its most ignominious form, former parliamentarian and the Leader
of Bahrain’s al-Wefaq Party, Sheikh Ali Salman, while still in prison
since 2015 on a 4-year dubious sentence on trumped up charges that
were acquitted on 18 June this year, has been handed a life sentence
by the kangaroo court of the repressive Aal-e Khalifa minority regime.
The news has shocked the Bahrainis and the free world, but there is
ominous silence in the western media.
No western leader, in spite of pretensions to human rights and democracy, has said anything against this gross violation of justice.
Without the least doubt, on the heels of the illegal US sanctions on
the Islamic Republic for Iran’s adherence to the letter and spirit of the
Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), and Saudi Arabia’s
macabre murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Turkey,
which have tarnished Washington’s image, the weird verdict against
the venerable religious leader of the Bahraini people by another
American client regime, has further exposed to the whole world the
ugly inhuman face of the Donald Trump Administration.
The White House is run by shameless hoodlums whose only goal is
to destabilize West Asia through unelected, unrepresentative, tyrannical, and terrorist minority regimes, which brutalize the people they
rule and poke their dirty noses in the affairs of other countries like
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen.
Bahrainis are groaning for long under the sandals of the Aal-e
Khalifa minority regime, yet the intrusive US which claims to respect
peace and security, continues to base its unwanted 5th Fleet in that
Persian Gulf island state.
Since 2011 Bahrain has seen the worst form of human rights abuses
by the ruling regime, including desecration of mosques and hussainiyahs, detention of peaceful protestors, kidnappings, imprisonment,
torture, murder, and revoking of citizenship of the sons of the soil who
have been living in Bahrain for long centuries, well before the Aal-e
Khalifa pirates of the Khor Abdullah waterway between Basra and
Iraq seized Bahrain at the turn of the 19th century with British help
at a time when Qajarid Iran was at one of its most weakest positions.
Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Director,
Heba Morayef has called for the immediate and unconditional release
of Sheikh Ali Salman and the quashing of his politically motivated
conviction and sentence.
This Egyptian lady, who is a well-known human rights activist, has
rightly said: "Sheikh Ali Salman is a prisoner of conscience who is
being held solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.”
She also denounced the international community’s silence on the
continued crackdown on peaceful protests and the ignoring of Bahrain’s human rights record.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said: "This
verdict will leave no room or any doubt in the public opinion and
the international community that the Bahraini government does not
intend to improve the situation, but it seeks to intensify its crackdown
and worsen the conditions.”
Sheikh Salman the 52-year-old secretary general of the dissolved
al-Wefaq National Islamic Society has been charged with alleged spying for neighbouring Qatar in order to overthrow the Aal-e Khalifa
regime.
It is an absurd claim rejected by both the government of Qatar and
the people of Bahrain, who, following the brutal crushing of their
demands for civil liberties since 2011, have become more committed
to the overthrowing of the Aal-e Khalifa regime.
They think that they can do it by themselves without any help for
any other country, despite the blind support of the regime by the US
and the West, given the intense hatred of the Aal-e Khalifas by the
Bahraini people, including the Sunni minority.