Informed Comment

5. Dear right wing blogosphere and also Bill Maher: You can’t generalize about women’s position in Muslim countries based on a reprehensible mob attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan. Generalizing about a whole group of people based on a single incident is called “bigotry.” It is also a logical fallacy (for wingnuts challenged by six syllables in a row, that means, ‘when your brain doesn’t work right’) known as the ‘Hasty Generalization.’ Nobody seems to note that allegedly helpless Egyptian women were the ones who saved Logan, or that Anderson Cooper was also attacked.

Some other examples of reporters or celebrities being assaulted by crowds are here and here. Wingnuts, and also Bill Maher, who do not immediately make generalizations on these bases about large groups of Westerners are wusses.

Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.

4. That the unrest in Bahrain is significantly caused by Iran is false. It is an indigenous protest of Arab Shiites who are treated like second class citizens in their own country. On Saturday night,
the protesting crowds camped out in Pearl Square downtown, as their leaders consulted in preparation for talks with the government. Wikileaks cables show that the US government consistently discounted fear-mongering about Iran by the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain.

3. Yusuf Qaradawi, the 84-year-old preacher whose roots are in the old Muslim Brotherhood before the latter turned to parliamentary politics, is nevertheless no Ayatollah Khomeini. Qaradawi addressed thousands in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday. Qaradawi called for Muslims to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda alongside US troops in 2001. On Friday he praised the Coptic Christian role in the Egyptian revolution and said that the age of sectarianism is dead. Qaradawi is a reactionary on many issues, but he is not a radical and there is no reason to think that either the Youth or Workers’ Movements that chased Hosni Mubarak out of the country is interested in having Qaradawi tell them what to do.

2. Looking to the Tunisian and Egyptian futures, it is not true, as dreary anti-Muslim Israeli propagandist Barry Rubin alleged, that Muslim fundamentalist parties always win free and fair elections in Muslim-majority countries. This frankly stupid allegation is disproved by the Pakistan elections of 2008, the Albanian elections of 2009, the Kurdistan elections in post-2003 Iraq, and all of the Indonesian elections.

1. Despite the importance of Facebook and Twitter as communication and networking tools, Labor unions and factory workers have been more important in the Arab uprisings than social media. In Libya, the regime’s attack on internet service did not forestall a major uprising on Saturday in Benghazi, which the regime met with deadly force.

AP reviews Saturday’s rallies throughout the region:

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Breaking News: Bahrain security forces appear to have run out of ammunition at the downtown Pearl Roundabout, as thousands of Shiite protesters flooded in Saturday morning. The demonstrators took the square and a festive mood settled in. The Wifaq Party, which had represented the majority Shiites in parliament until its members resigned en masse on Thursday, had announced that it would not enter talks with the Sunni monarchy as long as police were attacking peaceful protesters.

In Bahrain, Friday began with funerals for three protesters killed by security police during earlier demonstrations. The funerals turned into protest rallies. Some 50,000 Bahrainis took part, about 10% of the population.

Shiite Friday prayers sermons were full of calls for ‘ a real constitutional monarchy’ or even for the overthrow of the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy.

Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qasim said in his Friday Prayers sermon at the Diraz Mosque that Thursday’s massacre at the Pearl Roundabout was “a premeditated massacre intended to kill and shed blood, not simply to disperse the crowd.” He wondered, “Why this despotic killing?” The congregation began chanting “Bahrain, Free, Free!” and “Sunnis and Shiites are Brethren– We will not sell out our Country!” Sheikh Isa replied, “We will not accept this humiliation!” again and again. He said that the Bahrain government was now the chief threat to the security of Bahrain citizens. He added that the world needed to shoulder the responsibility of rescuing the Bahraini people. He called on Bahrainis to cling steadfastly to national unity, saying, “Do not kill yourselves with sectarianism.”

In contrast, at the Grand Mosque, Sunni Bahrainis and Sunni Pakistanis and Indian Muslims showed support for the embattled king. Although Shiites are 70 percent of the citizen population, over half of Bahrain’s 1.2 million residents are expatriate guest workers, and most of them are Sunni Muslim.

