Speaking in an interview with FNA, Isaac said, “Not just the US government, but corporations like Exxon Mobil, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, etc. are making billions of dollars of the genocide of Yemenis.”
Monica Isaac, an organizer with Yemeni Liberation Movement, an NGO for educating and mobilizing Yemeni communities and allies aimed at ending the war on Yemen.
Below is the full text of the interview:
Q: Do the White House and Capitol care for the use of US-made weapons by Saudi-led coalition against Yemenis?
A: No because Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Arab world so they are vulnerable to this violence. The US has historically used violent Imperialist interventions around the Arab world. This includes more specifically the use of inhumane tactics to extract resources, land and perpetuate genocide all for billions of dollars (they made over 60 billion dollars in weapon sales to Saudi Arabia) to maintain their empire. Not just the US government, but corporations like Exxon Mobil, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, etc. are making billions of dollars of the genocide of Yemenis.
Historically this is done at the expense of not just the Arab world but to all people in the Global South.
Q: How do you believe Riyadh can go ahead bombarding innocent civilian Yemenis since 2015, and getting away with its war crimes' consequences?
A: Saudi Arabia needs US financial, logistical and diplomatic assistance for this war and genocide to continue. If Biden Administration decided today to acknowledge and end the blockade, we would see necessary aid in the country. We would see hospital generators functioning properly to administer care to Yemenis. That is why the declaration from the Biden Administration in February that they would end support is empty. That support is ongoing through a fuel blockade and we have visibly seen that, more recently through the CNN investigation and reports from WHO and UNICEF. If they really had ended support, material conditions for the Yemeni people would have changed. They have not and in fact, only gotten worse.
Q: How does the US media let Americans know of the situation in Yemen? Do they reveal the US government’s complicity in the war crimes on the impoverished Arab country?
A: Corporate media in the US is complicit. Most news outlets barely share what has been happening in this 6-year genocide and media is received in very short fragments so there is not room for thorough reporting and understanding. This is intentional to keep people less informed and easily manipulated into anti-Arab propaganda. When folks are not given accurate news they are not able to thoughtfully engage in what is happening globally and therefore unable to respond, empathize and act. It is a calculated effort to dehumanize the Yemeni people in an effort to justify genocide.
They have routinely done a disservice to the American people by not focusing on the role the government is playing in this genocide by hyper-focusing strictly on the Saudi Arabian government as if they have the power to act individually without our support. The media has also repeatedly uplifted a narrative that the United States is "protecting its citizens and the people of Yemen" by intervening when in fact, this intervention is a violent imperialist strategy routinely and historically performed by the United States: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. Fear mongering by media has been effective: create fear in the lives of Average Americans that the political existence of the Arab world is a direct threat to their lives. That intervention is needed on any level in order to keep us safe. But there is no examination as to what this intervention historically is: an extension of building their corporatist imperialist empire through violations of human rights, extraction of resources and the violent and slow starvation of the Yemeni people (in this case).
Journalists are not asking the right questions: Does America even have a right to be there? Why does America think it has the right to insert itself and determine how other countries need to be governed and exist?
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