If the Tunisia and Egypt revolution was not a Sunni revolution, why is the Bahrain revolution being reduced to Sunni Shia sectarianism?

If Arabs of Saudi are killing Arabs of Bahrain, how is that racism? It is a clear case of Shia hatred, a hall mark of the house of Abdul Wahhab and Saud.

What a shame to see Shaikh Qaradawi and Tarik Fatah united in their hatred for the revolution in Bahrain!

You people have once opposed Saddam and supported Amrika, but what happened now the same Amrika has killed thousands of people including people from your sect and an ayatollah of yours and hundreds of mosque and Imam Bargahs.

In the same way you are opposing the king but the price of political instability will be more killing of the people of Behrain irrespective of race and sect.

Wallah Tariq bin Ziyad, your name and thoughts remind me Hazrat Azam Tariq Shaheed

Maulana Izharulhaq, Jhangvi’s son was abducted and killed in Karachi and his dead body thrown in a deserted place. his only crime was that he has asked Azam Tariq to leave his fathers mosque for him as he thought it was his right to fill his fathers place.
I have no interest in Sipah Sahaba, they are sell out and have always betrayed their workers

Hamid Dabashi | 20 Mar 2011
It’s not a Shiite-Sunni divide

CNN – The roots of the sectarian division between Sunni and Shiite Muslims go back to early history and relate to Muslims’ disagreement on the succession to Muhammad’s prophetic authority. Throughout the medieval era, hostility has flared between Sunnis and Shiites.

But in the course of European colonial domination of the Arab and Muslim world, and following the old Latin doctrine of “divide and rule,” such sectarian divisions, as in those between Muslims and Hindus or Muslims and Christians, have been abused, exaggerated, and exacerbated.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are Sunni, or “orthodox.” A significant minority of Muslims, about 10 to 15%, are Shiites, or “heterodox.” The Shiites are mainly concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen, but significant Shiite communities live throughout the Muslim world.

Soon after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, political strategists and military analysts, seeking to divert attention from the principal culprit in the misbegotten war, attributed much of the violence in Iraq to this sectarian division and the emerging rivalry between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the region. Echoing these strategists’ assessments of a transnational Shiite uprising against Sunni domination, King Abdullah II of Jordan even spoke of the formation of a “Shi’i crescent.”

In the revolutionary uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly in countries such as Bahrain with a significant Shiite population ruled by a small Sunni leadership, the question of Sunni-Shiite hostility and rivalry has again resurfaced in predicting the course of the unfolding dramatic events.

This fear of a “Shiite crescent” or a resurrection of sectarian rivalries in the Muslim world, as in the fear of a renewed militant Islamism, is a false alarm built on a flawed reading of Muslims’ multifaceted political cultures.

Recent history instantly discredits any assumption of a transnational Shiite solidarity against Sunnism. For eight long and bloody years, Iran and Iraq, two major Shiite countries, were at each other’s throats — Shiites killing Shiites on two sides of a national divide. Shi’a, or even Islam in general, has never been the sole deciding factor in people’s political identity.

Today in Bahrain, people are much more attuned to Arab nationalism and even pan-Arabism than they are to Shi’ism. Within specific Shiite countries, loyalties and identities are fractious along many crisscrossing lines.

In Iran, a major Shi’a country, we are witness to a massive civil rights movement, recently galvanized and radicalized by the uprisings in the region. Shiites chanting “Allahu Akbar/God is Great” are engaged in street demonstrations against an Islamic Republic, a government based on Shi’a doctrines. All of these point out that Shi’ism is one among many other factors in determining people’s political persuasions and social actions.

What we are witnessing in much of the Arab and Muslim world is not a re-enactment of Sunni-Shiite rivalries. It is the defiant retrieval of a vast and variegated cosmopolitan culture — the assertion of a syncretic identity that is the result of distant and recent history. This vibrant and multifaceted culture can’t be reduced to any sect or ideology.

Against all odds, people from Morocco to Iran, from Bahrain to Yemen, have arisen almost at the same time against a corrupt, disabling, and denigrating politics of despair — against a colonial geography code-named “the Middle East” that no longer means anything.