Then in late afternoon, a small crowd walked toward the Pearl Roundabout downtown, from which protesters had been driven by force on Thursday morning. As they approached, security forces opened fire on them, killing one and wounding another 50 or so. The local hospital was overwhelmed with arrivals.

ABC has video

On Friday evening, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa called for calm and a dialogue between the government and the demonstrators. The erratic behavior of the Bahrain government, with its oscillations between calls for talks by the king and his son and brutal repression by the security forces caused long time Gulf watcher Gary Sick to wonder if there is a split between the palace and the officer corps, with the latter far more militant and more than a little insubordinate. Me, I think the palace is probably both calling for dialogue and ordering that troops fire into the crowds of protesters.

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Members of parliament from the Shiite Wifaq Party, which had 18 of 40 seats in the lower house of the Bahrain legislature, have resigned en masse from their positions. They were objecting thereby to the deaths so far of 5 protesters and the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators early on Thursday morning by government security forces.

Streets were empty late Thursday in Manama, in the wake of the clearing of the downtown Pearl roundabout of demonstrators by security police, who took down their tents.

Euronews in Arabic reports that the Bahrain army stationed tanks in downtown Manama and then announced a ‘Communique No. 1′ in which they pledged (or threatened) to use decisive force to establish ‘order’ in the country (i.e. no more big demonstrations will be tolerated).

In the meantime, physicians and nurses demonstrated at having been prevented from treating in the field the hundreds of injured after the crackdown on Thursday morning.

Friday morning, a small group of 200 mourners came out for the funeral in a village of protesters killed by security police on Thursday. They chanted slogans calling for the overthrow of the Sunni monarchy.

Both the withdrawal of Wifaq from the government and the turn of chanting to anti-monarchy slogans are very bad signs for national cohesion. The Shiites of Bahrain, about 70% of the citizen population, have now largely withdrawn from the body politic, remaining only as disenfranchised and sullen subjects of a monarchy many can no longer abide. Many Shiites are saying that the government, by attacking peaceful protesters, has lost all credibility.

Aljazeera English has video on Thursday’s violent crackdown:

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Bahrain’s king, Hamad Al Khalifa, ordered troops and tanks into Pearl Square in downtown Manama in the early hours of Thursday morning. They fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and used batons to clear the hundreds of demonstrators who had decided to stay the night in the square, killing four protesters and injuring 95. About 50 tanks were reportedly on their way to the site on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, thousands of protesters had come out to mourn the second of two dissidents who had been killed by police repressing earlier demonstrations.

Aljazeera English covers what happened during the day on Wednesday:

Then the military decided to move in to crush the dissident forces.

Then Aljazeera English on Wednesday night delivered the bad news:

The differences between Bahrain on the one hand and Tunisia & Egypt on the other are legion. But the strong ethnic and sectarian divide between the minority Sunni king and the majority Shiite population is key here. The military that crushed the mostly Shiite protesters on Thursday morning is Sunni. The secret police are Sunni (and sometimes even expatriate Pakistanis & etc.) If the Shiites got what they wanted, i.e. more democracy and a weaker monarchy, then the interests of the Sunni ruling class would be profoundly endangered.

In Bahrain’s case, the interest of the Saudi state in backing the Sunni monarchy, and fear that the Shiites would favor Iran, complicates the story regionally. Saudi Arabia is very wealthy and very nearby (a causeway connects the main island of Bahrain to the Saudi mainland, across which Saudi expatriates come in, and act as a support for the king against his own Shiite population).

Tunisia and Egypt are much more unified populations, mostly Sunni and Arab. The military in neither place was afraid that if the strong man was overthrown, some alien ethno-sectarian group might take over that would imperil the prerogatives of the existing Establishment. Nor were there big regional geopolitical divides, though of course the far rightwing Likud government of Israel preferred that Mubarak remain as strong man. It was not powerful in Egypt, however, while Saudi Arabia is powerful in Bahrain.

Both Tunisia and Egypt were class-based movements, protests of the blue and white collar workers. While economic grievances are important in Bahrain, they are being reworked as sectarian grievances, since most of the rural and small-town poor are Shiites.

There is still no guarantee that the Sunni government will succeed in repressing the movement of the Shiite majority for more democracy in Bahrain, but determination to use force against protesters does raise the cost of activism significantly, and sometimes can tamp it down.

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