Press TV has conducted an interview with Rodney Shakespeare, a political commentator in London, to ask for his take on Britain's support for Saudi Arabia in its brutal military aggression against Yemen.
What follows is a rough transcription.
Press TV: The [Campaign Against the Arms Trade] (CAAT) believes that it is hypocritical that the British government is arming Saudi Arabia. What do you think?
Shakespeare: Indeed hypocritical. I never want to hear the British government again talk about human rights or British values. We are arming a barbaric, totalitarian regime which are a bunch of perverts. If a blogger asks for a bit of democracy, he gets a thousand lashes. A lash rips the flesh apart, they do it only fifty at a time and after that he would be dead. So they are going to take that poor man to the point of death twenty times. The Saudis, they love whipping women. They are sexual perverts as well and at this very moment their perversion is they are killing women and children in Yemen –- for no other purpose but killing. Because they will never ever succeed in getting to reintroduction of horrible [Abd Rabbuh Mansur] Hadi, the previous autocrat there; and notice that the Americans are also in the same game. They are the warmongers and the killers, the Brits and the Israelis and the Saudis and that is the axis of evil. We are part of that and we are supporting Saudis in their monstrous aggressions, their sexual perversions, their physical perversions, and the fact [that] they are a gruesome, anti-democratic country. We should be ashamed of ourselves, and it is time we have the guts to say we will never arm these people, and we will endeavor to overthrow them, because that is what must happen for the good of the progress of this world.
Press TV: It is well-established that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Yemen. Does that in your views make Britain and the United States, which are arming and supplying Saudi Arabia with this lethal arsenal, not only complacent in the killings of Yemenis, but complicit as well?
Shakespeare: it is not my view. It is the view of every decent person in this world. Some of those decent people are misled by the Zionist-controlled media and that includes BBC where the Zionist control is usually done by the omission of the truth. If ordinary, decent people knew what is happening in Yemen and realized that one of the poorest countries in this world is having all its infrastructure smashed, its medicine stock; it is the same game as the Israelis get up to Gaza. In both cases behind Saudi Arabia and Israel, there is a fascist mentality and a racist one. They think they are doing this against inferior people, but we are hand in glove with these perverts and I named the Israelis as being the perverts as well. We have got to have some guts and stand up at least on moral principle of this and in the long ruin we should deal with democracy issue in the Persian Gulf. Because that is where not only moral, but our economic interests lie, dealing with democracies in the Persian Gulf and not with these totalitarian, corrupt, barbaric, and feudal regimes.
MTM/KA