It is imperative for Americans, their elected officials and policy analysts, to come to terms with what is happening on its immediate terms and not reduce them to cliché. Political cultures are neither reducible to their constituent factors nor fixed and stagnant.

People from Morocco to Oman, from Yemen to Iran are determined to change their destiny from a politics of despair to an open-ended moral imagination that navigates entirely uncharted course for liberty and dignity. In this process, every aspect of their religions and cultures will come forward only to the degree that they can restore their sense of pride of place and chart a new destiny.

http://www.muslimsdebate.com/faces/sn.php?nid=1625%3D

HRW: #Bahrain: Injured People Denied Medical Care http://t.co/l4h7bvC #lulu #feb14

http://www.hrw.org/ar/news/2011/03/17/bahrain-injured-people-denied-medical-care

Tehmina Janjua, a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, said the danger to Pakistanis, many of whom have lived for years in Bahrain and become Bahraini citizens, is being overplayed by Pakistan’s media and the government has no plans to repatriate workers.

“I don’t think we should paint it in a sectarian color,” Ms. Janjua said. The government, she added, played no role in sending police to Bahrain.

Still, Pakistan’s powerful military is involved through organizations that recruit police for Bahrain.

These recruits are increasingly “seen as the repressive arm of the state” by Bahraini protesters, said Tariq Fatemi, a security analyst and former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. and to Middle Eastern countries.

“The royal family of Bahrain feels much more comfortable having foreigners to guard them than locals,” said Jean-François Seznec, a professor at Georgetown University who studies Bahrain. “They are mercenaries and they are reliable to whoever hires them.”

In Pakistan, some of the new recruits waiting to ship to Bahrain later this month say they are willing to face the dangers to benefit from pay scales they could never attain at home. “The situation is not very good there but I’m willing to work anywhere if I get good pay,” said S. Khan, a 29-year-old university graduate from the northwestern city of Peshawar. Mr. Khan said he has been offered almost $400 a month to work for Bahrain’s security forces, seven times what he got in a Peshawar factory making matches.

Others have gotten cold feet. In Gujranwala, a scrubby city in Pakistan’s Punjab province where some families have more than 40 relatives serving in Bahrain’s government and police, people are worried about their kin. Muhammad Siddique, who runs a small grocery shop in Gujranwala, recently forbade his son to join Bahrain’s navy. “I don’t want to send my son to such a horrible situation,” he said.

Mahmood Ahmed Khan, a retired Pakistani navy admiral who heads the Bahria Foundation, a navy-linked foundation involved in the latest recruitment for Bahrain’s national guard, said it began looking for workers in September, well before the start of the recent protests.

But he acknowledges the risks to Pakistani police and is running courses in etiquette to make sure they put forward a good face. “We’d like our people to work as ambassadors for Pakistan,” he said.

Officials for the Fauji Foundation, a Pakistan army-linked organization involved in the latest recruitment, didn’t respond to repeated requests to comment.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703784004576220762563363574.html?mod=fox_australian

The Al Khalifa family, Sunni Muslims who rule over a Shiite-majority population, have long relied on recruits from Sunni-majority countries such as Pakistan, Jordan and Yemen to fill the ranks of their police forces. As antigovernment protests have flared in Bahrain, culminating in a violent crackdown last week, the monarchy has turned again to Pakistan military-linked foundations to find recruits for its security forces.

This month, Bahrani recruiters for the National Guard, a paramilitary body, signed up 1,000 new security personnel during road shows in Pakistan, according to officials with military foundations in Pakistan that organized the recruitment.

A spokeswoman for the Bahraini government declined to comment on its policy of recruiting foreigners to its security forces.

Bahrain’s dependency on foreign workers to fill security and other jobs has vexed Bahraini Shiites, who see it as an attempt to tilt the religious balance in the country and exclude them from jobs. Many are angered by the role of Pakistani policemen in suppressing the antigovernment protests.

Two Pakistani-born policemen and three other Pakistanis have been killed in recent weeks and about 40 others injured, according to the Pakistan Embassy in Bahrain. There are concerns that others in the 65,000-strong Pakistani community in Bahrain—most of them guest workers doing jobs that have nothing to do with the police, such as construction—could be vulnerable.

