Middle East landscape rapidly changing

[mylestheslasher]

No matter who is in charge the country will still be full of savages like those mentioned above that raped the reporter.

Again no disagreement Myles

I suppose I got a little off track responding to Trout. My main point on my original post was that we have scum on our doorstep, yet in this case he labels Egypt as being a country full of savages on the back of of this story.

Lets move on

Wasn't disagreeing with you either skull, just putting my opinion on that out in the open for fear of being accused of supporting the rape/sexual assault of american women in arab countries.

[give her dixie]

Onced again, the US shows what side it is on in the middle east where it has effectivly given to green light to Israel to keep on ethnically cleansing Palestinian land and build more illegal settlements.
They sure know how to do their bit for peace and stability..........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/19/us-veto-israel-settlement

The Obama administration wielded its first veto at the UN security council last night in a move to swipe down a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.

The US stood alone among the 15 members of the security council in failing to condemn the resumption of settlement building that has caused a serious rift between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority and derailed attempts to kick-start the peace process. The Palestinians have made clear that they will not return to the negotiating table until Israel suspends settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The decision placed the US in a controversial position at a time when it is already struggling to define its strategy in a tumultuous Middle East.

The 14 member countries backing the Arab-drafted resolution included Britain and France.

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the decision to use the veto power – open to the five permanent members of the UN, of which the US is one – "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity".

She said Washington's view was that the Israeli settlements lacked legitimacy, but added: "Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations."

But the isolated stance of the Obama administration risked the appearance of weakness in its approach to the search for Middle East peace and set it on a contradictory course to its earlier tough language against the settlements.

The Palestinian observer at the UN, Riyad Mansour, said the veto was unfortunate. "We fear ... that the message sent today may be one that only encourages further Israeli intransigence and impunity," he said.

Washington's controversial move clearly riled other members of the security council. Britain, France and Germany put out a joint statement in which they explained they had voted for the resolution "because our views on settlements, including east Jerusalem, are clear: they are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace, and constitute a threat to a two-state solution. All settlement activity, including in east Jerusalem, should cease immediately."

William Hague said he understood Israeli concern for security, but said that was precisely why Britain had backed the resolution. "We believe that Israel's security and the realisation of the Palestinians' right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary, they are intimately intertwined objectives." The US has used its veto 10 times since 2000, nine of which involved backing the Israeli side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[give her dixie]

Some footage of the Bahrain state security forces opening fire on peaceful demonstrators.
This video is pretty horrific, so be warned...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwnUQcKXmMM&feature=player_embedded&skipcontrinter=1

[Groucho]

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the decision to use the veto power – open to the five permanent members of the UN, of which the US is one – "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity".

She said Washington's view was that the Israeli settlements lacked legitimacy, but added: "Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations."

The settlements are ILLEGAL under international law.....there can be no misunderstanding.

[mylestheslasher]

Some footage of the Bahrain state security forces opening fire on peaceful demonstrators.
This video is pretty horrific, so be warned...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwnUQcKXmMM&feature=player_embedded&skipcontrinter=1

Will this video make the news I wonder or is the brutality of our friendly dictators out of bounds for the "free" press??

[give her dixie]

Six years have passed since residents of Bil'in, together with their Israeli and international supporters, started regularly demonstrating against the Wall and the confiscation of more than half their land by it. It has been more than three years since the Israeli High Court ruled that the path of the Wall must be changed as soon as possible, and the people of Bil'in have waited long enough.

Hundreds have turned out to mark the sixth anniversary of Bil'in's struggle and have resisted an usually large group of Israeli Occupation Forces for several hours. In chants and slogans, protestors demanded an end to the military occupations, the dismantelling of illegal settlements and the Apartheid Wall,and called for Palestinian unity. IOF have attacked protestors with the "skunk", with sound grenades, rubber bullets, 0.21 life ammunition, and a heavy use of tear gas. Nonetheless, protestors stood in the invading army's way and managed to stop them from entering the village. At one point, activists stood together to resist the occupation's attempt to arrest villagers. At the end of the demonstration, however, one Israeli activist was arrested and accused of stone-throwing. Several protestors sustained injuries, including Hamza Burnat, who was shot at close range into his leg and abdomen with rubber bullets and life ammunition. Hamza is currently at the hospital awaiting surgery.

