"'It's one of the crazy things — the Houthis say this is an operation against Israeli interests, but it's not at all. The Israelis have almost no interests in the Red Sea, and the Houthis are simply harming poor Egyptians,' Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British ambassador to Yemen and an advisor to the Counter Extremism Project — a group based in Germany and the US, told EUobserver."

CEP Senior Advisor Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown testified before the United Kingdom Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee for hearing, "The UK’s international counter-terrorism policy," 

"The Houthis are a Yemeni militia group named after their founder, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. They represent the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam and emerged in the 1980s in opposition to Saudi Arabia's religious influence in Yemen. With an estimated 20,000 fighters, their official name is Ansar Allah. The group controls most of the west of Yemen and oversees the Red Sea coastline.

Vanessa Feltz speaks with the former UK ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Brown and lecturer in political science Arash Azizi."

CEP Senior Advisor Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown: "The great majority threat is from Islamist extremists. And yes...white supremacists...there is a problem of that kind in the U.K. And it should be taken seriously. But I worry that there may be some systematic talking down of the Islamist threat."