Bahrain’s opposition groups deny they are targeting the wider Pakistani community. They say Pakistani police have been injured because they are often on the front lines of clashes with antigovernment protesters.

But some Pakistani workers say they’re afraid. One of those who has relocated, a 30-year-old Pakistani salesman who gave his name only as Arsalan, said protesters attacked his home in the suburbs of Manama with stones and Molotov cocktails. “They were saying all Pakistanis should leave Bahrain,” Mr. Arsalan said.

The killings of policemen and attacks on Pakistani workers are front-page news in Pakistan, where the government has faced questions about the wisdom of helping staff Bahrain’s police force as violence there has escalated.

Tehmina Janjua, a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, said the danger to Pakistanis, many of whom have lived for years in Bahrain and become Bahraini citizens, is being overplayed by Pakistan’s media and the government has no plans to repatriate workers.

“I don’t think we should paint it in a sectarian color,” Ms. Janjua said. The government, she added, played no role in sending police to Bahrain.

Still, Pakistan’s powerful military is involved through organizations that recruit police for Bahrain.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703784004576220762563363574.html?mod=fox_australian

The Bahrain Uprising, Saudi Troops and Hussein the Martyr
3:28 PM, MAR 24, 2011 •

BY LEE SMITHSingle

Manama, Bahrain

Bahrain’s royal family has managed to paint the country’s opposition movement as a sectarian affair, involving only Shia and entirely manipulated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The opposition says that it is not a sectarian uprising, but a political reform movement, and points to members of the country’s Sunni minority (roughly 35 percent of the population) who support their demands.

By calling it an Iranian-backed Shia rebellion, Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family meant not only to flush the Sunnis out of the opposition, but also to frighten Washington, which recognizes Tehran as a threat to vital American interests, including the Manama-based Fifth Fleet. Therefore, Bahraini Shia have been subjected to a campaign of violence and systematic harassment the last few weeks in an apparent attempt to get them to fight back so that the government will have even more leeway to crack down on the opposition.

Among other instruments, the Al Khalifa have been using checkpoints to rattle their people, where the Shia are rousted by policemen and soldiers from places like Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria. These Sunni foreigners have been given Bahraini citizenship in order to try to tilt the sectarian divide in favor of the ruling family, and see the current situation as an opportunity to heap abuse upon the Shia with sectarian slurs.

And yet my Bahraini colleague didn’t understand why were stopped this morning at a checkpoint and told to get out of the car. “Maybe,” I suggested as we were driving off, “it’s because of the two green headbands hanging from your front mirror that say, ‘Hussein the Martyr.’” Given the charged environment, it’s hardly surprising that Sunni security forces are going to be especially watchful for any signs of militant Shia tendencies—like the kind that might be indicated by apparel commemorating the greatest Shia martyr of them all, Hussein.

The fact is, to date, the violence surrounding the uprising in this small country is not coming from the Shia or, for that matter, the local Sunni community. Rather, members of the opposition here are quick to note that the only people who carry weapons in this security-conscious state are government employees. So whoever put two bullets in the head of 51-year-old Bahia al-Arady last week, the first woman killed here since demonstrations began February 14, was not acting simply out of a personal sectarian grievance. At least 20, including al-Arady, have been killed in the demonstrations.

Still, I’m having a hard time figuring out my new friend, whom I’ll call Al. Al’s a youngish colleague, late 20s, whom I met in Beirut before I came to Bahrain. He says he doesn’t want any foreign involvement in Bahrain, not from the Saudis or Emiratis, who sent more than 1,000 troops last week as part of a Gulf Cooperation Council force, nor from Iran. He explains he doesn’t want anything like the Islamic Republic of Iran here in Bahrain, and yet for his religious guide he takes Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. When I remind him that Khamenei crushed his own domestic opposition, Al notes that for his political guide he takes a different cleric, Bahrain’s Isa Qassem, who merely insists, Al explains, that Shia are owed their rights in Bahrain.

