Joe Biden: Decision to Delist Houthis as Terrorists 'Irrelevant'

President Joe Biden told reporters this weekend his administration’s decision to remove the Yemeni Houthi terrorist group from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) was “irrelevant.”

On the same day – Friday – Biden responded to a question asking if he thought the Houthis meet the definition of a terrorist organization, “I think they are.”

Biden dismissed the State Department’s terrorism designations in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he was touring local businesses shortly after the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) announced a flurry of targeted airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The Houthis have dramatically disrupted global trade after declaring war on Israel in October and executing that declaration by launching attacks on commercial ships transiting through the Red Sea. Houthi leaders have claimed that they are only targeting Israeli ships or ships traveling to and from Israel but, in reality, their drone and missile attacks have targeted seemingly random commercial ships.

Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have resulted in a 90-percent drop year-on-year in container ship traffic through the Red Sea and Suez Canal between January 2023 and 2024 and a massive diversion of ship traffic to Africa, where the ships will transit around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. As of Friday, the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI) documented an increase of over 300 percent in the cost of shipping per container.

The Houthis launched an overthrow of the legitimate Yemeni government in 2014 that prompted the ongoing civil war in the country. Formally known as Ansarullah, the Houthis are a Shiite terrorist organization with close links to Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Their official slogan is “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

Biden’s initial response to the Houthi campaign against global shipping in the region was to create “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” a dubious coalition of mostly Western militaries meant to assure commercial shipping companies that transiting in the region would remain safe. “Operation Prosperity Guardian” lacks support from some of the region’s most influential countries – notably including Israel itself and Saudi Arabia, which has faced targeted attacks from the Houthis for years – and inspired some allies, such as India, to increase its naval presence in the Red Sea but reject membership in the Biden-led initiative.

On Friday, CENTCOM announced an escalation, along with the British armed forces, to airstrikes against Houthi military targets within Yemen. The strikes figured prominently in questions by reporters during Biden’s Pennsylvania tour. One reporter asked Biden whether he believed the Houthis fit the definition of a terrorist group or not, to which Biden answered in the affirmative. As a follow-up, another reporter asked, “how soon are you [Biden] willing to designate them as such?”

“It’s irrelevant whether they’re designated,” Biden responded, according to a transcript published by the White House. “We’ve put together a group of nations that are going to say that if they continue to act and behave as they do, we’ll respond.”

Biden appeared to be referring to Operation Prosperity Guardian.

The president’s declaration of the State Department’s FTO list as “irrelevant” ran afoul of comments by his National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby, who told reporters on the same day that the administration believed the FTO list was relevant enough to “review” the absence of the Houthis on that list.

“We are reviewing the FTO — Foreign Terrorist Organization — finding on the Houthis. As you know, we — we delisted them,” Kirby conceded, “And we have announced that we’re reviewing that — that decision right now. No decisions have been made yet.”

Kirby told reporters that, despite the removal of the Houthis from the list, “in this administration alone, we’ve issued some 500 sanctions again- — I mean, against 500 entities, 50 sanction regimes,” presumably against both the Houthis and their patron state, Iran.

“We’ll continue to work with our partners, you know, to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to dissuade these destabili- — these destabilizing behaviors by Iran,” he added.

Kirby emphasized that the Biden administration was “not interested in a war with Yemen” or “a conflict of any kind here,” but felt it impossible to continue to disregard the disruption of international commercial shipping.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Biden administration would remove the Houthis from the FTO list on February 12, 2021, as one of Biden’s first acts in office. Blinken’s statement did not state that the Houthis merited removal from the list as a result of desisting from terrorist activity.

“The United States remains clear-eyed about Ansarallah’s [the Houthis’ formal name] malign actions, and aggression,” Blinken said, “including taking control of large areas of Yemen by force, attacking U.S. partners in the Gulf, kidnapping and torturing citizens of the United States and many of our allies,” and other attacks.

Nonetheless, Blinken said the delisting was “a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen” and necessary to give the Houthis funding to be used for food and medical aid for Yemeni civilians.

“FTO designations play a critical role in our fight against terrorism and are an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business,” the State Department explains on its website. They make it illegal for Americans or American entities to offer “material support or resources” to the groups in question and severely limit the terrorists’ fundraising abilities.

“When you remove the designation, like the Biden administration did, you allow them access to the global banking system, you allow them to travel freely, you allow them to engage in business with our allies,” Former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, who served under former President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News in December. “So you allow them to get money, get funded. You allow Iran to pay them, and we don’t have a recourse.”

“Since they’re not a designated terrorist organization, operationally and intelligence-wise, they’re not a priority to take out, they’re not a priority for intelligence collection purposes,” Patel added.

The Trump administration added the Houthis to the FTO list in January 2021, a month before Biden removed them.

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