10 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
In the fifth year of a pitiless war be-
tween Ansar Allah, the Iranian-sup-
ported movement known as the
Houthis, and the Saudi Arabia-led and
United States-backed coalition, Sana,
the capital of Yemen, doesn’t see many
American visitors. For good reason.
The Houthis control Sana and about a
fifth of the country’s landmass in all; a
majority of Yemen’s 30.5 million people
live in Houthi-controlled areas. Misery
extends far beyond. Yemen’s humani-
tarian crisis is ranked the world’s worst
by the United Nations: Two-thirds of its
population need some form of assist-
ance, 10 million suffer malnutrition.
Almost a quarter of a million are starv-
ing to death.
Two weeks ago, I traveled with a few
colleagues to Sana. Our first impression
was of its overwhelming sense of isola-
tion from the outside world. Sana had
the air of being stuck several decades in
the past even before the war. Since then,
its few pockets of modernity — barista-
style coffee shops, car showrooms and
shopping malls trying to imitate tacky
Gulf aesthetics — have either been
shuttered or fallen into disrepair.
Land borders with Saudi Arabia are
cut off by front-line fighting, as are links
to all but one of Yemen’s ports. Sana has
a small, badly damaged airport, but
Saudi Arabia, which controls the
airspace, makes sure that commercial
planes neither fly in nor out. The sick, in
need of urgent medical care, can’t leave.
People separated from loved ones
abroad can’t travel.
Isolating Sana carries dire conse-
quences for its inhabitants. Ignoring
those who govern it has political costs
too. The Houthis bear considerable
blame for the tragedy — but they hold
the keys to the war’s resolution or ex-
tension. An ill-timed or ill-placed Houthimissile or drone strike aimed at Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or
Red Sea shipping lanes could spark a
broader conflict involving the United
States, its Gulf allies and Iran. It defies
logic for Saudi or American officials not
to engage them.
The residents of Sana seem stunned
and angry at what they view as the
wildly disproportionate international
attention garnered by every single
Houthi missile or drone attack on Saudi
Arabia, compared to the regular, de-
structive Saudi-led coalition bombings
Yemenis have endured since March
2015.
It is hard to know
how freely locals
can speak. Many
perhaps privately
fault the Houthis for
recklessly taking on
their northern
neighbor. If so, the
sentiment is well
hidden. Even the
leaders of a party
traditionally close to
the Saudis and at
odds with the Houthis expressed heart-
felt fury at Saudi Arabia.
A quip doing the rounds in Sana: If
the Saudis just handed me the price of a
missile, I would destroy my house for
them. Sana residents are exasperated at
the bombing of a cemetery: even our
dead are unsafe, they tell you.
Houthi supporters are also puzzled as
to why their attacks on Saudi Arabia are
attributed to Iranian dictates, as if their
being at war with the kingdom wasn’t
explanation enough. The world’s focus
on their cross-border operations has
only further convinced them that this is
what it will take to attract global interest
and get the Saudis to change course.
Saudi Arabia has too much to lose to risk
it; Yemenis have too little to lose to care.
A visitor in Sana also notices a sur-
prising sense of internal stability. The
Houthis are building something akin toa police state — the lack of checkpoints
or other markers of security in the
capital announcing their effective stran-
glehold.
Most people in Sana, rightly, consider
the United States to be complicit in the
war, an enabler of the Saudi-led coalition
that wages it. Americans, understand-
ably, would recoil at the Houthis em-
bracing “Death to America” and “Curse
the Jews” as their slogans, scrawled as
graffiti on the city’s walls. But Sana’s
residents warmly welcome the rare
American visitor.
The Houthi leadership knows all this
— the popular hostility toward the
Saudi-led coalition; the remarkable
control the movement has achieved —
and finds other justifications for self-
confidence. Time, they feel, is on their
side. Despite formidable military dis-
parities, they have stood up to a coali-
tion of wealthy, powerful states backed
and armed by the West.