As we drive through Manama, we pass scores of other drivers pulled over at checkpoints and lined up against a wall with their backs turned to their interlocutors’ weapons, just as we had earlier been. How, I asked Al, did the soldiers know they were Shia? Shias speak with a different accent, he tells me. Al takes that as proof that the Shia presence in Bahrain predates the Sunnis by hundreds of years. Also, Al explains, there’s the evidence on the tombstones in the graveyards. Still, it doesn’t bother him that Sunnis rule Bahrain; he just believes it’s not just that the Shia don’t have equal rights. His mother, for instance, has an engineering degree and can’t get a job, even as they import foreigners to do the same work. Maybe it’s because she’s a woman, I suggest. But they hire Sunni women, Al tells me.

When I ask him if he thinks the fall of Saddam gave Shia the sense of new possibility in the region, he demurs and counters that it was the 1979 Islamic revolution that inspired the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts 30 years later. “It was proof that people can change their rulers.” The answer is a little surprising, even if admiration for the Islamic revolution is a fairly characteristic Shia perspective—one I’ve heard not only in Beirut from anti-Hezbollah Shia, but in Washington after many glasses of Shiraz late into the evening with secular Shia.

Nonetheless, Al’s understanding of Shiism gives him a pretty conservative worldview—“It’s our responsibility to improve things, including our own station, and it is wrong to abandon our lives to fate,” he says. “But there are limits to political change that will not be resolved until the Imam Mahdi returns.” Perhaps the real Arab revolution, he thinks, is not what is happening on the streets but is an internal one that is yet to occur. “Islam was supposed to put an end to tribal divisions,” he says. “And yet now we have divisions based not only on tribe but sect as well.”

That internal revolution is the subtext when Al and I are stopped later in the afternoon at another checkpoint, even after he has taken the green headbands off the rear mirror. “Maybe I look Shia,” he says to me as the soldiers approach the driver’s side window. They’re wearing the camouflage uniforms of the GCC force—they’re Saudis. This time we’re told to stay in the car, and to pop open the trunk. “You were in the Pearl Roundabout, weren’t you?” one of the soldiers asks, referring to the large monument commemorating the country’s pre-petroleum economy based on pearl diving. The roundabout served as the main site of the uprising in Bahrain, until security forces dismantled it.

Al, who indeed had been at the Pearl Roundabout earlier, takes a strange detour around the question. He says he was actually in Lebanon, and I am wondering if the Saudi in the dark mask covering his face who has stuck his head in the car can see my jaw drop. It happens to be true he was in Lebanon for part of the time, but this is just the sort of thing that is likely to rile up these occupying forces sanctioned by their Wahabbi government to bear arms against foreign Shia. “So you were visiting your friend Hassan Nasrallah,” one of the Saudis says. “Of course not,” says Al. Nasrallah has taken up the cause of Bahrain’s Shia, and in return the Al Khalifa government has cancelled all flights between Manama and Beirut, and instructed Bahraini nationals inside Lebanon to leave the country.

One of the soldiers asks Al to open the glove compartment, where he’s hidden the two headbands. “What are these?” a soldier wearing a Salafi-style beard asks. Al is compelled by the Saudis to recount the story of Hussein and his martyrdom on a 7th-century battlefield in Kerbala. “We have martyrs, too,” says one of the soldiers. “What’s Kerbala?” he says dismissively.

Al had previously explained to me that the story of Hussein is generally misinterpreted, even by some Shia. Where many see the story of his tragic betrayal and his death at the hands of a superior force as an emblematic tale of Shia suffering and resignation, it is in reality a story of hope and aspiration. The grandson of the prophet knew he was going to lose, but he went anyway. “We believe that Imam Hussein,” Al had told me, “his companions and family members were the real winners at Karbala. Yes, they lost the military battle but they won for their values and beliefs. And that victory gave a great impulse for Shiism to survive.” This central tableau in Shia Islam is a political narrative, not about self-abnegation but about faith and endurance.

Maybe that’s why Al and the rest of the Shia here are able to withstand the taunts of their persecutors. But it also suggests that if the campaign of violence against them persists, it is going to reach a point where the hope and faith invested in the figure of Kerbala moves the Shia to action against the injustice they are suffering, and they are going to have a much better chance of success than their martyr.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/bahrain-uprising-saudi-troops-and-hussein-martyr_555452.html?page=2

The U.S. double standard
Published On Wed Mar 23 2011

In February, protesters in Bahrain celebrated a victory as the military withdrew from the streets of the capital. This month the Saudis sent troops to support the monarchy.
HASSAN AMMAR/AP

By Haroon Siddiqui
Editorial Page
DOHA, QATAR

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/959663–siddiqui-the-u-s-double-standard

The world has wisely intervened in Libya to stop a tyrant from killing his own people. But it won’t do the same for pro-democracy forces in Bahrain, Yemen and other places in the region.

