Category Archives: Occupied Bahrain

Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, ethnic cleansing, Human Right, Occupied Bahrain

Gulf Niemöller: Protesters, Reporters, Teachers, Doctors, and Jews………….

     
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“First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” Pastor Martin Niemöller

“Up to 50 doctors and nurses who treated anti-government protesters injured during the recent demonstrations in Bahrain were charged yesterday with acts against the state. In an escalation of the government crackdown on the protests, the medical staff were accused of “promoting efforts to bring down the government” and “harming the public by spreading false news” Some were also accused of causing the deaths of two demonstrators by “inflicting additional wounds” on them or of giving them “unneeded treatments.” In all 23 doctors and 24 nurses were charged and will be tried in a military court, the Justice Minister Khaled bin Ali Al Khalifa said. “The medical profession was strongly abused during this period,” he said. Medical organisations expressed outrage at the legal assault on the profession with health staff seized from their homes and hospitals taken over by the military. Under the Geneva convention people wounded in conflict are guaranteed the right to medical care, regardless of which side they are on…….”

“Bahrain’s justice minister has said 47 medical workers will be charged with acting against the state during the recent unrest in the Gulf kingdom. The 23 doctors and 24 nurses had promoted efforts to bring down the Sunni monarchy and spread false news, Khaled Bin Ali Al Khalifa alleged. Activists say medics are being punished for treating pro-democracy protesters hurt in clashes with security forces. On Monday, two ex-MPs from main Shia opposition group Wifaq were arrested. Matar Matar and Jawad Fairuz were taken from their homes in the evening and had not been heard of since, members of Wifaq said……” BBC News

The al-Khalifa al-Saud pogrom is in full swing in Bahrain. But that is okay, they may get all these Bahrainis mentioned above in the title, but they’ll never get what counts the most: oil and weapons deals. Western democracy will be safe on my Gulf, under the protection of the princes of al-Saud and the shaikhs of al-Khalifa.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Culture, Gulf states, Occupied Bahrain

Politics on My Gulf: On Being Royally Anally Retentive ………

     
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“Her Highness Shaikha Moza grandmother of His Majesty, for whom we sacrifice our lives may god keep and save him, mother of the late his Highness Shaikh Issa Bin Salman Al-Khalifa and His Highness ‘Prince’ Khalifa Bin Salman Al-Khalifa and the late prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al-Khalifa, has passed away.” Tweet by Nabeel al-Homar, Bahrain regime spokesman.

RIP for the lady: she is not guilty for the crimes of her son and her grandson.

But WTF? Now Bahrain shaikhs are all called ‘princes’. First the emir Shaikh Hamad promoted himself unilaterally to a ‘king’, although there is nothing kingly or royal or regal about him. Then all the shaikhs are calling themselves princes. No more frogs in Bahrain, but who kissed all the al-Khalifa to turn them into princes (and princesses)? Can it be the al-Saud? It has to be: the al-Khalifa are even starting to wear the shmagh ghetra, a telltale Saudi headgear, in summer now. Bahraini rulers and their retainers among the elite are going Saudi, and they can’t seem to do it fast enough. Saudi, or rather al-Saud, are chic in occupied Bahrain. Which makes me wonder if any Frenchmen started to wear small mustaches in Nazi-occupied Paris so long ago.
The Bahrainis of the “right inclination”, political or otherwise, may find other ways to ape their new Wahhabi masters. They can start frequenting the places where all the things that are banned in the Kingdom without Magic are available. Don’t let your imagination run wild, not too wild. You can get flogged in public in Riyadh for singing in public, even an innocent thing like a Salafi carol (a la Fa La La…….). That is if you are a male. As for a singing female, you can probably get flogged anywhere on both shores of my Gulf. Iranian mullahs can be almost as anally retentive about these things are the Wahhbai shaikhs: almost so, but not quite.
In occupied Bahrain, they can do as the uninvited Saudi visitors do. That may become even more necessary as the true Saudis take their business elsewhere: they will be more welcome now in economically depressed Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Hopefully not as part of an occupation army.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Gulf states, Occupied Bahrain

Time on a Reign of Terror in Bahrain…………..

     
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““I need to leave Bahrain,” he says, voice shaking. “What channels can I use?” By all accounts, Bahrain’s protests have had the wind knocked out of their sails the past two weeks, as the government systematically shut down the opposition’s operations. Leading activists were arrested en masse, many in pre-dawn raids. The headquarters of opposition group Waad was torched. As Manama was put under martial law, 100 Saudi Arabian tanks arrived on March 13 to help police the streets. Salmaniya Medical Center, a main gathering point for protesters and the country’s most sophisticated hospital, was essentially locked down. At checkpoints around the city, masked thugs pulled drivers out of cars at the slightest suspicion of anti-government activity, often beating them senseless. A kingdom had imposed a reign of terror — with anecdotes and examples of how vengeance is exacted. “The injuries, the bullet holes, are always in the back — as people are leaving,” one official said. ……….”

