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Transnational Thanksgiving (comes one day early)

Posting this a day early because I won’t be around tomorrow.

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Tragically, no one could have seen this coming:

The attack off the coast of Yemen comes just days after the Houthis issued a graphic with captions in Hebrew, Arabic and English that said, “We will sink your ships.” The graphic showed an Israeli commercial ship on fire.

Well, the ship hasn't sunk quite yet!

I, like many others, was quite taken aback by how organized the Houthis are. I was under the impression they were a rag-tag bunch of rebels with the odd ATGM, but no, they've got a fucking airforce! And a halal equivalent of the Navy Seals to boot.

Convergent evolution is real!

Amazing how there is one optimal way to do SOCOM shit, and it's copying the SOG and SAS's homework from 60 years ago.

Fact of the day: seals aren't halal.

Assuming you mean "muslims aren't allowed to eat seal meat", I don't think that's true- all water-dwelling animals are halal.

I based my answer on https://islamqa.org/?p=22479, which is for Hanafi Sunni Islam.

Responding to you and @orthoxerox It looks like, from wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_halal_and_kosher_fish#Halal Sunni regard all sea game as halal while Shia permit scaled fish and some crustaceans, but largely call other sea creatures haram. The Houthis in question are overwhelmingly a variety of Shia.