My BFF “The Obama administration is making a major misstep by “closing its eyes” to the violent government crackdown on protesters in Bahrain and leaving the door open for Iran to influence the small oil-producing nation and U.S. ally, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi said Friday. “In the absence of the West in Bahrain, the government of Iran can of course influence and exploit the revolution,” Ebadi, the Iranian-born human rights activist, author and former judge who has been living in exile since 2009, said in an interview at The Washington Post. Ebadi highlighted Sunni-led Bahrain, which is a majority-Shiite nation like Iran that has used violence to stop recent protests…….”
I bet not a single media outlet in the Persian-American Gulf will ever carry this news item. They always headline Shirin Ebadi’s comments against the Iranian regime, and rightly so. Not single newspaper “anywhere” on the Gulf will carry this news item. Cheers
mhg
My BFF “Human Rights Watch said on Friday that the United Arab Emirates has dissolved a civil society group after it arrested three prominent activists. The rights group urged the UAE to reverse its decision, which it said was a crackdown on peaceful dissent. The Jurist Association was one of three non-governmental organizations that joined hundreds of citizens in signing a petition this month calling for a greater voice in government and legislative powers for the quasi-parliament, the Federal National Council (FNC). Three prominent activists who made similar calls for political reform have been arrested in the last few weeks. UAE officials were not available for comment……….”
The al-Nahayan, owners of Abu Dhabi, also ruling family of the UAE, are applying the Saudi and Bahraini method of dealing with any scent of dissent or independent thinking. These ruling families have many people in their vast media, including hired Arab propagandists, called “palace intellectuals” whose job is to pretend ‘liberalism’ while praising the absolute tribal oligarchs. These brownnosers write as if the rulers of these states are managing a utopia. The despots try to appeal to world opinion through opening funny branches of elite Western universities, but then throw their professors (and possibly students) in prison or deport them at the first sign of independent thinking. Once in awhile someone decides to show a streak of independence and some honesty and decency: that is when the truth of these despots comes out. The rulers of the UAE have shown that they can be as ruthless as the al-Saud. They both can be as ruthless as Qaddafi or Saleh or Assad: in fact they can be even worse if they face an uprising. The Saudis have shown that cruel ruthlessness in their own country and in Occupied Bahrain. Cheers
mhg
My BFF Household Economics 101: referring to my last post. The reason Saudi families need so many housemaids is not necessarily that they are lazy. The wife often works, mostly teaching in girls schools, in order to make ends meet. They also need someone to drive the wife to work and back because women are not allowed drive in Saudi Arabia, even women who threaten to breastfeed their Asian drivers (actually those in the news were upper middle class ones). They can’t take public taxis driven by strange men, besides it probably is not safe in the kingdom of many frustrations. They don’t all live in the style of the al-Saud and their retainers. Most middle class families have to borrow even in order to travel for a vacation, most don’t own homes. There are people who are dirt poor under that ocean of petroleum and not far from those princely palaces: that is how the thousands of princes can afford to amass billions. A report in Arab News today confirms what I and others have written: that overall unemployment is in double digits and that it is about 40% for young adults (20-24). That is a (pre)revolutionary rate of unemployment for young people. Fortyfucking percent unemployment! And only Khaled al-Johani showed up to protest in Riyadh last month and nobody knows what happened to him! Enough to drive anyone from the Arabia Peninsula, whose last name is not al-Saud, to despair.
I shall have more on this point in a coming posting soon: you have been forewarned. Cheers
mhg
My BFF “There are many reports of housemaids being abused or beaten, and occasionally even murdered. However, there is another side to the story. The large number of housemaids running away from their employers is causing untold problems, including social embarrassments and additional financial burdens for many Saudi families. “It costs a lot to recruit a housemaid, with fees that go up to SR15,000. This includes recruitment fees, plane ticket and visa,” said Abu Faisal, a recruitment office manager in Jeddah. “If the maid runs away, the employer loses all the money he spent hiring her.” Maids run away for several reasons, but they are mostly greedy and search for jobs in other households to make more money, according to Abu Faisal. “Many maids run away from their sponsors as soon as they land in the Kingdom, knowing that they will find a job no matter what, for people are always looking for maids,” he said……..”
