Dear Houthis

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Do you remember that first rocket you sent skimming over the exposed midriff of Israel a couple of weeks ago? Our various alarms sounded at 6:00 am. Thanks. That’s a civilized time for a siren. We were about to wake up anyway, but no children were yet in school or kindergarten, so any hits there would result in damage but no serious injuries.

Now, you’ve taken to waking us up repeatedly in the middle of the night, sometime after we enter a period of deep sleep – between 2:00 and 4:00. Less cool.

I’m reminded of the American attack on Panama and its strongman Noriega in 1989. The Americans decided to drive him insane by playing loud rock music near his residence. The Panama story, like ours today, is one of protecting international shipping lanes – which is why you will ultimately lose. But I’m beginning to wonder if your rockets are not so much meant to kill us as to create a nation of sleep-deprived mental cases.

Or maybe your goal, dear Houthis, is to bootstrap yourselves up from a culturally isolated sect controlling half a county, bordered by the Saudi desert and the Red Sea, to a group known for being even more extreme than the extremists, crazier and more trigger-happy than Somalis or Texans, a fierce desert tribe with a mafia-like code that has suddenly come into possession of long-range weapons.

Truly, Houthis, the world was ready to leave you alone, to fight your local battles with no interference. The world only really cared about you – or even heard about you — when you started firing on cargo ships headed for the Suez Canal.

I’m beginning to wonder if your rockets are not so much meant to kill us as to create a nation of sleep-deprived mental cases

Funnily enough, when I check who you are in Wikipedia, I get a description of a Shia sect, the Zaydi, which is close to Sunni and was once considered relatively liberal. And if you find some elders to ask, you might learn that Jews once lived quite peaceably in Yemen, and that even in Israel, their descendants keep the culture alive – a culture that blossomed over centuries in Yemen. Sometime between the 1950s – when the Zionist country arose in Israel and the Jews left yours – and now, you forgot who they were and what they looked like, what food they ate and how they treated their neighbors. If you could look those Jews in the face, you might see brothers and sisters rather than goblins and witches.

For now, you’re like bees. Your stings are an annoyance but soon forgotten. The thing is, we are not elephants. You do not send us running in fear from your missiles. We advance, instead, in your direction, waving fire like angry villagers, looking for your hive.

But my biggest problem with you, dear Houthis, is that you are handing our warmongering government an excuse to prolong the conflict in Gaza. Your missiles are a distraction that prevents us from getting dragged, one foot at a time, to the door in the border wall that will enable us to exit. You are so intent on destroying us, you are living proof that endless war with our enemies is necessary to keep ourselves safe.

I’m sure you’re aware that every day that our army stays in Gaza is a day in which the extremists in our own country plan to reoccupy its land. It’s another day that hostages are living or dying in inhuman conditions, in which hunger, disease and death from collateral damage ravage the Palestinian population there.

Pat yourselves on the back Houthis. You’ve shown us a face of extremism that even I, a wishy-washy leftist, cannot excuse in any manner whatsoever. You’ve made it personal. You’ll celebrate if a piece of one of your rockets falls on me, so, yeah, someone needs to put you back in line.

In the meantime, dear Houthis, I would really appreciate, if you really must fire missiles at us, if you could go back to shooting them at 6:00 am or say around 11:00 pm. I know civilized is not necessarily your thing, but could we just give it a try? We’ll get your point, I promise, just at an hour we can fit it into our schedules.