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Tue, Nov 02, 2010 | The Dry Bones Blog | By Yaakov Kirschen

One Million Arabs Expelled

The current news is about how the west was tipped off by the Saudis about mailbombs sent from Yemen to the U.S.

Curious. Isn’t it?

Today’s cartoon is twenty years old. It was published in November of 1990 … when more than one million Arabs were expelled. The double standard applied and, because Israel was not involved, the story was a big ho hum.

So today, 20 years later, you and most of the Western World don’t remember that event. But the Arabs of Yemen (who were expelled) and the Saudis (who expelled them) certainly do remember.

Here’s an interesting 2009 background piece on Yemen from the Independent (UK) which traced the growing radicalization of Yemen to the expulsion that today’s Golden Oldie cartoon had commented on:

Yemen is the Afghanistan of the Arab world. It is the poorest Arab country, its government is weak, its people are armed, it already faces a serious rebellion, it is strongly tribal and its mountain ranges are a natural refuge for groups like al-Qa’ida.

There is nothing new about the growing political, social and economic crisis in Yemen, but the world is waking up to it only since the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound plane has been linked to al-Qa’ida in Yemen. Last night the regional wing of the group claimed responsibility for training and arming Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with the Christmas Day bomb.

Yemen has been becoming increasingly unstable over the past two decades, ever since Saudi Arabia expelled a million Yemeni workers because Yemen refused to support the US-led war to expel Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1990.

Read more…