Maybe the housemaids will start protesting in Riyadh; there probably are as many of them as Saudis. That will be the Saudi revolution, since the natives are either too afraid or too brainwashed by the shaikhs or too worried about clan or tribe feelings. After all, how can you protest against the ruling family if some neighbor of your best friend’s brother in law has a distant niece who is married to one of the al-Saud drivers? Makes it tough, don’t it? The best hope for a revolution is with the Asian and African housemaids, and God knows they probably have good reasons to protest. The other alternative is for people to lose so many of their housemaids that they rise in revolution out of despair. Despair is what drove Tunisians and Egyptians and Libyans and Bahrainis and Syrians to revolution. In India the rising price of onions can lead to political protests and change elections, maybe in Saudi Arabia the rising ‘price’ of housemaids will do the job. Cheers
mhg
My BFF “Manama, April 19 (BNA) — It was a simple message a group of Bahraini’s wanted to send across to the masses- “reflect their loyalty to the leadership.” In what started last week as signing an allegiance pledge and Loyalty swords campaign is now turned into a movement of masses from all spectrums, turning up in numbers signing their initials supporting the wise leadership. Books were opened at the National Stadium in Isa Town for citizens to show allegiance to the Kingdom and its leaders…………..”
I have read reports that the emir’s (sorry king’s) half-witted son Nasser is behind this drive. He is head of some kind of military or security unit(s). They say the Saudis prefer him to the crown prince Salman, probably on account of his half-wittedness (or is it half-wittiness). So they are starting to force all Bahrainis to sign the pledge of allegiance to this traitorous despotic family who could not control the people with imported mercenaries and had to import Saudi troops to occupy their country. Why not let the people vote on this Mothercare King? It is going to be like this: no pledge to the despot no job no food no medicine no education. It is like in the days of the Ba’ath in Iraq when people had to join the party to advance: but in Iraq people still got treated and educated if they did not join. In Nazi Germany people had to join the party to advance. This is not to compare the ruling family of Bahrain to Germans, even the Nazis who had some warped perverted ideas of nationalism. The al-Khalifa have no such nationalist ideas, not even warped ones. They are in it for themselves, pure and simple. No different from the al-Saud next door or the less significant al-Nahayan. This whole thing is like a farce, this family and the other I mentioned. Yet they are playing a dangerous game, probably pushed by their Saudi masters. A dangerous farce played with two absolute ruling clans who have some really dangerous Western weapons at their disposal. They could push our region into another war that would certainly drag in the United States and the West. Is that what these funny ruling tribal polygamous clans, the al-Saud and the al-Nahayan, have in mind? Or are they just pawns of someone else who is moving the pieces? Opinions on my Gulf differ.
(Have you ever heard of King Mothercare?) Cheers
mhg
My BFF “Countries and U.S. states that rank near the top in happiness also rank near the top in suicides rates, U.S. and British researchers suggest……Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland each indicate relatively high levels of happiness levels, but also high suicide rates. Nevertheless, the researchers note that because of variation in cultures and suicide-reporting conventions, the findings are only suggestive. Comparing happiness and suicide rates across U.S. states presents an advantage because cultural background, national institutions, language and religion are relatively constant nationwide……..” UPI News We in the Middle East, both Arabs and Iranians, do not have high suicide rates. In fact we have very low rates, possibly the lowest in the world. The rates did spike last December and January (starting with Tunisia). The reason is not that people in our region are happy. It is not Islamic fatwas against suicide either (the al-Qaeda Salafi types do it for the perks and extra benefits they expect to get on the ‘other side’). No, these are not the reasons for our low suicide rates. It is that the malcontents, the angry ones, don’t get a chance to commit suicide. Long before they reach that level of despair, Arabs and Iranians are either killed or tortured or imprisoned by their regimes. Or forced into exile, where they are no longer part of the local statistics. Cheers
mhg
My BFF “Allies of Saudi Arabia have not publicly protested these serious and systematic violations. The European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said on April 18 that she had been “very pleased” with her two-day visit to Riyadh and made no public comments about the political prisoners. Neither Tom Donilon nor Robert Gates publicly commented on the kingdom’s human rights violations. “The EU’s silence on the brazen arrest of a peaceful dissident on the first day of its chief foreign policy representative’s visit looks like a pat on the back for an authoritarian state,” said Christoph Wilcke, senior Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Silence when more than 160 peaceful dissidents are locked up should not be an option for Brussels or Washington.”………. In 2009, Saudi Arabia acceded to the Arab Charter for Human Rights, which guarantees in article 32 the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The kingdom is one of few countries that have not yet signed the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. “As the list of Saudi political prisoners grows longer, the silence of the US and the EU becomes more deafening,”…..”