Front lines are essentially frozen.
Their domestic foes, nominally led by
the Aden-based, internationally recog-
nized government of President Abd
Mansour Hadi, show signs of fracture.
The Emiratis recently announced a
redeployment that greatly diminishes
the risk of a coalition assault on the vital
port city of Hudaydah. Anti-Saudi senti-
ment is rising in the halls of the United
States Congress.
Despite their confidence, the Houthis
don’t know how or when this war will
end. Their singular refrain is that they
are ready to talk. Not with Mr. Hadi or
his allies, whom they dismiss as “merce-
naries” — but with the Saudis, who they
claim pull Mr. Hadi’s strings, or with the
United States, which they believe pulls
the strings of the Saudis.
They offer a road map: They promise
to stop cross-border attacks against
Saudi Arabia if the Saudis halt attacks
against them. They will withdraw from
Saudi territory. Riyadh will allow Sana
airport to reopen. And they will discuss
a longer-term relationship that, theyassert, will be closer than the Houthis’
relations with Iran.
They talk in one breath about a peace-
ful settlement and close ties to Saudi
Arabia; in another they warn of sur-
prises that lie in store if Riyadh doesn’t
agree to a cease-fire. They take offense
at being labeled Iranian proxies, but
acknowledge the war brought them
closer and offer lackluster denials when
asked if Iran supplies them with weap-
ons. At times they emphasize the purely
local nature of their fight; at others its
more revolutionary, Pan-Islamic iden-
tity. Saudi and American officials can be
forgiven for being confused.
There is also ambiguity in the
Houthis’ description of an eventual
internal settlement. Once the war with
Saudi Arabia ends, the Houthis claim
they will sit down with other Yemenis to
negotiate the formation of a techno-
cratic government, new elections and
the disarmament of all armed groups.
Yet again, the claims are conditional.
They say they will give up their heavy
weapons once trust has been restored —
which, after such brutal fighting, could
be a while. Their opponents suspect it
will be never: The Houthis will not
easily, and certainly not willingly, give
up the power they have accumulated.
It is uncertain how the Houthis would
respond if the United States stopped
assisting the Saudi-led coalition and the
coalition ended its campaign. But the
past four years give us a pretty good
sense of what will occur if not. The
Houthis are likely to be stronger, the
opposition more fragmented, Iran more
influential, Saudi Arabia less safe and
more vilified. And the Yemenis more
impoverished and desperate.
As we departed Sana, residents re-
peatedly asked us what the United
States would do to end their misery. We
wished we could answer.Robert Malley
ROBERT MALLEYis the president and
C.E.O. of the International Crisis
Group.America should talk to the Houthis
A supporter of Houthi rebels during a gathering to mobilize more fighters into battlefronts against Saudi-backed government forces, in Sana, Yemen.YAHYA ARHAB/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKAmissile or
drone strike
could spark
a broader
conflict
involving the
United States,
its Gulf allies
and Iran.Many of today’s mass murderers write
manifestoes. They are not killing only
because they’ve been psychologically
damaged by trauma. They’re not killing
only because they are pathetically
lonely and deeply pessimistic about
their own lives. They are inspired to kill
by a shared ideology, an ideology that
they hope to spread through a wave of
terror.
The clearest expression of that ideol-
ogy was written by the man charged
with a killing spree in Christchurch,
New Zealand. His manifesto has been
cited by other terrorists; the suspect in
this weekend’s El Paso mass shooting
cited it in his own manifesto.
It’s not entirely what you’d expect. At
one point its author writes about his
travels around the world: “Everywhere
I travelled, barring a few small excep-
tions, I was treated wonderfully, often as
a guest and even as a friend. The varied
cultures of the world greeted me with
warmth and compassion, and I verymuch enjoyed nearly every moment I
spent with them.”