Barack Obama helped engineer regime change in Egypt and joined the Anglo-French-led attack on Libya that should lead to regime change there. But these allies, including Canada, won’t help topple other autocrats who are also attacking their citizens.

Worse, Obama and Co. acquiesced to a Saudi-led military intervention in Bahrain to support the king against the will of his people.

This cynical, self-serving response to the Arab Awakening is sowing the seeds of future conflicts between Arabs and the West and, therefore, Muslims and the West, the very divide that Obama has tried hard to bridge.

Welcome to Obama’s realpolitik. He has sacrificed his grand promise of universal human rights and democracy at the altar of American interests.

All states work in their own interests but few claim the moral leadership that America does.

After siding, albeit reluctantly, with the people’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt against pro-American regimes, Obama has reverted to Washington’s old double standard of one law for allies, another for adversaries.

Dissidents in Iran and Syria will, therefore, be cheered on and materially backed in their heroic bids to unseat their regimes. Stephen Harper will be among those beating the drums hard.

But he and others won’t be speaking up, except in banalities, in support of dissidents elsewhere, not just those in Bahrain and Yemen but also in Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The autocrats there, repressive in varying degrees, will be counselled against using violence but not penalized for resorting to it, some more viciously than others.

The U.S. wants these allies to reform, not fall.

Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa uses far more foreign mercenaries than Moammar Gadhafi. He and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been no less brutal than Gadhafi. Yet there’s no call to the United Nations for a no-fly zone over either country.

No bombs will be dropped on Bahrain, host to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and also home to an American air base. Nor is Obama pressuring Saleh to quit. Saleh is an ally in counterterrorism efforts against Al Qaeda and provides fuelling facilities for American warships.

Let’s not forget what the Arab autocrats, and the other regional actors, have been up to.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did not seek United Nations permission to send troops into neighbouring Bahrain to save King Khalifa.

The latter is a fellow Sunni ruling over a majority Shiite population that’s systematically discriminated against. The Shiites are routinely abused by an army that’s exclusively Sunni, its ranks recruited from Pakistan, Jordan, Syria and Yemen, many of whom are granted citizenship to alter the demographic mix.

The Bahraini Shiites are also demonized as a fifth column for Shiite Iran. This even though there is no evidence of Iranian meddling.

The Bahraini Shiites are making political, not sectarian, demands.

The second reason for propping up Khalifa is to avoid a possible domino effect that the fall of one monarchy may have on all the others in the region — American allies all, sitting on oil.

There are two views on Abdullah’s move. Having failed to convince Obama not to abandon Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a longtime American client, he was swift to protect Khalifa, a Saudi client. Or that Abdullah did consult Obama and arrived at a quid pro quo — the Arabs would cut Gadhafi loose and the West would not interfere in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

There is no mass protest movement in Saudi Arabia. But the most potent opposition comes from Shiites, a persecuted minority in that country. They live in the oil-rich eastern province, across a 23-kilometre causeway from Bahrain.

The Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are thus doubly damned — for making the same political demands that other Arabs are making and for being Shia.

The Arab uprising, as transformative as it already has been, has run not only into stiff domestic resistance but also geopolitical realities, regional and international.

American flirtation with the Arab spring is coming to an end, if it has not already. The new world order is beginning to look like the old world order.

