But those self-styled progressives marching in Western capitals, chanting their support for attacks on ships, aren’t concerned about what’s actually happening in the Red Sea and in Yemen. Instead, they’re projecting on to these skirmishes their simple-minded anti-Western worldview. They might doll up their politics as anti-imperialist, but beneath the leftwing-ish jargon, there lurks little more than a loathing of the West. And it’s this reflexive anti-Westernism that has led them to automatically portray the US and its allies as evil imperial aggressors and, even more incredibly, to see the Houthis as a noble resistance force.

This, after all, is the Houthis we’re talking about. This is a militia that has played its own not insignificant role in the humanitarian catastrophe that has engulfed Yemen since 2015; it’s a brutal Islamist movement that has crushed dissent, deprived women of their rights and persecuted homosexuals throughout its northern Yemen strongholds; an anti-Semitic insurgency whose motto is ‘Death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews’. The Houthis have even been known to perform the Nazi salute during marches. Yet so morally and politically lobotomised are large swathes of today’s left, that they are willing to throw their support behind this, one of the nastiest and most reactionary forces in the world right now. Yemen, Yemen, make us proud…

[The Left isn’t concerned about consistency, or even ideology per se. They want the destruction of Western civilization more than any other goal, so therefore the enemy of the West becomes a valued entity for the International ANSWER crowd. — Ed]