The ideology he goes on to champion
is highly racial, but it’s not classic xeno-
phobia or white supremacy. It’s first
feature is essentialism. The most impor-
tant thing you can know about a person
is his or her race. A white sees the world
as a white and a Latino sees it as a Lati-
no. Identity is racial.
The second feature is separatism.
Races are healthy when they are pure
and undiluted. The world is healthy
when people of different races live
apart. The world is diseased when races
mix. “I am against race mixing because
it destroys genetic diversity and creates
identity problems,” the El Paso suspect
wrote.
The third feature is racial Darwinism.
Races are locked in a Darwinian strug-
gle in which they try to out-reproduce
their rivals. Currently, the black and
brown races are stronger than the white
race and are on the verge of obliterating
it through invasion.
Immigrants, the Christchurch sus-
pect wrote, come “from a culture with
higher fertility rates, higher social trust
and strong robust traditions that seek to
occupy my peoples lands and ethnically
replace my own people.”
This ideology is an extreme form of a
broader movement — antipluralism —
that now comes in many shapes.
Trumpian nationalists, authoritarian
populists and Islamic jihadists aredifferent versions of antipluralism.
These movements are reactions
against the diversity, fluidity and inter-
dependent nature of modern life. An-
tipluralists yearn for a return to clear
borders, settled truths and stable identi-
ties. They kill for a fantasy, a world that
shines in their imaginations but never
existed in real life.
The struggle between pluralism and
antipluralism is one of the great death
struggles of our time, and it is being
fought on every front.
We pluralists do
not believe that
human beings can
be reduced to a
single racial label.
Each person is a
symphony of identi-
ties. Our lives are
rich because each of
us contains multi-
tudes. Pluralists believe in integration,
not separation. We treasure precisely
the integration that sends the antiplu-
ralists into panic fits. A half century ago,
few marriages crossed a color line. Now,
17 percent of American marriages are
interracial.
Pluralists are always expanding the
definition of “us,” not constricting it.
Eighty years ago, Protestants, Catholics
and Jews did not get along, so a new
category was created, Judeo-Christian,
which brought formerly feuding people
into a new “us.” Thirty years ago, rival-ries were developing between blacks
and Hispanics, and so the category
“people of color” was used to create a
wider “us.”
Pluralists believe that culture mixing
has always been and should be the
human condition. All cultures define
and renew themselves through encoun-
ter. A pure culture is a dead culture
while an amalgam culture is a creative
culture. The very civilization the white
separatists seek to preserve was itself a
product of earlier immigration waves.
Finally, pluralism is the adventure of
life. Pluralism is not just having diverse
people coexist in one place. It’s going
out and getting into each other’s lives.
It’s a constant dialogue that has no end
because there is no single answer to
how we should live. Life in a pluralistic
society is an ever-moving spiral. There
are the enemies of pluralism ripping it
apart and the weavers of community
binding it together. There is no resting
spot. It’s change, fluidity and movement
all the way down.
The terrorists dream of a pure, static
world. But the only thing that’s static is
death, which is why they are so patho-
logically drawn to death. Pluralism is
about movement, interdependence and
life. The struggle ahead is about com-
peting values as much as it is about
controlling guns and healing damaged
psyches. Pluralism thrives when we
name what the terrorists hate about us,
and live it out.The ideology of hate and how to fight it
Pluralists
are always
expanding
the definition
of “us,” not
constricting it.David Brooks
opinion
If one of the perpetrators of this weekend’s two mass
shootings had adhered to the ideology of radical Islam,
the resources of the American government and its inter-
national allies would mobilize without delay.
The awesome power of the state would work tirelessly
to deny future terrorists access to weaponry, money and
forums to spread their ideology. The movement would be
infiltrated by spies and informants. Its financiers would
face sanctions. Places of congregation would be
surveilled. Those who gave aid or comfort to terrorists
would be prosecuted. Programs would be established to
de-radicalize former adherents.