It is a reign of terror, largely sectarian, but not only that. It is also tribal. There are prominent Sunni opposition figures under detention, like Ibrahim Sharif al-Sayed who heads a secular democratic group. He may be the target of more of the wrath of the ruling despots and their Salafi allies because they have tried to make the Bahrain uprising a purely Shi’a-Sunni sectarian issue, and people like him disrupt their propaganda.
Cheers
mhg



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Arab Revolutions, Occupied Bahrain

Saudis, Go Home! Al Khalifa & Al Qaddafi…..

        
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  • (Tweet) Winnipeg Free Press: Bahrainis abandoned in their time of trial…..
  • (Tweet) Bahrain Online: Isa Radhis body retained by authorities after family refused to sign that he passed away in a car accident……
  • (Tweet) Bahrainis call for civil disobedience……
  • (Tweet) In Karzakan #Bahrain now. Banner says “Their weapon is violence, Our weapon is civil disobedience……
  • (Tweet) Bahrain: Journalists Denied Entry at the Airport…..
  • (Tweet) Kuwait medical volunteers denied Bahrain entry because many of them were Shi’as…..
  • (Tweet) #Bahrain police car chases unarmed men, shoots them, leaves them to die…..
  • (Tweet) #14feb #bahrain #lulu Isa Radhis body retained by authorities after family refused to sign that he passed away in a car accident……
  • (Tweet) Isa Radhi Al Radhi confirmed dead.Authorities request family sign that death was car accident,they refuse……
  • (Tweet) #14Feb #Bahrain #lulu :Isa Radhi Al Radhi from Sitra confirmed dead…….
  • (Tweet) @Wefaqsociety: we will not forget him forever………
  • (Tweet) LiveBahrain: Nasrallah: what is the difference between Al Khalifa and Al Qaddafi?….

  • (Tweet) JustAmira: The Allah Akbar (God is Greater) chants have started. Let’s hope they aren’t followed by BOOM BOOM BOOM #Bahrain…

  • (Tweet) draddee: #Bahrain funeral turns into defiant protest. Demolishing the #Lulu monument is idiotic & desperate

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Corruption, Occupied Bahrain

Qardhawi as a Saudi Hero of Egypt’s Revolution!………

        
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“Al-Qaradawi, who is the president of the World Federation of Muslim Scholars, was vocal in amassing Egyptians against the ousted Egypt President Husni Mubarak, and egged on other revolutions that took place or are taking place elsewhere in the Arab World, but kept quiet for Bahrain…….”

Qardhawi is certainly not silent about Bahrain anymore: he is siding with the oppressive al-Khalifa and the Saudi invaders.
Now Alarabiya (Saudi owned and managed by some little prince) is building up this Qardhawi dude, and this always makes me suspicious. It is now making Qardhawi the hero of the Egyptian revolution. He hung around in Qatar, then flew in and tried to claim a role in sending Mubarak to Sharm el-Shaikh. Maybe he fancied himself another Khomeini.
Now the Saudis are using him as a tool to justify their invasion and occupation of Bahrain. I have never cared for “television clergy”, be they Sunni, Shi’a, Episcopalians, Baptists, or other Evangelicals (I have never seen any Jewish TV rabbis, but no doubt they have them too). There is always something “oily” and hypocritical about most of the television clergy, whatever faith. There is also something of a different kind of “oil” about this Qardhawi guy. Normally I don’t pay attention to him, but when a royal Saudi network builds him up I perk up, get suspicious.

(
Qardawi’s son converted to Shi’ism a couple of years ago, but he has not ‘come out’ yet, presumably at the request of his father who would lose his position. I am not sure HTF one converts from one Islamic sect to another: I mean it is not like converting to something like Catholicism).
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Egypt, Occupied Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

Can Saudi Money and Western Arms Kill the Arab Spring?…………

        
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  Can the Saudi army crush her spirit?
“You say you want a revolution

Well, you know
We all want to change the world
 You tell me that it’s evolution

Well, you know
We all want to change the world….” The Beatles

“Mr. Maskati is a 24-year-old human rights activist who not long ago felt so close to achieving Egypt’s kind of peaceful revolution, through a dogged commitment to nonviolence. Then the Saudi tanks rolled into Bahrain, and protesters came under attack, the full might of the state hammering at unarmed civilians. “We thought it would work,” Mr. Maskati said, his voice soft with depression, yet edged with anger. “But now, the aggression is too much. Now it’s not about the protest anymore, it’s about self-defense.” The Arab Spring is not necessarily over, but it has run up against dictators willing to use lethal force to preserve their power……At first, they seemed an unstoppable force, driven by the power of demographics — about 60 percent of the population across the Arab world is under the age of 30………”

It is now clear that the forces of Arab despotism and reaction have recovered from the initial shock of the revolution and have regrouped. The revolution seemed to cut through the decrepit old Arab system like a knife through rancid butter, moving from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Bahrain to Libya and beyond (perhaps to Saudi Arabia). Now the revolution has stalled in the desert of Libya and in the burned and bloody streets of occupied Bahrain. In Libya, Qaddafi has redeployed his oil money and his Western weapons and may have bought himself a reprieve. In Bahrain the people were on the verge of defeating their despotic rulers, when U.S officials started visiting with more frequency just before Saudi arms intervened by invading the country and occupying it.

