Leave It To 'Vice' To Romanticize A Terrorist … Meet The 'Handsome' Yemeni Pirate

Not since 'Rolling Stone' glamorized the Boston Marathon bombers, have we seen an organization hype criminals. Apparently, a Yemeni Tik Tok influencer is quite handsome. He is also a pirate. He is also probably dead or about to be arrested. This is a bit of the article describing the whole back story. Vice: “A handsome Yemeni influencer's account vanished from TikTok after posting a tour of a captured cargo ship.” -- He isn't even that handsome, honestly. —— The fight over Red Sea shipping channels between Western militaries and Houthi revolutionaries is playing out online as well as on water.

On January 15, a user on X reposted a TikTok of a young man sailing around the Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship seized by Yemen’s militant Houthis last year. “Yemeni pirates posting casual tiktok’s while the entire western imperial core are having a meltdown about their blockade on their ships is the funniest shit of 2024, surely,” the user wrote in a caption. As of this writing, the video has been viewed more than 13 million times, with social media users dubbing the handsome man “Timhouthi Chalamet.” The video was filmed by a Yemeni influencer who calls himself Rashid al-Haddad online, and there’s no clear evidence that he actually participated in the raid that captured Galaxy Leader. But he does look good when posing next to the ship. Al-Haddad, who frequently posts photos of himself wearing warfighting gear and carrying weapons on social media, appears to be part of a new online trend where influencers post content to promote their side of a given conflict.

The TikTok account featured in the Tweet is now gone, and was last scraped on Tuesday morning by the Internet Archive. It’s unclear if TikTok removed it or not. The social media company did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment. “Timhouthi” is just one part of a larger phenomenon of the Red Sea conflict playing out online. Houthis post videos of their raids on Telegram, which get shared on X. Yemeni politicians and military leaders post their speeches online. Influencers like al-Haddad post media of the captured ships and remix the speeches. Capt. Chris Hill captain of the U.S.S. Eisenhower, which is bombing Yemen, is posting pictures of his ship’s crew posing with cookies. https://twitter.com/ChowdahHill/status/1747169029662408992

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https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2024/01/21/handsome-yemeni-influencer-n2392015