The Revolution That Is Not Being Televised

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In the wake of King Hamad’s three month emergency declaration, today in Bahrain the king’s goons cleared the protesters out of Pearl Square and glimpses of their brutality were caught by amateur cameras.  Within a few feet of the riot police, a man who is crying out “peaceful - peaceful” is shot twice at point blank range.  What we are not seeing is the mayhem at hospitals that are surrounded by troops with soldiers roaming the wards shooting suspects getting treatment.

But unlike Tunisia and Egypt where the revolutions were televised, and both the media and social media played a crucial role and their success, the Bahraini uprisings will not be seen on Al Jazeera Arabic.  For the simple reason it’s too close to home and the rulers of Qatar, who own Al Jazeera, don’t like what is happening next door.

Neither do the Saudis who are behind the crackdown. The ailing Saudi king has been leaning on his Bahraini royal cousin to get tough from the beginning, and finally he sent troops in to give King Hamad some backbone.  Earlier, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had urged the king to compromise and meet some of the demands of his people, warning that baby steps towards reform will not be sufficient. 

All the while Bahraini state media and Saudi media have been stirring the sectarian pot by characterizing the protesters as heretics and agents of Iran.  This racist and demeaning characterizations of Shiites goes back to a seventh century split in Islam that makes the catholic/protestant split look positively gentlemanly.

Why do these reactionary rulers stoke the sectarian fires instead of ladelling out a little social justice?  Because they are medieval!  Like fawning royal watchers giddy over what Kate Middleton might wear at the royal wedding, we have treated the Gulf rulers like kings instead of crooks. 

The Al Saud family’s thousands of princes are embezzlers of gigantic proportions and the wealth of the top princes cannot be measured because they are state secrets.  But if their billions were revealed, the Forbes list would need some serious adjustment. 

And King Abdullah, who we obediently label as a reformer, is the same bloodthirsty tyrant who recently called Obama every day yelling at him to allow his friend Hosni Mubarak to mow down those ungrateful students in Tahir Square. 

Imagine what they do to their own students who challenge the monumental scam the Al Saud’s have going, where as absolute monarchs, the only avenue of political expression allowed is to petition the royals for mercy.  Having reduced their people to beggars, on top of that, they impose the Wahhabi religious police on them.

The regime’s witch hunters invade the most intimate recesses of their citizen’s lives to the point the men are sexually repressed to the breaking point, and the woman are either property or slaves-in-waiting.  They don’t have time to think of anything else, let alone rebellion

So as Ahmadinejad and his horrible regime across the Gulf lick their chops at the prospect of shredding the Saudi military paper tiger, we can only ponder how again we got it so wrong.  How could not have our whole political and economic arrangement in the Middle East resting on such a thin straw? 

But after having taken their bribes for decades, how can our leaders urge these barbaric potentates to ease up a bit on their people before they blow it all?  Apparently they are not listening and we are heady for the abyss. 

Greed and God are too great.  And we are so pathetically dependent on their oil that we have no excuse but to suck it up when the spigot is turned off.  The only good news is that the young educated Saudis hate the regime and it’s religious oppression. So if it does turn out like Egypt then we will be lucky.

If it does not, then the Iranian regime with be over the moon.  But then again we have been so good to them lately.  We got rid of their enemy the Taliban and then their arch-enemy Saddam.  And George W, Bush just handed them Iraq.  Giving them Saudi Arabia on top of that is truly icing on the cake.