The Saudi strategy for defeating the Arab spring is simple: to co-opt it in North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya) with money and through Western allies, and to crush it by force and genocide in Bahrain and the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen is getting bloodier as the dictator clings to his capital city.
The Saudi invasion of Bahrain, aided by the United Arab Emirates as a baggage carrier, came only a few hours after the US Defense Secretary left Bahrain, possibly with Jeffrey Feltman still in Manama. Or maybe not: Feltman has visited the island several times in only a few weeks and is becoming gradually known in our region as a Shi’a-baiter to a Wahhabi degree (you’d think he is running the al-Khalifa campaign the way he runs the right-wing March 14 campaign in Lebanon, or that he is running for office over there).

In any case, Saudi money has bought the king (formerly emir) of Bahrain to such a degree that he has invited them in to occupy the country and subjugate its people. A king inviting a Wahhabi force to subjugate his largely Shi’a people: it is like inviting Nazis into a Jewish neighborhood. But Saudi money will not subjugate a country like Egypt the way it did under the stagnant Mubarak. It may rob the revolution of some of its gains if the Egyptian people are not careful. Saudi money and force will not subjugate the people of Bahrain for long either; they barely escaped their last intervention in Yemen. Besides, they will probably have more fires to put out at home in the coming months.

As for the West: well, how many ways can one spell ‘hypocrisy’? The West was eager to keep the old order in North Africa until it was too late. Now they are eager to take on Qaddafi. In Bahrain, where people are being killed and displaced by a corrupt kleptocratic regime, the West is largely turning a blind eye with a soft unconvincing “Oh, you shouldn’t!” No doubt dreaming of huge weapons deal from the al-Saud and al-Nahayan clans.
Cheers
mhg



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Arab Revolutions, Occupied Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

Satrapy of Bahrain: who Rules in Manama?………..

        
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  Can the Saudi army crush her spirit?
“American officials want Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to allow political reforms that could lead to more representation for Shiites under Sunni rule. During his telephone conversation with the Saudi king, Mr. Obama called for an end to the violence that has accelerated in Bahrain over the last few days. He asked for a “political process as the only way to peacefully address the legitimate grievances of Bahrainis and to lead to a Bahrain that is stable, just, more unified and responsive to its people,”……..”

So Obama is discussing the future of Bahrain with Kin Abdullah, a foreigner to Bahrain.
So tell me again: who did you say rules in Bahrain?………..
It is clear to me that the king of Bahrain is now a satrap (wali in Arabic, which is worse) of the Saudi monarchy. His avaricious clan are now allowed to continue their plunder of Bahrain, but its politics are left to the big boys across the causeway. The shots now are called from Riyadh not Manama.
Let this be a lesson for other states on my Gulf: never invite Saudi (or Iranian or Iraqi) troops to prop up your regime. If you have to do that, then it is time to do a Bin Ali or a Mubarak and get the hell out of Dodge.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Occupied Bahrain, Persian-American Gulf

Freed Bahrainis, Beached Saudis, Abu Dhabi Waterboys, Horny Mermaids ……

        
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                           Some Saudi and UAE forces           One of their Bahrain victims

Things are looking up on my side of my Gulf. I won’t call it the Persian-American Gulf this time, but only this time. After the Saudis take over Abu Dhabi, or will it be Qatar, I’ll call it the Persian-Wahhabi Gulf, although Wahhabis are desert people and not true Gulf people. They fear turning into mud and dissolving into the sea, as the old poet said so long ago. That old poet was right: all fishermen who sail from Saudi Arabia are Indians or Pakistanis. Salafis are also reported to fear the sea, for they may believe that either some Jinn or some horny mermaids may pop out and assault them (they’ll opt for the mermaids anytime, these bearded goats).

Back to my main entrée: Saudi forces, with their Abu Dhabi water boys, have finally brought justice and democracy to the people of Bahrain. Now the people of Bahrain can be as free as the people of the Arabian Peninsula. More important: now the little king of Bahrain can be as free as the Saudi king. What is even more important: now all these shaikhs, these little khalifas of Bahrain can feel as free as the al-Saud princes, and like them they can do whatever they want, take whatever they want. Nobody there to argue, is there? Isn’t freedom great?
Now I expect Hillary Clinton to pay a visit to Manama, walk around Lulu Square, amazed at the site of the victory of the al-Khalifa, al-Saud (and their Abu Dhabi water boys).
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Occupied Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

Real and Political Massacres in Manama: the Division of Bahrain………

        
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  Can the Saudi army & Abu Dhabi mercenaries crush her spirit?