Click on the following link to see US taxpayers dollars at work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH9a_2BQIk

PS If you can, boycott CRH, as it is cement supplied by them which is been used to build this illegal wall. Quite embarrassing for an Irish company to be involved in such an inhumane and illegal wall.

[give her dixie]

Some footage of the Bahrain state security forces opening fire on peaceful demonstrators.
This video is pretty horrific, so be warned...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwnUQcKXmMM&feature=player_embedded&skipcontrinter=1

Will this video make the news I wonder or is the brutality of our friendly dictators out of bounds for the "free" press??

Somehow I doubt if we will see this video on the mainstream press. While watching this video I thought of Bloddy Sunday in Derry all those years ago.
I'm sure if video phones were available back then, this would have been the images we would have seen of the 14 men getting murdered.

[give her dixie]

There was growing anger last night over the enmeshed relationship between authoritarian Gulf governments and the British military and police after weeks of democracy protests across the Arab world that met with violent state repression.


As demonstrators in Bahrain and Libya attended funerals and faced armed soldiers yesterday, campaign groups called on the Government to re-evaluate whether Britain should be so heavily involved in the training of Arab police and the military.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-britain-taught-arab-police-forces-all-they-know-2219270.html

In the past two years, British police have helped to train their counterparts in Bahrain, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia through schemes run by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), which organises overseas training. At present, there are three full-time advisers working with the Bahraini police, which was heavily implicated in the violent crackdown on protests in Manama this week.


Since the warming of relations between Libya and Britain, officers travelled frequently to Tripoli between 2008 and 2009 to train police, and Britain has authorised the export of tear gas, crowd-control ammunition, small-arms ammunition and door-breaching projectile launchers.

Three years ago, ministers agreed to send Libya vehicles armed with water cannons. There are also unconfirmed reports that riot vans made by British companies have been present during crackdowns in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where scores have been killed.

And there is the long-standing connection between the UK military and Arab regimes that send scores of officers through training at Sandhurst. Five Arab heads of state are Sandhurst alumni, including the King of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifa, who ordered the violent crackdown.

Other Arab rulers who have been through officer training in Britain include King Abdullah of Jordan, the Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Salim Al Sabah, the Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said al Said, and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Tom Porteous, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, urged a government review of such close links after the attacks on peaceful protesters in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain.

"It is a real concern and highly symbolic of the cosy and powerful relationship that countries like the UK and the USA have had for many years with these deeply repressive regimes," he said. "The British Government often states that it insists on incorporating human rights elements in its overseas training programmes but when it comes to dealing with protesters, we have seen over the past few weeks how the security forces in many of these countries are unleashed in a particularly brutal way."

An NPIA spokesman said British police have helped to train the Bahrainis in "effective search techniques, tackling cyber-crime, dealing with forensics and evidence gathering", adding "respect for human rights and diversity underpins all NPIA's training and support for overseas police forces".

The MoD said last night that the British military has long-standing "mutually beneficent training programmes" with a host of Middle Eastern countries, adding that the military was still trying to draw up a list of how many officers are involved in training abroad, but declined to comment further.

But Saeed al-Shehabi, a London-based dissident who runs the Bahrain Freedom Movement, said: "The regime in Bahrain has proven that it has no humanity, no respect for human rights or international conventions. British arms are being used for internal repression of peaceful protests. Why is the British Government letting this happen?"

[give her dixie]

Robert Fisk in Bahrain: 'They didn't run away. They faced the bullets head-on'

"Massacre – it's a massacre," the doctors were shouting. Three dead. Four dead. One man was carried past me on a stretcher in the emergency room, blood spurting on to the floor from a massive bullet wound in his thigh.


A few feet away, six nurses were fighting for the life of a pale-faced, bearded man with blood oozing out of his chest. "I have to take him to theatre now," a doctor screamed. "There is no time – he's dying!"

Others were closer to death. One poor youth – 18, 19 years old, perhaps – had a terrible head wound, a bullet hole in the leg and a bloody mess on his chest. The doctor beside him turned to me weeping, tears splashing on to his blood-stained gown. "He has a fragmented bullet in his brain and I can't get the bits out, and the bones on the left side of his head are completely smashed. His arteries are all broken. I just can't help him." Blood was cascading on to the floor. It was pitiful, outrageous, shameful. These were not armed men but mourners returning from a funeral, Shia Muslims of course, shot down by their own Bahraini army yesterday afternoon.

