Something that seems to have escaped the attention of the left, so eager are they to condemn a war by a perceived ‘oppressed’ group (Palestinians) by a perceived ‘oppressor’ (Israel), is the horrific loss of life in the Yemeni civil war that’s been raging for more than nine years.

According to the UN, the war has resulted in the deaths of more than 150,000 people from direct violence and a quarter of a million more from its indirect effects. Four million people have been displaced. The charity Save the Children estimates 85,000 children have died from starvation alone, because of the war.

Cue the blue-hair-cropped street marchers, ANTIFA, the Socialist Alliance, manipulated high-school students, immature university undergraduate ‘social justice’ lovers, and the rest of the Australian left! Hit the streets! Let the world know of the horrific human carnage! The ‘genocide’!

Alas, there is silence.

So what’s the difference between this conflict and the war in Gaza? Are Jews and Israel so great an enemy of the left (and their far-far-right friends) that this is all just about raw racism and anti-Semitism? Partly, perhaps.

But the real enemy is far wider and larger and to see this reaction as all about sick Jew-hatred is to miss that wider picture. It’s an attack on us. It’s yet another opportunistic attack by the left upon civilisation and the West.

‘Complex’ is too simple a word to explain the Kraken-from-hell that the Yemeni civil war has become. But primarily it’s a battle between the Houthi movement, a Shia Islamist organisation that emerged in the 1990s from Yemen’s most north-western ‘state’, that borders Saudi Arabia and the original Yemeni government. The Houthis emerged originally as an opposition force to Yemen’s then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, accusing him of corruption. Saleh was allied to the Saudis and the US. The Houthis seem nice. In 2003, they adopted the slogan of the southern Lebanese-based terrorist group Hezbollah, which, like me, you may need a quick refresher on. It reads, ‘God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews, Victory to Islam.’

Things really heated-up in late 2014, when the Houthis took over the capital city, Sanaa, and then the whole government. In March 2015 they declared a major mobilisation to overthrow then-president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and drive into southern provinces. And here’s where it gets more than a bit complicated. During this 2015 offensive, the Houthis were joined, now as allies, by forces loyal to former President Saleh, the man they originally sought to oust in the early 2000’s. They apparently decided he wasn’t too corrupt or US-friendly to do business with, after all. As they pushed south in March 2015, it took no time at all for the newer President Hadi to do a runner. He’d fled to Saudi Arabia by the end of the month.

And that’s when the Saudis got involved more overtly. A coalition led by them, launched a counter-attack of air strikes against the Houthis and restored the former government.

Why does any of this matter to us as summer sun, beaches, beer, too much food and Christmas loom? Well, for two reasons: firstly, it’s probably good to understand that this is all part of the ongoing proxy war and battle for Middle-Eastern political and economic supremacy that is constant between Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Iran. If you want to understand any Middle East conflict – and there’s likely going to be a few of them in coming years – they all need to be understood through this Saudi-vs-Iran lens.

There’s been no direct involvement by Iran in this war, however, Iran’s delightful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have been assisting Houthis with ‘military training’, logistics and arms supplies. And there have been activities by Hezbollah and the IRGC’s guerrilla-style special Quds forces in Yemen, which the Saudis think is all part of Iranian attempts to set up an Iranian satellite state in Yemen.

And this could have massive implications for the stability of the entire Middle East, and us as a result. If Yemen becomes an Iranian satellite state, the Saudis believe it will become a base for ballistic missiles aimed at all the Gulf Cooperation Council member states (namely, Saudi, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait). So this is kind of big.

The second reason we really need to care about this while the cricket’s on and the ham is being carved, is that a war this insane and complex, is a great reminder of everything we, as Australians, take way-too-much for granted.

That relative peace, prosperity and civility we wake up to every day, is not the norm for planet Earth. It didn’t just pop out of nowhere. And – more importantly – it isn’t something that will stick around unless we value it and protect it.

And right now we live in a culture that is almost obsessive about criticising and condemning everything that Western Civilisation stands for. A little self-criticism is healthy and necessary, even. Too much becomes a destructive cancer that will kill us. I repeat: Will. Kill. Us.

And we (by which I meant the dominant lefty trendy Aussie intelligentsia class, rather than your average Speccie reader) have gone way too far in recent years. This is clearly illustrated now by the hypocrisy of the reaction to the Gaza war, and the silence on more deadly conflicts like Yemen.

Why the outrage and the marching in the streets? It’s not only because the Jews are involved and (for some bizarre reason that will always baffle me) people on the left, far-right and Islamists, all have a disproportionate obsession about the Jews and their historical misdeeds. It’s because Israel represents the West, and the West is evil because it ‘ate all the pies’. The West is the oppressor.

And that’s pretty much all it took to get the left marching alongside neo-Nazis.

But the West didn’t eat all the pies that belonged to anyone else. There were no pies. There were some ingredients to make pies, in the ground, but no skills or ingenuity to extract them. There were some systems of government and trade that would enable a pie or two to be cobbled together if people stopped fighting long enough, but there was no system of government or economics that freed as many people and extracted as much value for everyone to share as Western Civilisation offered. And there were spots of genius scattered about the East and Middle East that, had they been in more fertile ground would have flourished and lasted far longer than they did. As much as the poser intellectuals and academics pump themselves up with self-importance by complicating things and pretending they see ‘depth and nuance’ that we mere deplorables cannot, the truth of the matter is simply this: the West worked out how to make the pies, set up a system to share the pies, and keep the peace in pie-land better than anyone else.

Now there were many bad things done along the way to achieve the many many many good things that liberal democracy and free market capitalism have given the world. But the solution isn’t to destroy what’s been achieved. The solution is to protect what was hard-won at all costs and move to create a better world, from that starting point.

But we’re not doing this. Instead we’re falling for the age-old lie of the left, that only revolution can ‘fix’ things, and that we must tear everything down to rebuild anew. A dangerous untruth that should not be given a second thought or the light of a moment’s consideration. And we’ve gone a step further into the madness: we’re giving Islamist Jihad ideology a second thought. An ideology that not only wants Israel wiped off the map, but all Jews, all non-Muslims, and all moderate Muslims (i.e.: the Judeo-Christian-origin West and our liberal civilisations).

And so our descent into the madness of hyper-liberalism – allowing the enemies of freedom to use our freedoms to attack us – deepens even further.

We need to put the brakes on soon. The cliff’s edge looms.