17th Mar, 2013 –
After the 14 March weekend disturbances the opposition will probably be feeling that it failed. This was one of their prime dates for rioting and demonstrations – and not a single martyr!
Since day one of the uprising a major element of the opposition’s strategy has been to put vulnerable young people into highly confrontational situations – set the video cameras rolling – and hope somebody dies.
Around three of the handful of ‘martyrs’ over the past year were killed when tear-gas canisters struck them during clashes between rioters and police. Within minutes, images of the unfortunate youth would be circulating on the Internet, inciting more impressionable people to take to the streets against this ‘murderous regime’.
The speed of delivery of this material makes it obvious that eulogies to these ‘deceased heroes’ have often been written in advance, and the inflammatory language seems perfectly designed to escalate the situation and give rise to further casualties on both sides.
Putting forward your children for martyrdom
Many children have been coerced by their parents to wear bands around their heads with the word ‘martyr’ written on in Arabic. You can easily find examples of this on the Internet, showing the unhealthy and disturbing culture which is being promoted in these communities, where local leaders and families are actively preparing their children for death. Just imagine as an eight year-old child, your own parents dressing you up in a ‘martyr’ headband and telling you to go out and get yourself killed. So much for parental affection!
We can be very relieved that so much work has been put in to reforming the security services, so that – despite the fact that on any given weekend police are likely to be dealing with rioting in tens of locations simultaneously – the vast majority of these pass without serious casualties. Compare this with the grizzly death toll in Syria where each day several times more people are killed than the entire death toll from all sides (police, bystanders, expats, protesters and loyalists) after two years of unrest in Bahrain.
Regarding some of the most notorious incidents where rioters were killed in the early days of the unrest, police have been jailed and action is being taken against others – the security forces know very well that there can be serious consequences if their actions cause serious harm to rioters – even though they are being faced with deadly weapons like firebombs and iron rods. Several policemen have been murdered and hundreds have been seriously injured.
Mourning with Molotovs
Once the opposition propaganda machine has gone into overdrive, exploiting every possible drop of blood from these martyrs, the next stage is to turn each funeral into a major flashpoint; just as Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionaries exploited each funeral as a major point of mobilization prior to the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.
A quiet family funeral is not an option and families are often forced to hold this tragic event in a major public location for maximum disruption.
For example, there was a recent standoff for several days with the Interior Ministry when the opposition insisted on holding a funeral procession for one ‘martyr’ in Al-Daih – conveniently located in central Manama and in a completely different part of Bahrain from the family home.
It is obvious to everybody that the aim is maximum disruption, seeking to trigger a major flashpoint for confrontations with police and – God-willing – maybe another martyr or two.
After the post-March 14 unrest in 2012 the opposition kept one ‘martyr’ on ice for several weeks, so that they could bury him to maximum spectacle as the world’s media was arriving for the April Formula One Manama Grand Prix – a practice highly offensive to most Muslims who traditionally bury their dead immediately.
Iran TV fans the flames
There are no longer any natural deaths in unrest hotspots. If a 75 year-old lady dies quietly in her home, or someone dies in hospital of respiratory complications – they must be tear gas victims, and therefore can legitimately be added to Al-Wefaq’s highly inflated death-tolls and featured round the clock on Iranian propaganda TV channels like Al-Alam, Press TV and Mayadin. Particularly now the Government offers compensation for anyone adversely affected by the unrest.
We apologize for sounding highly cynical here, but for Bahrainis who have followed events closely from day one, we are sick to death of the calculated and callous manner in which the dead are exploited in an attempt to trigger more death, violence and chaos. The opposition exploits the emotions of young and impressionable people and seeks to turn 13 year-olds into weapons.
Travel to any rioting centre in Bahrain and you will see that those people building roadblocks, brandishing Molotovs, and manning the front line have an average age of around 12 years-old. This is not an empty claim – go and see for yourselves. And while you are there, look out for the bearded men standing back at a safe distance coordinating their foot-soldiers; the women running to-and-fro bringing milk crates of firebombs and rocks out to the barricades – and the inevitable man standing at a safe distance with a high-quality video camera, hoping for bloodshed.
Making the most out of martyrs
So the next time you see news of a new ‘martyr’ in Bahrain, look carefully for certain features:
1) Notice how within minutes the opposition has posted images and literature round the Internet (How do they afford such a slick media machine?); hours before the Interior Ministry posts any information about what really happened – usually too late to correct the 24-hour news media, which will long since have gone with the version of events promoted by the opposition.
2) Notice how Iranian state news outlets often broadcast news of ‘new martyrdoms’ even before they are announced by the opposition – just happening to gather their own exclusive TV footage from on the scene. Al-Alam TV will often broadcast false news stories of ‘martyrs’ that are so tenuous that even the mainstream opposition don’t announce them – for example, re-broadcasting news of the death of someone who died several weeks before, or highlighting someone as a ‘hero martyr’ who died of an epileptic fit, far from any unrest. We wouldn’t take these media outlets seriously, except that they are the staple diets of radicalized populations in these riot zones. Iran knows what it is doing when its media outlets spend more time talking about Bahrain than they do about all the other countries of the Arab world put together. This is just one way in which Iran seeks to incite revolution.
3) And then watch out for the funeral; always held in a major public centre. You have to feel sorry for the families when ‘mourners’ turn up with cartloads of molotovs and turn these tragic events into war zones. But the families have no say in the fate of what happens to their deceased loved-ones. The corpse becomes public property, to be paraded, exploited and photographed.
Regrettably, this is Bahrain in 2013. Although leading opposition groups say they want dialogue, they have lost none of their fevour for weekly rioting and violent confrontation.
The martyr machine rolls steadily forward.