A medical orderly was returning with thousands of other men and women from the funeral at Daih of one of the demonstrators killed at Pearl Square in the early hours of Thursday.

"We decided to walk to the hospital because we knew there was a demonstration. Some of us were carrying tree branches as a token of peace which we wanted to give to the soldiers near the square, and we were shouting 'peace, peace. There was no provocation – nothing against the government. Then suddenly the soldiers started shooting. One was firing a machine gun from the top of a personnel carrier. There were police but they just left as the soldiers shot at us. But you know, the people in Bahrain have changed. They didn't want to run away. They faced the bullets with their bodies."

The demonstration at the hospital had already drawn thousands of Shia protesters – including hundreds of doctors and nurses from all over Manama, still in their white gowns – to demand the resignation of the Bahraini Minister of Health, Faisal Mohamed al-Homor, for refusing to allow ambulances to fetch the dead and injured from Thursday morning's police attack on the Pearl Square demonstrators.

But their fury turned to near-hysteria when the first wounded were brought in yesterday. Up to 100 doctors crowded into the emergency rooms, shouting and cursing their King and their government as paramedics fought to push trolleys loaded with the latest victims through screaming crowds. One man had a thick wad of bandages stuffed into his chest but blood was already staining his torso, dripping off the trolley. "He has a live round in his chest – and now there is air and blood in his lungs," the nurse beside him told me. "I think he is going." Thus did the anger of Bahrain's army – and, I suppose, the anger of the al-Khalifa family, the King included – reach the Sulmaniya medical centre.

The staff felt that they too were victims. And they were right. Five ambulances sent to the street – yesterday's victims were shot down opposite a fire station close to Pearl Square – were stopped by the army. Moments later, the hospital discovered that all their mobile phones had been switched off. Inside the hospital was a doctor, Sadeq al-Aberi, who was himself badly hurt by the police when he went to help the wounded on Thursday morning.

Rumours burned like petrol in Bahrain yesterday and many medical staff were insisting that up to 60 corpses had been taken from Pearl Square on Thursday morning and that police were seen by crowds loading bodies into three refrigerated trucks. One man showed me a mobile phone snapshot in which the three trucks could be seen clearly, parked behind several army armoured personnel carriers. According to other demonstrators, the vehicles, which bore Saudi registration plates, were later seen on the highway to Saudi Arabia. It is easy to dismiss such ghoulish stories, but I found one man – another male nurse at the hospital who works under the umbrella of the United Nations – who told me that an American colleague, he gave his name as "Jarrod", had videotaped the bodies being put into the trucks but was then arrested by the police and had not been seen since.

Why has the royal family of Bahrain allowed its soldiers to open fire at peaceful demonstrators? To turn on Bahraini civilians with live fire within 24 hours of the earlier killings seems like an act of lunacy.

But the heavy hand of Saudi Arabia may not be far away. The Saudis are fearful that the demonstrations in Manama and the towns of Bahrain will light equally provocative fires in the east of their kingdom, where a substantial Shia minority lives around Dhahran and other towns close to the Kuwaiti border. Their desire to see the Shia of Bahrain crushed as quickly as possible was made very clear at Thursday's Gulf summit here, with all the sheikhs and princes agreeing that there would be no Egyptian-style revolution in a kingdom which has a Shia majority of perhaps 70 per cent and a small Sunni minority which includes the royal family.

Yet Egypt's revolution is on everyone's lips in Bahrain. Outside the hospital, they were shouting: "The people want to topple the minister," a slight variation of the chant of the Egyptians who got rid of Mubarak, "The people want to topple the government."

And many in the crowd said – as the Egyptians said – that they had lost their fear of the authorities, of the police and army.

The policemen and soldiers for whom they now express such disgust were all too evident on the streets of Manama yesterday, watching sullenly from midnight-blue armoured vehicles or perched on American-made tanks. There appeared to be no British weaponry in evidence – although these are early days and there was Russian-made armour alongside the M-60 tanks. In the past, small Shia uprisings were ruthlessly crushed in Bahrain with the help of a Jordanian torturer and a senior intelligence factotum who just happened to be a former British Special Branch officer.