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears on Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

Letters to the Editor

By Letter
Published: March 24, 2011

LAHORE: This is with reference to the violent uprising in Bahrain. It is sad to see that the people of Bahrain are targeting Pakistanis, taking them to be collaborators of the unpopular regime. The fact is that most of them are low-wage workers and labourers who have no connection of any kind with the security or police forces that are clamping down on the uprising.
My question is that what is the Pakistan embassy in Manama doing in this regard? The federal government should be directing its embassy to do all that it can to protect the Pakistanis who are in Bahrain, and to repatriate all those who want to return to Pakistan. A few hundred, of the thousands of Pakistanis resident in Bahrain, have been provided shelter inside the embassy — what about the rest? What are they to do?
As for the protesters, they might have a somewhat genuine grudge against Pakistan, in that many Pakistanis serve in Bahrain’s police force. In that regard, blame for the backlash lies on the shoulders of the Pakistani government, since it could have stopped this recruitment from taking place. At the very least, it could freeze all such recruitments to the Bahraini security services for now.
Salma Tahir
Published in The Express Tribune, March 25th, 2011

http://tribune.com.pk/story/137103/neutrality-on-bahrain-ii/

Mussalman bro,

Thank you for boldly stating what was inside my heart.

Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia
By Robert Scheer

22 March 2011

It’s the black gold that drives nations mad and inevitably raises the question of whether America and the former European colonial powers give a damn about human rights as the basis for military intervention. If Libya didn’t have more oil than any other nation in Africa would the West be unleashing high-tech military mayhem to contain what is essentially a tribal-based civil war? Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S routinely protects.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Moammar Gadhafi must now go not because his human rights record is egregious but rather because his erratic hold on power seems spent. After all, from the London School of Economics to Harvard, influential foreign policy experts were all too happy until quite recently to accept Libyan payoffs in exchange for a more benign view of Gadhafi’s prospects for change under the gentle guidance of what Harvard’s Joseph Nye celebrated as “soft power.”

But that revisionist appraisal of Gadhafi suddenly became an embarrassment when this nutty dictator—whom few in the world could ever understand, let alone warm to—was exposed by defections from his own armed forces to be akin to rotten fruit destined to drop. Libya’s honeymoon with the West, during which leaders led by Tony Blair and George W. Bush thought Col. Gadhafi might finally prove to be a worthy partner more concerned with reliably exporting oil than ineffectively ranting against Western imperialism, has suddenly been abandoned as no longer necessary. As with former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein before him, the Libyan strongman now seemed an awkward relic of a time that had passed him by, and easily replaceable. Not so the royal ruler of Saudi Arabia and the surrogates he finances in Yemen and Bahrain; their suppression of their peoples still falls within acceptable limits because of the vast resources the king manages in a manner that Western leaders have long found agreeable.

But this time, in the glaring light of the democratic currents sweeping through the Mideast, the contradictions in supporting one set of dictators while toppling others may prove impossible for the U.S. and its allies to effectively manage. The recognition, widely demanded throughout the region, that even ordinary Middle Easterners have inalienable rights is a sobering notion not easily co-opted. Why don’t those rights to self-determination extend to Shiites in the richest oil province in Saudi Arabia or for that matter to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza?

The fallback position for U.S. policymakers is the “war on terror” standard under which our dictators are needed to control super-fanatic Muslims. That’s why the U.S trained the Republican Guard led by the son of the despised ruler of Yemen as the counterterrorism liaison with Washington. On Tuesday it was the tanks of the lavishly U.S-equipped Republican Guard that stood as the final line of support surrounding the Presidential Palace as calls for departure of Yemen’s dictator increased in intensity. The U.S. was still following the lead of Saudi Arabia, long a financier of the Yemeni ruler.

The Saudi lead was made clearer in the kingdom’s support for the royal family in neighboring Bahrain as Saudi troops were sent in along with forces from the United Arab Emirates to suppress Bahraini democracy advocates claiming that freedom would enhance the power of the majority Shiite population. The fraud here is to locate Shiite Iran as the center of terrorism when it was the Sunni monarchies that were most closely identified with the problems that gave rise to al-Qaida. Not only did 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 come from Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with Pakistan, were the only countries to diplomatically recognize the Taliban regime that harbored al-Qaida. In Bahrain the majority Shiite population is dismissed as potentially under the sway of the rulers of Iran without strong evidence to that effect. Once again it is convenient to ignore the fact that Iran, as was the case with Saddam’s Iraq, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack that launched the U.S. war on terror.

All of which elevates the question of how long will the U.S. and its allies ignore the elephant in the room posed by an alliance for human rights and anti-terrorism with regimes in the Middle East that stand for neither? While the jury is still out on whether the West’s attack on Libya will prove to be a boon for that nation’s population, at the very least it should expose the deep hypocrisy of continuing to sell huge amounts of arms and otherwise supporting Saudi Arabia and its contingent tyrannies.

