Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF

“Security forces in eastern Saudi Arabia clashed with armed people provoked by a “foreign country,” the Saudi Press Agency said Tuesday, citing an official source at the Interior Ministry. The incident occurred Monday night in Awamiyya, in the Qatif region of Eastern province, where many Shiites in the predominantly Sunni country live. At least 14 people were wounded. “A group of instigators” congregated in the town’s roundabout and “used motorcycles and Molotov cocktails to undermine security and interfere in national sovereignty,” according to the report…….The ministry said that it “will not tolerate any threat to the security and stability of the homeland and its citizens, and will respond with an iron fist.”………”

“Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday that clashes on Monday night that injured 14 people including 11 policemen in its oil-rich Eastern province, home to a large Shi’ite population, were the work of an unnamed foreign power, usually code for its rival Iran. Saudi Arabia applies the Wahhabi austere version of Sunni Islam, and minority Shi’ites say that, while their situation has improved slightly under reforms launched by King Abdullah, they still face many restrictions and discrimination. The government denies these charges. Shi’ites have long complained of second class status in the absolute monarchy. They also want the release of Shi’ite prisoners, some of whom were arrested during previous protests. Shi’ites, who make up to 15 percent of the 19 million Saudi population, say they are not represented in the cabinet, they struggle to land senior government and security jobs and are viewed as heretics or even agents of Iran by the Saudi authorities and hardline Sunni clerics. …………”


The fear is also vanishing in Saudi Arabia, just as it did in other places from Tunisia through Libya and Egypt and Syria and Yemen and Bahrain. The fear is gone or going away. Now the “Saudis” even have a Facebook page for what they call their “revolution”. Today it is Qatif, but who knows, maybe tomorrow it will be Riyadh and Jeddah in spite of the many who have vanished, like Khalid al-Jehany and Ashmawi and many others. The regime is already claiming that the protesters are “Iranian” agents, a predictable claim for Gulf absolute polygamous monarchs when they are in trouble. This old tune of the despots has lost its charm. Only the so-called self-styled palace liberals, really Wahhabi faux-liberals, in the media of some GCC Gulf states, including my hometown, pretend to believe this nonsense anymore. The despots can fool their people only so many times with the sectarian card that they and the Bahraini rulers have overused.

The solution can be simple: give people back their full God-given rights, the rights they were born with before you usurped them.
Cheers
mhg


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