And the stakes here are high. This is the first serious insurrection in the wealthy Gulf states – more dangerous to the Saudis than the Islamists who took over the centre of Mecca more than 30 years ago – and Bahrain's al-Khalifa family realise just how fraught the coming days will be for them. A source which has always proved reliable over many years told me that late on Wednesday night, a member of the al-Khalifa family – said to be the Crown Prince – held a series of telephone conversations with a prominent Shia cleric, the Wifaq Shia party leader, Ali Salman, who was camping in Pearl Square. The Prince apparently offered a series of reforms and government changes which he thought the cleric had approved. But the demonstrators stayed in the square. They demanded the dissolution of parliament. Then came the police.

In the early afternoon yesterday, around 3,000 people held a rally in support of the al-Khalifas and there was much waving of the national flag from the windows of cars. This may make the front pages of the Bahraini press today – but it won't end the Shia uprising. And last night's chaos at Manama's greatest hospital – the blood slopping off the wounded, the shouts for help from those on the stretchers, the doctors who had never before seen such gunshot wounds; one of them simply shook his head in disbelief when a woman went into a fit next to a man who was sheathed in blood – has only further embittered the Shia of this nation.

A doctor who gave his name as Hussein stopped me leaving the emergency room because he wanted to explain his anger. "The Israelis do this sort of thing to the Palestinians – but these are Arabs shooting at Arabs," he bellowed above the din of screams and shouts of fury. "This is the Bahraini government doing this to their own people. I was in Egypt two weeks ago, working at the Qasr el-Aini hospital – but things are much more fucked up here."

[give her dixie]

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the decision to use the veto power – open to the five permanent members of the UN, of which the US is one – "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity".

She said Washington's view was that the Israeli settlements lacked legitimacy, but added: "Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations."

The settlements are ILLEGAL under international law.....there can be no misunderstanding.

Groucho, a couple of months ago in an attempt to re start the so called peace process talks, the US offered Israel a $3billion aid package. (In addition to the $3 billion they already recieve annually).

The package included 20 new F35 killing machines, plus a guarantee that they would use their veto in the UN to block the Goldstone report on the slaughter in Gaza, and also block any attempts by the UN to find Israel guilty over the massacre onboard the Mavi Mamara in International waters which left 8 Turks and a US citizen dead.

To recieve this package, all Israel had to do was to stop their ILLEGAL building for 3 months. They refused the package, and kept on building. Now, what has the world come to whenever a nation is doing something illegal, and to ask them to stop for a few weeks, they are offered $3 billion? Is the punishment for illegal activity now a present?

As we have seen from this veto yesterday by the US, Israel and the US don't care about international law, and it is also clear as to who is running the US. The tail is certainly wagging the dog........

[All of a Sludden]

As we have seen from this veto yesterday by the US, Israel and the US don't care about international law, and it is also clear as to who is running the US. The tail is certainly wagging the dog........

GHD, I think you can be every bit as biased as the Americans and the Israelis but I have to agree with you on the quoted piece.

[Tyrones own]

No matter who is in charge the country will still be full of savages like those mentioned above that raped the reporter.

Again no disagreement Myles

I suppose I got a little off track responding to Trout. My main point on my original post was that we have scum on our doorstep, yet in this case he labels Egypt as being a country full of savages on the back of of this story.

Lets move on

Wasn't disagreeing with you either skull, just putting my opinion on that out in the open for fear of being accused of supporting the rape/sexual assault of american women in arab countries.

You mean South African right myles?..again if she were a muslim and had suffered such a brutal race based attack, you'd know exactly where she was from 

[give her dixie]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/19/libyan-protesters-gaddafi-suicide-army

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is confronting the most serious challenge to his 42-year rule as leader of Libya by unleashing his army on unarmed protesters.

Unlike the rulers of neighbouring Egypt, Gaddafi has refused to countenance the politics of disobedience, despite growing international condemnation, and the death toll of demonstrators nearing 100.

The pro-government Al-Zahf al-Akhdar newspaper warned that the government would "violently and thunderously respond" to the protests, and said those opposing the regime risked "suicide".

William Hague, the UK's foreign secretary, condemned the violence as "unacceptable and horrifying", even as the Libyan regime's special forces, backed by African mercenaries, launched a dawn attack on a protest camp in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

Britain is scrambling to extricate itself from its recently cosy relationship with Gaddafi, initiated by then prime minister Tony Blair in 2004. That rapprochement saw Libya open its doors to British oil companies in exchange for becoming a new ally in the "war on terror" while Britain sold Gaddafi arms.

