Don’t force us down the path of Egypt and rule by the military, Islamists in the Parliament and investors and tourists taking flight.

I don’t want to class fellow countrymen as Shi’i and Sunni. All should have equal opportunities. The growing sectarianism and extremism from both sides is alien to Bahrain. Many of my best friends are Shi’i, but committed to supporting our constitutional monarchy. The media is contributing to the sectarian divide every time it falls into the trap of describing the situation as Sunni against Shi’i.

Our government has made mistakes, but this doesn’t justify the opposition’s call for “Death to Al Khalifah”. There has been huge progress by the authorities over the last year; look at how the Bahraini security forces managed the 14 February 2012 protests with minimal force and no serious casualties, despite being attacked by Molotovs and makeshift weapons. The opposition has used abuses by the security forces to justify its own increasingly violent tactics. This is hypocrisy.

On the 14 February anniversary, many of us breathed a sigh of relief; the protests hadn’t been particularly well attended, they hadn’t achieved their aims of reaching the Pearl Roundabout, and the police performed impressively well in managing these events, without giving the opposition any excuse to talk about repression, injustice and martyrs.

The poster boy for the 14 February demos was very much Nabeel Rajab. It was him who was photographed and quoted my most of the international newspapers and he who had spectacularly declared that he’d drag his young daughter and wife off to the Pearl – apparently in the hope of them all getting assaulted and locked up and thus providing the opposition with further material to grease their propaganda machine with. We can be grateful that our security forces showed restraint in refraining from granting Rajab’s wish.