There was a massacre on Wednesday morning by the joint operations of Bahraini regime forces and Saudi occupation forces. Several were reported dead, but the toll will rise, many more were wounded.
A political massacre followed: the impartial Bahraini alwasat daily and the opposition have been reporting that members of the toothless appointed Shura Council have been announcing their resignations throughout the day. Members of the Bahrain judiciary have also been announcing their resignations throughout the day. At least one newly-appointed minister announced his resignation (not many more will, since almost all ministers are either al-Khalifa members or their tribal retainers). Alarabiya network (owned by an in-law of the royal family and operated by a nephew of King Abdullah) tried to put the usual Saudi propaganda face on it. It claimed on its website that those Shi’as who resigned did so because they were threatened.

In effect the al-Khalifa and their al-Saud lords have split Bahrain into two. They have finally given up on the fake all-inclusive government they tried to present to the world, especially to the West. This has always been a sectarian regime in Manama, but in the past it could not be a 100% sectarian regime like the Saudi one. Now the regime in Manama is just like the Saudi one, representing the al-Khalifa family and a few families of their retainers and royal groupies. Reports also filtered throughout the day that leading opposition figures have been arrested, presumably by joint al-Khalifa and Saudi forces. Some right-wing daily rags in Kuwait, which unfortunately seems to spawn some of the worst Arab media and “crappiest” writers in recent years, have even started talking about a Bahrain Khalifiyya, البحرين الخليفية, meaning an al-Khalifa Bahrain. Sort of like “Saudi” Arabia.
Now the Saudi forces will probably remain in Bahrain forever, unless forced to leave by the people of Bahrain. And they can force them to leave, now that the fear is gone.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Occupied Bahrain, Persian-American Gulf

Zenga Zenga in Occupied Bahrain: Manama as Prague or Kuwait City?………….

        

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“Forces from neighboring Gulf Arab countries will help maintain order in Bahrain, Arabiya TV reported on Monday, and an adviser to Bahrain’s royal court said their forces were already on the strategic island. “Forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council have arrived in Bahrain to maintain order and security,” Nabeel al-Hamer, a former information minister and adviser to the royal court, said on his Twitter feed. Gulf Daily News, a newspaper close to Bahrain’s powerful prime minister, reported on Monday that forces from the GCC, a six-member regional bloc, would protect strategic facilities. A Saudi official said Monday that more than 1,000 Saudi troops, part of the Gulf countries’ Peninsula Shield Force, have entered Bahrain where anti-regime protests have raged for a month…….”


The lines have been drawn on the Gulf: which is what the worried al-Saud dynasty has wanted since they hosted Bin Ali and supported Mubarak last January. They, like other oligarchies on MY Gulf, have wanted a sectarian divide between the people of the region (I mean the Arab side of the Persian-American Gulf). It is the old policy of ‘divide and rule’.
The rapacious Bahrain oligarchy did a masterful job of terrifying a section of their population into throwing in their lot with the rulers and against their own self-interest. In this task, and as usual, the al-Khalifa have had the strong support of the Salafi movement, always the mercenary force willing to do the bidding of the despots in the Arab world these days. They usually do it for reasons to do with Salafi doctrine, or for sectarian reasons, or for material gain. All three of the above in the case of Bahrain (and Saudi Arabia).

This invasion of Bahrain is being advertised in Gulf semi-official media as a “police” force. They claim the GCC Peninsula Shield agreement allows it. In fact the GCC agreement allows helping a member against foreign invasion, not against popular uprisings. They certainly did not interfere to protect Kuwait in 1990: they chickened out against an outside invader (Iraq).

This is a Saudi invasion against the people of Bahrain. The talk of UAE participation probably means they may have sent a hundred or so people along with the Saudis. The UAE has very few natives to form a real army: its population consists mostly, nay overwhelmingly, of foreign expatriate laborers and housemaids.
This is a Saudi invasion to save the nuts of the al-Khalifa from the fires of their own greed and corruption and their insistence on their Apartheid policy. Just as the 1968 Soviet invasion was against the people of Prague and the Ba’athist 1990 invasion was against the people of Kuwait. Anybody who was against those invasions has to be against this one. After all, a pig with lipstick, even a brotherly or sisterly pig, is still a pig. The pig has just strolled into Manama inside a tank.
The good news for the people of Bahrain and other Arab states is: the fear is gone. It may be zenga zenga in Manama………..
Cheers
mhg

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