Our government must stop arming terrorists

In the midst of crisis in the Persian gulf, Saudi Arabia and others have condemned neighbouring Qatar as the godfather of jihadist Islamic extremism.

It’s time Britain took a note out of their ally’s playbook, and used it against them.

The British government, under the former Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition, then exclusively Tory leadership, and now another coalition between the Tories and the DUP, has contributed through the brokering of private sector arms deals and government-to-government contracts to the funneling of Saudi Arabian weapons and wealth to militant jihadist organisations. Even closer to home, the DUP has actively supported loyalist paramilitary factions and terrorist militias both north and south of the Irish border. It appears that to the powers that be, unionist terrorism = good, but republican terrorism = bad.

Accusations that Qatar, an oil-rich monarchical state, has provided assistance in the form of sanctuary, money, and weapons, as well as media-backing, to extremist Islamic groups, from an almost equally as rich and oppressive hereditary regime in Saudi Arabia is nothing short of alarmingly hypocritical. I use the word alarmingly not because the accusations about the Qatari state are ungrounded, but because Saudi Arabia is, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden put it, the integral cog in the state-sponsored machine of Salafist jihadism in the Middle East. What’s more, this overt hypocrisy raises red flags as to how our own government can be at best willfully ignorant and at worst complicit in Saudi Arabia’s funding of extremist Islamic factions.

The British government for years laboured to secure defence export deals with the Gulf states, lobbying on behalf of BAE Systems – the private defence company – to a number of morally questionable regimes on multiple occasions. This effort, gestated by Margaret Thatcher some thirty years ago, was stressed by ex-Chancellor George Osbourne as a key move in retaining the UK’s private defence sector to secure an envisaged export led economic recovery.

In February 2014, the government got its wish.

BAE closed a multi-billion pound deal with the Saudi state. And what did BAE supply them with? 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets. These weapons, sold to the Saudis through a government brokered deal, did not sit idle for long. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia led a coalition military campaign into Yemen supporting former president Ali Abduallah Saleh, targeting Houthis and allied rebel fighters. Since then, an increasing amount of evidence has emerged that Saudi Arabia has violated humanitarian law by, among other things, dropping British made cluster bombs on the war-torn country.

The rationale behind the brokering of this deal by the UK government was economic recovery. Indeed, the Saudi deal saved hundreds of jobs at BAE, for employees based mainly in the south-west of England, which otherwise would’ve been lost due to a global downturn in appetite for armed conflict. Share price also received a bump between 2014 and 2015. From a globalist perspective, one has to wonder whether the retention of hundreds of private sector jobs – which could otherwise be found if the government taxed corporations and invested in public services – is worth the displacement of over three million people and the deaths of over 10,000 civilians? As analysts and journalists have said, the advent of war in Syria, as well as in Yemen, has given business a much needed boost. They love it, thrive on it in fact, when a countries’ defence budget suddenly expands to accommodate the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands.

The civil war in Syria, the ISIS hotbed, has provided yet more opportunity for western governments to illicit sympathy for, and justify, war. Those same governments, mind you, helped create the power vacuum in those middle-eastern countries which they now need to go in and ‘help’ become civilised democracies. All this instead of imposing sanctions – a punishment that was deemed appropriate for Russia. Of course, Russia does not supply our defence contractors and their investors with business, nor do they supply us with intelligence, as the Saudi’s do, that Theresa May boasted has ‘saved hundreds of lives in the UK.’ I wonder though, if she cares so greatly for the lives of those living in the UK (and you’d hope Ireland too), why has she entered into coalition with the DUP? This a party whose founder, Ian Paisley, endeavoured and succeeded in setting up a unionist paramilitary organisation, Ulster Resistance, which was allied with such murderous factions as the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, and Red Hand Commando – paramilitary groups responsible for the deaths of over 500 people!

Whether the justification is strength and stability, national security, or economic recovery, a government supporting and funding terrorism, either directly or indirectly, is a threat to this country and its people. But hey, at least it’s better than having a man who believes in nuclear disarmament in charge… Right?

#InternationalPolitics