Scapegoats

Goats are pictured as their prices are being negotiated by vendors and buyers at a livestock market where people buy sacrificial animals ahead of the Eid al-Adha celebrations in Sana’a, Yemen. Photo: Reuters/Khaled Abdullah.

Lost In Rewind

A Yemeni woman, dressed in a traditional outfit, takes a selfie while attending a cultural festival in the capital Sana’a. Photo: AFP/Mohammed Huwais.

Deck prism

A Yemeni woman, dressed in a traditional outfit, attends a cultural festival in the capital Sana’a. Photo: AFP/Mohammed Huwai.

Blowin’ in the Wind

A Yemeni artist paints a graffiti on a wall in the capital Sana’a calling for peace and tolerance and rejecting the ongoing conflict in the Arab country. Photo: AFP/Mohammed Huwais.

Searching for Jesse Owens

The New York Times of December 29, 2017 published a video report about the “cultural exchanges” between Italy and Saudi Arabia: “Italian Bombs, Yemeni Deaths: Tracking the Global Arms Trade” edited and reported by Malachy Browne, Barbara Marcolini and Ainara Tiefenthäler, who, in their summing up introduction, rhetorically ask: “We followed shipments of bombs from a holiday island in Italy to Saudi Arabia, then found those bombs at the scene of civilian deaths in Yemen. Is Italy capitalizing on a brutal conflict or just doing business?”. It’s hard to answer such a question, but yes, Italy is, since immemorable time, a key arms supplier to everyone, everywhere. Arms producers and manufacturers are neither moral nor ethical – not even in the United States. It would be rather more effective to neutralise once for all the “war neural network” – introduced by the U.S. at the time of the Gulf War – that has permeated the globosphere since then. But it won’t be easy, not even if you make love, not war. Just think of what might happen if you’d make love to the wife of a jealous husband. Or vice versa.