Hague's outspoken comments came a day after the government revoked arms export licenses to both Bahrain and Libya for their use of deadly force against protesters calling for a change in the regime.

With internet services in Libya shut off for long periods, foreign journalists excluded and access already blocked to social networking sites, Gaddafi appeared determined to quell a revolt centred in the country's east, which has long suffered a policy of deliberate economic exclusion.

Libya has also jammed the signals of Al-Jazeera, the Arab broadcaster to the country. Reports from inside the country claimed pro-regime forces had deliberately aimed at protesters' heads.

That allegation appeared to be supported by shocking video footage smuggled out of the country which seems to show two unarmed protesters being shot in the head.

Hague said: "Governments must respond to legitimate aspirations of their people, rather than resort to the use of force, and must respect the right to peaceful protest.

"I condemn the violence in Libya, including reports of the use of heavy weapons fire and a unit of snipers against demonstrators. This is clearly unacceptable and horrifying.

"Media access has been severely restricted. The absence of TV cameras does not mean the attention of the world should not be focused on the actions of the Libyan government."

At least five cities in eastern Libya have seen protests and clashes in recent days. Special forces attempted to break up a protest camp that included lawyers and judges outside Benghazi's courthouse. "They fired tear gas on protesters in tents and cleared the areas after many fled carrying the dead and the injured," one protester said.

A mass funeral for 35 people who died on Friday came under fire from pro-government snipers who killed one person at the procession and injured a dozen more, according to sources in the city.

The shootings came amid credible reports of a round-up of government opponents who were taken from their homes in raids by security forces.

The crackdown has been led by the elite Khamis Brigade, led by Gaddafi's youngest son. Unconfirmed reports claim that force has been backed by African mercenaries brought into the country in five separate flights.

A video on the Libya 17th February website appeared to show an injured African mercenary who had captured by anti-government protesters.

Protests have so far been centred on Benghazi and the towns of Bayda, Ajdabiya, Zawiya, and Derna while Tripoli has remained so far calm but tense.The latest events in Libya have come against the background of continuing protests across the Middle East and North Africa.

In Bahrain, which has also seen attempts to put down pro-democracy protests with lethal force in recent days, anti-government protesters swarmed back to a symbolic square on Saturday, putting riot police to flight after the army was withdrawn.

A wave of protests has spread through the Middle East and North Africa after rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt toppled their long term leaders.

In Yemen today riot police shot dead a protester and injured five others after opening fire on thousands of marchers.

Meanwhile in Algeria police brandishing clubs broke a rally into isolated groups to keep protesters from marching.

[give her dixie]

I doubt if the war lord Tony Blair will speak out to loudly against Gaddafi, considering his close ties to his family..........

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1284132/Tony-Blair-special-adviser-dictator-Gaddafis-son.html

[give her dixie]

Robert Fisk: These are secular popular revolts – yet everyone is blaming religion

Sunday, 20 February 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-these-are-secular-popular-revolts-ndash-yet-everyone-is-blaming-religion-2220134.html

Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister hand – al-Qa'ida's hand, the Muslim Brotherhood's hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah's bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.

Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the "stable" dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West's hypocrisy that they didn't want America on their side. "The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers," an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. "Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side." At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. "We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks," a medical orderly told me on Friday. "And now Obama wants to be on our side?"

The events of the past two months and the spirit of anti-regime Arab insurrection – for dignity and justice, rather than any Islamic emirate – will remain in our history books for hundreds of years. And the failure of Islam's strictest adherents will be discussed for decades. There was a special piquancy to the latest footage from al-Qa'ida yesterday, recorded before the overthrow of Mubarak, that emphasised the need for Islam to triumph in Egypt; yet a week earlier the forces of secular, nationalist, honourable Egypt, Muslim and Christian men and women, had got rid of the old man without any help from Bin Laden Inc. Even weirder was the reaction from Iran, whose supreme leader convinced himself that the Egyptian people's success was a victory for Islam. It's a sobering thought that only al-Qa'ida and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators, believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of pro-democracy protesters.

