Understanding the menacing mentality of the Houthis, look not to the deserts sands of Yemen but to the urban landscapes of Europe and America.

By David E. Kaplan

Trying to fathom why a strange-looking folk we Israelis had once never heard of keep lobbing missiles in our direction since they fired their first (literally “out of the blue”) in  November 2023, I stare at this photograph of the Houthis taken in Sana’a, Yemen on March 28, 2025.

Fueled with hatred against Israel, I can make our a few of the protestors holding up copies of the Koran but for the most part they are brandishing ‘weapons’ of bygone ages such as axes, spades, swords and daggers. They project the collective crazed look that one could imagine on the faces  of the Visigoth or Hun hordes about to sack ancient Rome or the Sudanese Mahdi on its frenzied assault on Khartoum in 1885. What few ‘modern day’ firearms I can make out look like wooden riffles – something out of the Anglo Boer War (1899-1902). I could be looking at a history book off my bookshelf instead of a front page of a newspaper.

It is so easy to dismiss these desert tribesmen as an aberration, a surprise desert menace. However, these Houthis with their crazed appearance in tribal attire arising to strike fear from the desert sands of Yemen have much in common with those who pound the urban pavements of Europe and the Americas. Poles apart culturally, these Houthis share the same ‘targeted’ hate of Jews and Israel as the ‘hordes’ of professors and students at campuses across the Western world, their political leaders, the media and the ‘ordinary’ folk that attend football matches and pop concerts. They may look very different but they are no different when it comes to attitudes towards Jews – either against the individual Jew anywhere or the collective Jew – Israel. In this context, the behavior of the strange looking Houthis is not an aberration but the norm. Their menace lies not in their appearance but in their intent which is evident in Saana as it is in Sydney. Replace the backdrop of arid Yemen desert with the Sydney Opera House and protestors shouting “gas the Jews” and the same malicious hatred is all too evident. It is no less evident in Philadelphia, USA  when this past Passover, a 38-year-old ‘ordinary’ auto mechanic, Cody Balmer, set fire with a homemade Molotov cocktail to the home of Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. This ‘ordinary’ man faces charges of  attempted homicide, aggravated arson, terrorism and other crimes. And now in the US capital, Washington, two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC, Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli citizen, and Sarah Milgrim, an American a young couple about to be engaged were gunned down in cold blood as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. They were targeted for death for no other reason than that they were “suspected” by the killer of being Jewish. He did not know personally who he was killing as long as they were Jews.

What’s more, the killer wasn’t of Middle East descent or a Muslim but one Elias Rodrigues of Chicago, a graduate from the University of Illinois Chicago with a degree in English, currently working at the American Osteopathic Information Association. Before that position, his LinkedIn profile says, he was “an oral history researcher and production coordinator at a Black history site.”

His friends and neighbors are apparently “surprised”.

Israelis were also “surprised” on October 7, 2023! No more…

Jewish killers today come not only in the shape of those on motorcycles, hang gliders and Toyota Hilux trucks as they did on that fateful October 7 or Houthis shooting missiles from afar but they could just as easy be neighbors at any American or European city who are college grads or motor mechanics. They could be positioned anywhere on the political spectrum from left to right – it makes no difference whether they read a bible or prefer the comics, are familiar with mechanics, economics, anatomy or the philosophies of the ancient Greeks. Education is no prophylactic to the malady of antisemitism. 

Writing in The Spectator, Jonathan Sacerdoti asserts in his piece ‘THE WASHINGTON SHOOTING IS A CHILLING WARNING TO JEWS EVERYWHERE’ that:

“Historians and genocide scholars have long noted that the most chilling acts are often carried out …. by neighbors, shopkeepers, schoolteachers – people who, under different circumstances, might have lived blameless lives. What changes is not their nature, but their perception: a slow erosion of empathy, a steady drip of propaganda, a creeping sense that certain lives are worth less.

In Rwanda, it was farmers with machetes. In Nazi-occupied Europe, it was train conductors, clerks, and landlords. When hatred becomes ambient – socially accepted, reinforced by silence – those who once passed you in the street become capable of terrible things. That is the true terror of genocide: not just the horror of its crimes, but the ordinariness of its perpetrators.”

Subject to the steady drip of media into “ordinary” society – whether  on TV or online – the narrative against Jews takes hold and lubricates the path to murder. The complicity of the media in the “War against the Jews” was all too evident  with last week’s vicious claim – a lie akin to a medieval Blood Libel –  that 14,0000 babies in Gaza were “at imminent risk of death by starvation within 48 hours”. Despite the obvious implausibility of the claim where media in the ordinary course of another geographic scenario would have checked and rechecked their ‘facts’ before publishing, they not only failed to do so but outlets repeated it. As Sacerdoti noted:

“Activists shouted it and shared it as gospel, as if numbers so apocalyptic required no scrutiny at all.”

The reason is all too obvious for as Sacerdoti continues:

“What was dismissed as fringe now speaks from podiums and marches through capitals. This was more than a double murder; it was a marker.

The two people killed in Washington could have been me, my friends, my neighbours. Their lives ended on a street in the capital of the free world, while the man who killed them, red keffiyeh in hand, proudly shouted the slogan now barked constantly with increasing fervour on our very own streets, as crowds pass synagogues, Jewish families, and Holocaust memorials swathed in blue tarpaulin for protection: “free free Palestine”. We all know what it really means.”

It means that it is hunting season, and Jews are the prey – anywhere!

Feature picture:
From Yemen with Hate. Animated Houthis protesting against Israel on annual al-Quds Day in Sana’a, Yemen, March 28, 2025. (Photo: Reuters/Khaled Abdulla) 

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