Wednesday, September 14, 2011
@LindaWms60
"jokingly, i said, surely Bahrain is all beach.... Hmm....beginning to wonder if you have ever been to Bahrain my dear. You seem to know soo little about the place you write soo much about! I invite you to actually take a trip to Bahrain and judge for yourself rather than relying on the slanderous tweets ur soo keen on reading and repeating. there are thousands upon thousands who love Bahrain the way it is and in reflection only a small number who dont and many of them are just like you, they dont even live in Bahrain! and i bet this wont be seen on your comments page either
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Bahrain - One Voice
It’s been a difficult few months in Bahrain, that’s true, but we have dealt with it and have now overcome the worst of it. It’s been a learning curve for many of us as we observed the changes taking place in ourselves, our friends and the country many of us expats call home. We gained local knowledge, we discussed local politics and we verbalized our views and thoughts more freely than we have ever done before. And when it came to showing our support at the rallies we were there also, standing alongside the local community and we felt welcomed.
However, as we struggled to understand the complexities of the riots taking place in Bahrain we were more baffled by the complete and utter disaster taking place with the international media. Amazed at BBC’s coverage, appalled by Sky News, disgusted by CCN’s reporting and repulsed by Al Jazeera’s accounts of the past riots to mention a few, and best you don’t get me started on the world newspapers. The internet, love it or hate it, became a battle ground for the war of the words. It was incredible how quickly cyberspace became a catalyst for hatred. Videos were uploaded, blogs were inflaming, tweets were blasphemous, facebook must have seen new pages and causes being established at an incredible speed until in the end not only were we fighting civil unrest but we were actually having a harder time combating this thing called virtual reality.
The opposition was ahead of the media game from the start, their attack on Bahrain had been well planned, well-orchestrated and well -funded by Iranian insurgents. They knew their plan and they paid well. They brought in journalists who were remunerated for their one sided accounts and threatened those who refused to print lies. They uploaded amateur videos of poorly staged incidents between them and the police, videos on Youtube that spread like wild fire throughout the world and that were used on news broadcasts. To the outsiders it looked like complete and utter mayhem, mass slaughter and massacre by the Bahraini police. How could we counterattack such images, how could we come back from media hell?
It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t supposed to be. If something is worth fighting for then it is never going to be an easy match. But we started slowly and from one blog to another, from one tweet to the next and from one voice to the other we did counterattack the inaccuracies that had been said against us and eventually we were heard, but more importantly believed, by the entire world.
The internet is loaded with stage-managed videos, with well thought out slanderous interviews, and there are some pieces that actually tell the truth. But with so much choice it’s sometimes hard to tell which ones are genuine and which ones are outright lies. Unless of course you come across the videos where you do actually see the car running over the police man numerous times, where the thugs are throwing stones, Molotov cocktails and yielding knives, or the ones of Salmaniya hospital being hijacked and used as their control center or of the uprising in Bahrain University. And if you are lucky maybe you will find the videos of Bahrainis crying out for the love of their King and their country.
For those of us who have lived through the hell of the past few months and watched our sunny Bahrain become a shadow of itself, let it be our time to rise up and tell the truth of what really happened here in Bahrain. We have finally found our voices, united we stand like never before, and never has there been a more crucial time in our lives when we have needed to use those voices. Bahrain WAS attacked, it WAS tortured but its stronger now than it has ever been, and let that be a warning to self-centred idiots who still think they can change it into Iran. NO WAY!
Monday, September 12, 2011
Nuclear - such a dirty word
September 11th marked the 6th month anniversary of the Japanese Fukushima Nuclear power plant disaster. For a few days the world’s media had gone wild in Japan with reports and films of overwhelming proportion being shown, as we learned that over 20,000 people were either killed or missing. The country had been devastated by 3 massive disasters, 9.0 earthquake, a Tsunami that engulfed anything in its path along 375 mile coast and then the most horrific Fukushima nuclear disaster.
At first I was glued to the tv watching in horror but not for long, the faces of those beautiful people filled me with a sense of complete helplessness. Those near the nuclear disaster now had a future of unknown torment. Their crops would have been contaminated, their water source destroyed and their homes were no longer safe. It really was a colossal tragedy.
To add insult to injury Japan’s new trade minister, of only 8 days, Yoshio Hachiro made a series of remarks regarding contamination of his clothes, last week, as he visited the area, and which, needless to say, resulted in his immediate resignation.
But despite Fukushima disaster there are still plans to build more power plants along the insubstantial coastline of Japan. Many Japanese communities are in uproar over this decision and will fight, as best they can, to prevent it going ahead.
Today in Foreign Policy I read that Iran’s Nuclear power plant is ready to go online, the Middle East's only commercial nuclear power plant. The US aren’t happy, Israel isn’t happy and neither are most of the Middle East. But Iran doesn’t care about them, they have the power (now nuclear) to turn themselves into a very commanding and controlling force to be reckoned with, and if neighbouring countries ever thought they had concerns about Iran, well they certainly have a whole lot of worrying to do now.
In a TV interview former Vice President Dick Cheney tells Newsmax TV that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if necessary to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon. Now I am beginning to wonder if the USA will also take a stand alongside Israel to help prevent the production of nuclear weapons, many would hope they would. And the Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE and Kuwait sit and wait patiently for the first atomic bomb to land on their doorsteps.
The debate on whether nuclear power is safe or not is ever ongoing. World Nuclear Association and IAEA say that the power is sustainable and reduces carbon emissions, but parties like Greenpeace International and NIRS believe it poses a threat to people and the environment, and unfortunately we have seen examples of the latter too many times. In 1979 The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster of Pennsylvania USA, 1986 Chernobyl of Ukraine, 2011 in Fukushima, Japan and today an explosion at the Southern France plant which treats nuclear waste. They say no leaks were evident, but they could tell you anything and besides I believe they said the same thing about Fukushima.
The evidence of human turmoil after a nuclear disaster is overwhelming and Germany, who ironically was contracted to build two 1,200-megawatt reactors in Bushehr, with a contract of $4.3 billion, has now decided to close all of its reactors by 2022. Italy too has now banned all nuclear power on the strength of the recent Fukushima humanitarian tragedy.
40 years ago this week a phone call about dead sea otters washing up on the shores of Alaska after US nuclear tests lead to the birth of environmental organization Greenpeace. Irving Stowe and his wife, Dorothy, were so outraged by the news that they launched a petition from their home in Vancouver, on the Canadian west coast, and set up a group called "Don't Make A Wave” now known as Greenpeace. Today its international headquarters is in Amsterdam, it has offices in dozens of countries, and even its Canadian headquarters is now in Toronto. It plays a vital role in our awareness of our environment and the fact that tests, of all sorts, take place all the time without the public’s knowledge. Governments don’t particularly like Greenpeace, which tells me they are doing a fantastic job of highlighting their sordid governmental secrets.
With all this Nuclear power comes the seldom talked about problem of containing all the waste. It derives from the use of uranium which is mined from the ground, but once put into production releases chemicals which can remain toxic to living organisms for thousands sometimes even millions of years. So you have to ask yourself is it morally acceptable to be producing poisons that will keep intoxicating the environment or that can be used in a more threatening form like bombs and also is it ethically correct to have already witnessed the Fukushima disaster and the nuclear waste station catastrophe of today in France, and others, and yet still continue to build and use Nuclear power plants. I know where I stand on this subject, do you? And to be honest it seems also that the UN knows its answer too as an “action plan” in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster and growing suspicions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, will dominate a meeting of the U.N. atomic watchdog this week.
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