Source: Truthdig.com

URL: http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamAndWest_1.aspx?ArticleID=4337

Bahrain Falls Mainly on the Shia
A battle royal in Manama.
APR 4, 2011, VOL. 16, NO. 28 • BY LEE SMITHSingle PagePrintLarger TextSmaller Text
Manama, Bahrain

NEWSCOM

Even as tensions surrounding the protests that have left 20 dead here since February 14 seem to be waning—curfews have been relaxed and people are slowly returning to work—they’re not going away. The sticking point isn’t the sectarianism that divides the Shia majority (some 65 percent of the population) and the ruling Sunnis. Nor is it that Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah see here a potential opening for their influence. The issue is older and more profound, dating back to the time two centuries ago when the al-Khalifa conquered Bahrain and the indigenous people who’d lived there for thousands of years.

Some longtime observers of Bahraini politics believe it was the call for replacing the Sunni monarchy with a republic that brought escalation. In response, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa two weeks ago invited in a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) force composed of 1,000 Saudi troops and another 500 from the United Arab Emirates.

“There was a paper signed by some of the opposition groups wanting to topple the government,” says Ali Rabia, a democracy activist for over 35 years. A well-known Sunni, Rabia is proof that the opposition movement is no simple sectarian affair. “I very much doubt these groups’ loyalties are with Iran,” says Rabia. “The Iranians would not treat them well, and they know it. The relationship between Persian and Arab Shia is not a good one.”

Rabia notes that in 1970 the Bahrainis voted in a U.N. poll not to join Iran and to remain an independent Arab state under the al-Khalifa. Now he fears that discontent, brewing for many years, may be reaching the point of no return. In his office in downtown Manama, he shows me a copy of the document calling for a Bahraini republic and explains this is why he left his political society (use of the word “party” is outlawed). “It was a gift to the government,” says Rabia. “It was also useful in telling the GCC states and the United States that we are facing a danger.”

But the presence of what amounts to an occupying force—a foreign Sunni constabulary with no accountability to the Shia population it is policing—is only making matters worse. Some here blame the GCC forces for much of the violence, including detentions, disappearances from hospitals, midnight raids in Shia villages, and the shooting death of a 51-year-old woman, Bahia al-Aradi, as she was driving in her car.

Much of the opposition sees the government’s actions as unjustified. “So what if some of the opposition asked for a republic?” says Khalil Marzooq, a member of Al Wefaq, a Shia grouping and the largest bloc in parliament until its deputies walked out in late February. “As long as they did it peacefully, what’s the problem with that? If there were pro-regime figures on the other side who said we should leave the government alone and accept things the way they are, should we say we’re going to kill them?”

Al Wefaq, explains Marzooq, is taking the middle road in pushing for a constitutional monarchy. “We want a constitution written by the people,” says Marzooq, rather than the one imposed in 2002 by the ruling family. “And a representative parliament.” At present, the al-Khalifa’s Sunni co-religionists enjoy disproportionate representation. Before the GCC force arrived, the crown prince, Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, accepted the idea of dialogue with the opposition.

To some observers this suggested a split in the royal family, with “hardliners” taking control and summoning the GCC force. Others wondered if the decision had really been made by the Bahraini government, or if the Saudis themselves were calling the shots.

“More than three-quarters of Bahrain’s budget comes from the Abu Saafa oil field,” says Abdul Jalil Khallil, a colleague of Marzooq’s from Al Wefaq. “That field produces 300,000 barrels a day, half of which goes to the Saudis and the other half to Bahrain.”

That is to say, Riyadh essentially determines the economic health of Bahrain. Most real estate investment in Manama is Saudi, and the Saudi royal family sees Bahrain as a vital strategic interest. Bahrain refines up to 270,000 barrels of Saudi oil a day, and trucks coursing the 16-mile King Fahd causeway between the two countries carry vital goods to Saudi Arabia. Coming the other way are Saudi tourists heading into Manama for shopping and the liberal cultural climate. They can let their hair down in the city’s bars and nightclubs.

