should thank them for their honesty and heed the warning.

We know we are their enemy, while China and Russia (and of course Iran) are their friends. In this context, that word means accomplices. We should follow Vegetius’s advice and, because we want peace, prepare for war.