The bloodiest irony of all – which dawned rather slowly on Obama – was that the Islamic Republic of Iran was praising the democrats of Egypt while threatening to execute its own democratic opposition leaders.

Not, then, a great week for "Islamicism". There's a catch, of course. Almost all the millions of Arab demonstrators who wish to shrug off the cloak of autocracy which – with our Western help – has smothered their lives in humiliation and fear are indeed Muslims. And Muslims – unlike the "Christian" West – have not lost their faith. Under the stones and coshes of Mubarak's police killers, they counter-attacked, shouting "Allah akbar" for this was indeed for them a "jihad" – not a religious war but a struggle for justice. "God is Great" and a demand for justice are entirely consistent. For the struggle against injustice is the very spirit of the Koran.

In Bahrain we have a special case. Here a Shia majority is ruled by a minority of pro-monarchy Sunni Muslims. Syria, by the way, may suffer from "Bahrainitis" for the same reason: a Sunni majority ruled by an Alawite (Shia) minority. Well, at least the West – in its sagging support for King Hamad of Bahrain – can point to the fact that Bahrain, like Kuwait, has a parliament. It's a sad old beast, existing from 1973 to 1975 when it was dissolved unconstitutionally, and then reinvented in 2001 as part of a package of "reforms". But the new parliament turned out to be even more unrepresentative than the first. Opposition politicians were harassed by state security, and parliamentary boundaries were gerrymandered, Ulster-style, to make sure that the minority Sunnis controlled it. In 2006 and 2010, for example, the main Shia party in Bahrain gained only 18 out of 40 seats. Indeed, there is a distinctly Northern Ireland feel to Sunni perspectives in Bahrain. Many have told me that they fear for their lives, that Shia mobs will burn their homes and kill them.

All this is set to change. Control of state power has to be legitimised to be effective, and the use of live fire to overwhelm peaceful protest was bound to end in Bahrain in a series of little Bloody Sundays. Once Arabs learnt to lose their fear, they could claim the civil rights that Catholics in Northern Ireland once demanded in the face of RUC brutality. In the end, the British had to destroy Unionist rule and bring the IRA into joint power with Protestants. The parallels are not exact and the Shias do not (yet) have a militia, although the Bahraini government has produced photographs of pistols and swords – hardly a major weapon of the IRA – to support their contention that its opponents include "terrorists".

In Bahrain there is, needless to say, a sectarian as much as a secular battle, something that the Crown Prince unwittingly acknowledged when he originally said that the security forces had to suppress protests to prevent sectarian violence. It's a view held all too savagely by Saudi Arabia, which has a strong interest in the suppression of dissent in Bahrain. The Shias of Saudi Arabia might get uppity if their co-religionists in Bahrain overwhelm the state. Then we'll really hear the leaders of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran crowing.

But these interconnected insurrections should not be seen in a simple ferment-in-the-Middle-East framework. The Yemeni uprising against President Saleh (32 years in power) is democratic but also tribal, and it won't be long before the opposition uses guns. Yemen is a heavily armed society, tribes with flags, nationalist-rampant. And then there is Libya.

Gaddafi is so odd, his Green Book theories – dispatched by Benghazi demonstrators last week when they pulled down a concrete version of this particular volume – so preposterous, his rule so cruel (and he's been running the place for 42 years) that he is an Ozymandias waiting to fall. His flirtation with Berlusconi – worse still, his cloying love affair with Tony Blair whose foreign secretary, Jack Straw, praised the Libyan lunatic's "statesmanship" – was never going to save him. Bedecked with more medals than General Eisenhower, desperate for a doctor to face-lift his sagging jowls, this wretched man is threatening "terrible" punishment against his own people for challenging his rule. Two things to remember about Libya: like Yemen, it's a tribal land; and when it turned against its Italian fascist overlords, it began a savage war of liberation whose brave leaders faced the hangman's noose with unbelievable courage. Just because Gaddafi is a nutter does not mean his people are fools.

So it's a sea-change in the Middle East's political, social, cultural world. It will create many tragedies, raise many hopes and shed far too much blood. Better perhaps to ignore all the analysts and the "think tanks" whose silly "experts" dominate the satellite channels. If Czechs could have their freedom, why not the Egyptians? If dictators can be overthrown in Europe – first the fascists, then the Communists – why not in the great Arab Muslim world? And – just for a moment – keep religion out of this.