Susan Rice today brazenly, and rightly, condemned human rights abuses in Syria and Libya and a few other Middle East countries. She waxed indignant. What was most noticeable were the countries she did not mention. Two of these countries are the worst abusers of human rights now: Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Even as Rice was speaking, these two regimes were rounding up people in both countries and torturing them in Bahrain. Not only do they suppress freedoms and dissent, they also practice a form of apartheid discrimination, in the Saudi case against anybody of a different sect or faith, in the Bahrain case against the majority of the people (a la South Africa). Rice did not say boo about them. Nor did Secretary Clinton recently when she lambasted other governments this week. The Saudi pussycat has got all their tongue. No profiles of courage when elected American and European officials are terrified of offending offensive tribal absolute serial-polygamous monarchs.
I knew that deep bow Mr. Obama made in from of King Abdullah in 2009 was the beginning of something. Cheers
mhg
My BFF “Allies of Saudi Arabia have not publicly protested these serious and systematic violations. The European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said on April 18 that she had been “very pleased” with her two-day visit to Riyadh and made no public comments about the political prisoners. Neither Tom Donilon nor Robert Gates publicly commented on the kingdom’s human rights violations. “The EU’s silence on the brazen arrest of a peaceful dissident on the first day of its chief foreign policy representative’s visit looks like a pat on the back for an authoritarian state,” said Christoph Wilcke, senior Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Silence when more than 160 peaceful dissidents are locked up should not be an option for Brussels or Washington.”………. In 2009, Saudi Arabia acceded to the Arab Charter for Human Rights, which guarantees in article 32 the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The kingdom is one of few countries that have not yet signed the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. “As the list of Saudi political prisoners grows longer, the silence of the US and the EU becomes more deafening,”…..”
Susan Rice today brazenly, and rightly, condemned human rights abuses in Syria and Libya and a few other Middle East countries. She waxed indignant. What was most noticeable were the countries she did not mention. Two of these countries are the worst abusers of human rights now: Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Even as Rice was speaking, these two regimes were rounding up people in both countries and torturing them in Bahrain. Not only do they suppress freedoms and dissent, they also practice a form of apartheid discrimination, in the Saudi case against anybody of a different sect or faith, in the Bahrain case against the majority of the people (a la South Africa). Rice did not say boo about them. Nor did Secretary Clinton recently when she lambasted other governments this week. The Saudi pussycat has got all their tongue. No profiles of courage when elected American and European officials are terrified of offending offensive tribal absolute serial-polygamous monarchs.
I knew that deep bow Mr. Obama made in from of King Abdullah in 2009 was the beginning of something. Cheers
mhg
My BFF The Arab Summit in Baghdad was canceled by the Saudis. The Arab League, the Club of Despots, claimed that unrest in the region requires a postponement. The truth is that the Saudis said that either the venue be moved from Baghdad or it be postponed. They did not want to be presided over by a Kurd (Iraqi president Talibani) and an Arab Shi’a (Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki). They got their wish. The odd thing is that in this age of Arab revolutions against despotism and in favor of freedom the most despotic Arabs decide Arab League policy. A couple of absolute monarchs, actually one, have decided that the summit be moved or postponed. Saudi Arabia had to give the nod for NATO to intervene in Libya and to keep out in Yemen and to not say a word about the repression and its invasion of Bahrain. It may have a hand in what happens next in Yemen and Libya, and maybe even Syria, and it sure is trying to influence the course of the yet-unfinished Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. The most undemocratic Arab regime is still calling the shots for the Arab world. A new Arab dawn? It sure doesn’t look like it from where I am sitting at the window, watching my best friend obey a call of nature on the side of my rain-soaked lawn.
And that is when I decided to stop typing before I stepped deeper into it. Cheers
mhg
My BFFShaikh Khalifa of YouTube This is a love song to Shaikh Khalifa Bin Salman, prime minister of Bahrain for forty years. The title on the reel says ”Khalifa, the Crown on the head of every Bahraini”. I don’t think he composed the music, even he can’t be that bad. But the lyrics, well, he may have. Nobody else could. Here is a sample:
“He who filled all eyes with good deeds, he whose generosity……
You are our honor O Shaikh, You are the symbol and meaning…….
We love you big time………”
Okay, not exactly as rousing as Piaff singing La Marseillaise. Cheers
mhg
My BFF