Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF
“Bahrain is trying to drown the protests in Shia blood. “Let us drown the revolution in Jewish blood” was the slogan of the tsars when they orchestrated pogroms against Jews across Russia in the years before the First World War. The battle-cry of the al-Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain ever since they started to crush the pro-democracy protests in the island kingdom two months ago might well be “to drown the revolution in Shia blood”. Just as the tsars once used Cossacks to kill and torture Jews and burn their synagogues, so Bahrain’s minority Sunni regime sends out its black-masked security forces night after night to terrorise the majority Shia population for demanding equal political and civil rights. Usually troops and police make their raids on Shia districts between 1am and 4am, dragging people from their beds and beating them in front of their families. Those detained face mistreatment and torture in prison. One pro-democracy activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, brought before a military court last week with severe facial injuries, said he had suffered four fractures to the left side of his face, including a broken jaw that needed four hours’ surgery……..It soon became clear that the government is engaged in a savage onslaught on the entire Shia community – some 70 per cent of the population……..”


This policy of apartheid has been going on in Bahrain since the ruling al-Khalifa clan reneged on its promise at independence to hold free elections. That was in 1975 when they dissolved the first and last freely elected legislature. Like in most Arab despots they managed to keep the people at bay through fear, prison, and exile. The difference is that now in Bahrain, like in other Arab states, the fear is gone. Now the al-Khalifa clan and their Saudi Wahhabi masters and their Pakistani and Jordanian mercenaries are trying to restore that old fear into the hearts of the Bahraini people. They are trying the old method of unbridled violence.
Cheers
mhg


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