From Angry Arab's Bahrain correspondent: "One more thing I forgot to add. Three policemen were killed in the bombing. You heard about the Emirati. The other two were Yemeni and Pakistani and I'm pretty sure you haven't read anything about them. Now everyone is mourning the Emirati - the Bahraini regime just named a mosque after him and the UAE is going to (or already did?) name a street after him. But the question no one is asking is this - why is the Bahraini regime not talking about the Pakistani and the Yemeni? They have been no mosques erected in their names, no poems written, no emotional tributes to the two dead martyrs, no pictures of their families. The answer is simple. To the regime, they are nothing but hired guns. Their lives are completely worthless. If they get killed, the regime will simply replace them with new mercenaries. They are worthless to the pro-government Bahrainis too. No one is talking about them. Ask yourself this - there have been policemen killed before. Why is this bombing the only one which everyone cares about?
Oh and another thing. Bahrain has basically turned into an apartheid state. The villages get hit every night with tear gas and there are mass arrests. Yet drive two minutes outside the villages (remember Bahrain is tiny) and life is continuing as usual. Of course there are checkpoints littered everywhere which cannot be avoided. I really wish I had a videotape of who exactly they were stopping at the checkpoints because it is so blatant. If someone is driving a BMW, Mercedes, Lexus or Audi (or some other luxury car), they wouldn't get stopped. If someone was driving a Toyota or Mazda or any other cheaper car, they would get stopped. However if the people in the car were women that were dressed up and wearing no hijab then there is a chance that they would not get stopped. If they were women but wearing the Bahraini style abaya (you know that black cloak that iraqi and Kuwaiti women wear also) then they would not get spared. The question is of course, what if you have a car that is not a luxury car but not really cheap either - like a volkswagon or a Nissan Altima? Well a friend of mine who has a Nissan answered that question for me - sometimes he would get stopped, sometimes he wouldn't, depending on who was with him in the car (women, men, how they are dressed etc), where he was (shia area or not) and how he was dressed."
Oh and another thing. Bahrain has basically turned into an apartheid state. The villages get hit every night with tear gas and there are mass arrests. Yet drive two minutes outside the villages (remember Bahrain is tiny) and life is continuing as usual. Of course there are checkpoints littered everywhere which cannot be avoided. I really wish I had a videotape of who exactly they were stopping at the checkpoints because it is so blatant. If someone is driving a BMW, Mercedes, Lexus or Audi (or some other luxury car), they wouldn't get stopped. If someone was driving a Toyota or Mazda or any other cheaper car, they would get stopped. However if the people in the car were women that were dressed up and wearing no hijab then there is a chance that they would not get stopped. If they were women but wearing the Bahraini style abaya (you know that black cloak that iraqi and Kuwaiti women wear also) then they would not get spared. The question is of course, what if you have a car that is not a luxury car but not really cheap either - like a volkswagon or a Nissan Altima? Well a friend of mine who has a Nissan answered that question for me - sometimes he would get stopped, sometimes he wouldn't, depending on who was with him in the car (women, men, how they are dressed etc), where he was (shia area or not) and how he was dressed."