If Bahrain serves as an escape valve for the Saudis, however, it’s precisely Bahrain’s relaxed atmosphere that poses a threat to the Saudis. “The Saudis are not worried about sectarianism,” says Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights. “Shia make up only 20 percent of the Saudi population. They’re worried about democracy, or anything that would wrest power out of their hands.”

If the Saudis see Bahrain as a place to project power and dishearten their own opposition before it takes off, other observers argue that it wasn’t the Saudis who made the decision to send in troops.

“The Bahraini establishment was under intense pressure from the United States to enter a dialogue,” says one source close to the government. “The Americans did not want to see any use of force. So the Bahrainis’ hands were tied, and they brought in the Saudis because of their special relationship with the Americans.” In other words, bringing in Riyadh was meant to shield Manama from Washington’s scrutiny.

Manama has more than enough firepower to quell any uprising all on its own. Bahrain, with a population of 1.2 million, has some 40,000 troops—a larger army than Tunisia, which has 10.5 million people. Add the security forces (police), the national guard, and the intelligence services, and Bahrain has more armed forces per citizen than just about anywhere else in the world. The vast majority of those forces, moreover, consist of foreigners from Pakistan, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and Sudan that the government has made citizens in an effort to tilt the sectarian balance in its favor. The number of Shia in the armed forces is minuscule.

Why is the army so large? The al-Khalifa are afraid of Iran, but that’s why the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based in Manama: to protect Gulf oil and its producers from hostile external forces. The GCC forces are supposed to serve the same purpose. And yet the king congratulated the commander of the GCC forces as though he’d waged a successful campaign against foreign invaders rather than Bahrainis. This is because the royal family does not perceive the Shia community as part of their own people.

“It’s a tribal matter,” says one Shia intellectual. “It’s not sectarian. It goes back to pre-Islamic days when the tribes invaded each other. You have the Bedouin and you have the towns-people. For the Bedouin there were eight months of raiding, raping, and robbing each year and four months of rest. The al-Khalifa conquered this island. They are the winners and we are the losers, and they believe they owe us nothing. This is Bedouin style—who has the sword can do what he likes.”

The al-Khalifa play the sectarian card because it has resonance with Bahraini Sunnis and with Washington, which fears Iranian influence in any Shia movement.

In reality, the ruling families of the Arab Gulf states are more like a confederation of organized crime families. Each has a stake in the others’ maintaining their power and collecting tribute. Most of the families originated in the Nejd region of what is now Saudi Arabia. The al-Khalifa started there and moved first to Kuwait, where their cousins, the Al-Sabah, rule. From Kuwait they went to Qatar, ruled by the Al-Thani, another Nejdi tribe, and then to Bahrain.

“Therefore,” says my Shia informant, “the Shia have to be under them. But it wouldn’t matter if all the Shia one day converted to Judaism or Christianity or even Sunni Islam, because the bottom line would still be the same. We lost.”

If Bahrain seems to be getting back to normal, it’s also true that a GCC force cannot put down a protest movement whose roots go back long before the recent regional wave of uprisings kicked off in December. Khalil Al Marzooq says indigenous Bahrainis have been agitating for their rights since the 1920s. “If you keep repressing people,” says Marzooq, “eventually they’ll respond. People cannot continue to live like this.”

Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/bahrain-falls-mainly-shia_555538.html

Thousands rally at funeral
Mar 25, 2011
Thousands of mourners rallied at the funeral of a man shot dead by police in Bahrain while in Diraz police dispersed a small protest using tear gas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0AVENxVuEQ

@maryamalkhawaja: The Guardian: Barack Obama must speak out on Bahrain bloodshed http://tinyurl.com/68728d6 #bahrain #feb14

HRW: Bahrain: Suspicious Deaths in Custody http://bit.ly/fYKcGl #bahrain

TIME: How Bahrain’s Government Is Dividing the People http://ti.me/dI071J #bahrain

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2064934,00.html

How Bahrain’s Government Is Dividing Sunnis and Shi’ites http://yhoo.it/dJgHZw

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110413/wl_time/08599206493400

How Bahrain’s Government Is Dividing the People
By Karen Leigh / Manama Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2011

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2064934,00.html#ixzz1JReBbADT

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