(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - “Google Bahrain and you will see how inexcusably the popular uprising in the Persian Gulf sheikhdom is being blacked out by the mainstream media,” wrote Ismail Salami, Iranian author in an article published on Press TV on Thursday.
“And how discriminatingly the Western leaders ignore the vociferous demands of a nation for democracy and social justice,” he added.
The Saudi-backed regime of Al Khalifa in Bahrain has been severely criticized by human rights groups worldwide for killing scores of people and torturing many more due to participating in anti-regime protests that erupted in the tiny country in mid-February 2011.
Citing comments made by Cherif Bassiouni, the head of a fact-finding mission in Bahrain who had found 300 cases of torture during an investigation late in 2011, Salami stressed that Manama uses torture as a “systematic policy” against protesters.
“On March 22, 2012, Bahraini activists released a footage detailing the rape of a child” who had been “badly beaten” by “the Saudi-backed forces in Bahrain,” the prolific Iranian author pointed out.
Pointing to “grotesquely Kafkaesque trials in the country,” he added that “Kangaroo courts are rampant in Bahrain.”
The author of Islamic Views on Human Rights went on to say that such crimes are committed as Western powers “shamelessly” supply the Al Khalifa regime with “weapons and military equipment” to suppress the uprising.
According to new official figures, “The British government approved the sale of ‘military equipment valued at more than £1m in the months following the violent crackdown on demonstrators a year ago’,” he explained.
Recalling the US sale in 2010 of “over $200 million worth of weapons to the country,” Salami drew attention to a State Department statement on January 27, 2012 about Washington’s plan to sell a $1 million worth of military gear to Manama.
“All of a sudden, the US decided that Bahrain is an ‘important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East’ and that they should do their best to provide the regime with all sorts of military equipment,” Salami wrote.
He also highlighted the “bezels of wisdom” Bahraini King has reportedly received from an infamous British military figure who had served as the head of security apparatus in the kingdom for three decades in the past, that is, “Colonel Ian Henderson AKA the Butcher of Bahrain.”
"A British citizen whose very name conjures up images of appalling torture methods, he used torture to crush the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, and later the 1990s uprising in Bahrain. It is widely speculated that Henderson has orchestrated the crackdown in Bahrain."
Salami finally pointed to the Western double-standards, stressing that “The West blatantly pontificates about democracy in the Middle East and North Africa and shuts its ears to the excruciating cry for social justice in Bahrain.”
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