In the police attack mentioned above there were no reports of injuries, but in one previous raid in Ma'ameer on March 25, a 71-year-old man, Isa Mohammed, died from asphyxiation after police fired teargas into this home.
Note that these villages are not engaging in any criminal activities. They are unarmed civilians who are being wantonly attacked by state security forces simply on the basis that the people are Shia and therefore deemed by the Sunni elite rulers to be supportive of anti-government (pro-democracy) movement, which in itself is not illegal and is supposedly a right that is permitted by Bahrain's signatory to international laws, that is, the right to have political opinions.
Note also that, according to my contacts, the security personnel are mainly Saudi or from Yemen, Syria, Jordan. These personnel are predominantly Sunni and loyal to the regime. That is why they have been recruited by the regime. The police and army personnel are extremely hostile to Shia people out of deep sectarian phobia. This is especially true of the Saudis who are typically Wahhabis, the kind of extreme Islamism that Saudi rulers and Al Qaeda espouses. Wahhabis see it almost as a religious duty to crush Shias. We saw the same phobia in Iraq where Shia mosques were mostly attacked by bombers. The effective consent that the West has given the Bahraini rulers to crackdown on their people means the West is colluding with some of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East to crush pro-democracy people in Bahrain. Soldiers from Saudi Arabia, a country that does not permit women to drive cars alone, are in Bahraini suppressing people demanding
Democratic freedoms -- and the Saudis are being given de facto US and British support (on the basis that silence is support).
Finally, the date of the above incident, 5 June, and many other such raids on villages is several days after the State of Emergency Law was supposedly lifted in Bahrain by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa (1 June). This supposed lifting of the emergency measures by the state was greeted this week by the White House as a positive sign of Bahrain beginning an alleged process of "inclusive dialogue" with oppositionists. But as Bahraini human rights activists pointed out: "How can you have a dialogue with someone who is holding a gun to your head?"
My hope is that the American people learn from the article and the interview. I believe that the situation in Bahrain is totally against what we claim to stand for in this country. It's about time we actually lived up to the principles we claim to have, or this will be just another example of how American foreign policy creates a divide in what could have been a good relationship with a people striving toward self-determination and the lofty ideals we expressed in our own Declaration of Independence. It will be just another failure of the Obama administration in a long line of failures and broken campaign promises when he touted "Change". If the administration continues to echo the propaganda of the Bahraini monarchy, we will just be propping up another despotic, heavy-handed autocracy that is run by a minority elite at the expense of the people. This is the kind of foreign policy that makes enemies out of people that could have been allies. It's no wonder that America's reputation has become so poor around the world.
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