No American would settle for “thoughts and prayers”
as a counterterrorism strategy. No American would
accept laying the blame for such an attack on video
games, like the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick,
did in an interview on Sunday when discussing the mass
shooting in El Paso that took 20 lives and left 27 people
wounded.
In predictable corners, moderate Muslims would be
excoriated for not speaking out more forcefully against
the extremists in their midst. Foreign nations would be
hit with sanctions for not doing enough to help the cause.
Politicians might go so far as to call for a total ban on
Muslims entering the United States “until our country’s
representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Even a casual observer today can figure out what is
going on. The world, and the West in particular, has a
serious white nationalist terrorist problem that has been
ignored or excused for far too long. As President George
W. Bush declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we
must be a country “awakened to danger and called to
defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger
to resolution.”
There are serious questions about how the United
States has approached Islamic extremism, but if even a
degree of that vigilance and unity of effort was put to-
ward white nationalism, we’d be safer.
White nationalist terror attacks are local, but the ideol-
ogy is global. On Saturday, a terrorist who, according to a
federal law enforcement official, wrote that he feared a
“Hispanic invasion of Texas” was replacing white Ameri-
cans opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. In a manifesto,
the gunman wrote that he drew some inspiration from
the white nationalist terrorist attack in Christchurch,
New Zealand, that left 51 people dead. The F.B.I. is inves-
tigating the El Paso mass shooting as a possible act of
domestic terrorism. The motive behind another mass
shooting in Dayton, Ohio, is under investigation.
In April, another terrorist who opened fire at a syna-
gogue in Poway, Calif., echoed the words of the Christ-
church suspect, too, and appeared to draw inspiration
from a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall.
The alleged Christchurch terrorist, for his part, wrote
that he drew inspiration from white supremacist attacks
in Norway, the United States, Italy, Sweden and the
United Kingdom.
An investigation by The Times earlier this year found
that “at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011
were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks,
professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in
their tactics.”
White supremacy, in other words, is a violent, intercon-
nected transnational ideology. Its adherents are gather-
ing in anonymous, online forums to spread their ideas,
plotting attacks and cheering on acts of terrorism.
The result is an evolving brand of social media-fueled
bloodshed. Online communities like 4chan and 8chan
have become hotbeds of white nationalist activity. Anon-
ymous users flood the site’s “politics” board with racist,
sexist and homophobic content designed to spread
across the web. Users share old fascist fiction, Nazi prop-
aganda and pseudoscientific texts about race and I.Q.
and replacement theory, geared to radicalize their peers.
While its modern roots predate the Trump administra-
tion by many decades, white nationalism has attained a
new mainstream legitimacy during Mr. Trump’s time in
office.
Far more Americans have died at the hands of domes-
tic terrorists than at the hands of Islamic extremists
since 2001, according to the F.B.I. The agency’s re-
sources, however, are still overwhelmingly weighted
toward thwarting international terrorism.
The nation owed a debt to the victims of the 9/11 at-
tacks, to take action against the vile infrastructure that
allowed the terrorists to achieve their goals that horrible
Tuesday. We owe no less of a debt to the victims in El
Paso and to the hundreds of other victims of white na-
tionalist terrorism around the nation.
American law enforcement needs to target white na-
tionalists with the same zeal that they have targeted
radical Islamic terrorists. Ensuring the security of the
homeland demands it.
There can be no middle ground when it comes to white
nationalism and the terrorism it inspires. You’re either
for it or against it.Moderates on
the right in
America need
to do more to
condemn and
combat the
extremist
ideology in
their midst.MASS SHOOTINGS ARE TERRORISM
A.G. SULZBERGER,PublisherDEAN BAQUET,Executive Editor
JOSEPH KAHN,Managing Editor
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate EditorJAMES BENNET,Editorial Page Editor
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page EditorMARK THOMPSON,Chief Executive Officer
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON,President, International
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA,Senior V.P., Global Advertising
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P.,International Circulation
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
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