The Houthis’ attacks might not have had a significant military impact so far, but they have severely disrupted global trade. More strikingly, they have slowly started to thrill some Western leftists. After news broke that the Houthis had seized an Israeli-linked ship in early December, socialist magazine Jacobin painted the Houthis as an honourable anti-imperialist resistance movement. ‘They felt obliged to act’, it opined, ‘because of the strong, historically rooted support for Palestinians among the Yemeni people’.

Since then, the Houthi cheerleading among the left has only become louder. Self-styled ‘progressives’ have taken to expressing pro-Houthi sentiments on social media (Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King even managed to have his X account taken down for doing so). And on New Year’s Eve, pro-Palestine protesters decided to fill the New York City air with a new pro-Houthi chant: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!’

The opportunism and degeneracy of parts of the Western left clearly know no bounds. Having spent the past three months indulging in apologism for the Jew-hating maniacs of Hamas, campus and Twitter leftists have now added a new set of anti-Semitic Islamist extremists to their supposedly anti-imperialist pantheon.