Aal-e Khalifa Atrocities Increase to Ensnare Athletes

By: Kayhan Int’l 

The oppression of the Bahraini people by the repressive Aal-e Khalifa minority regime has reached alarming proportions and despite denunciations by human rights groups the world over, the US and Britain (the self-styled defenders of democracy) are ominously silent, while the UN continues to turn a blind eye.
Out of a population of 568,000 Bahrainis, over 4,000 are languishing in jail as political prisoners, while several thousand have fled the tiny Persian Gulf island state and are living in exile.
The overwhelming majority of those remaining in their ancestral land live in a state of fear, not knowing when their citizenship will be revoked by the regime, which has imported some 700,000 people from various countries to use as workforce or as mercenaries to serve in the security forces for the merciless suppression of the original Bahrainis.
Recently, a group of six Bahraini men who returned from pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Iraq and Iran, were arrested on arrival at Manama airport, accused of having ties with Hashd ash-Sha’bi and the IRGC. They were sentenced to jail by a kangaroo court and deprived of their nationalities.
The ruler Sheikh Hamad, who since 2010 has been styling himself as ‘king’ is notorious for his enmity, not only towards the Shi’a Muslim majority but also towards Sunni Muslim activists who demand democracy and representative rule.
When the popular and peaceful uprising started in 2011 at the now demolished "Maidan al-Loulou” (Pearl Square) of the capital, Sheikh Hamad invited Saudi troops to brutally crush it, and ever since,the so-called security forces continue to desecrate and destroy mosques and hussainiyahs, burn sacred texts, including copies of the holy Qur’an, and trample upon religious symbols.
The ruler’s son, Nasser bin Hamad, who is notorious as the "torture prison” and has been personally involved in the atrocities against the hapless detainees, once shamelessly tweeted: "If it was up to me, I’d give them all life [in prison].”
As head of Bahrain’s Olympic Committee, he has created a special commission to "identify and punish more than 150 members of the sporting community” who took part in the 2011 protests alone.
He has also publicly called for "a wall to fall on protesters’ heads, even if they are athletes, saying Bahrain is an island and there is nowhere to escape.
An example of the brutalities against athletes is the case of Bahraini footballer Hakeem al-Araibi, who was recently arrested at the airport in Bangkok when he arrived from Australia with his wife, unaware of the fact that the Aal-e Khalifa regime had cabled his photos and passport particulars to the authorities in Thailand by accusing him of criminal activities and demanding his extradition.
It was a shocking sight for sportsmen and sports lovers throughout the world to see the 26-year old al-Araibi being dragged to the prison barefoot in chains like a criminal.
Thanks to the protests by human rights activists all over the world, the Thai government had to release him and allow him to return to Australia where he currently resides and plays for a Melbourne club.
Meanwhile, to whitewash its criminal record and to fool the world, the regime as usual is giving extensive coverage to the holding of the so-called Formula One Bahrain Grand Prix, which the majority of citizens of the tiny Persian Gulf island state oppose, and have taken to the social media to express their disgust.
This has made the regime intensify its policy of state terrorism, whose latest victim is the young female activist, Najah Yusuf, who has been jailed and subjected to torture and abuse.
As a result, human rights groups in the West are calling on Formula One to cancel the event.
The Aal-e Khalifa regime thinks that its hosting of the US 5th Fleet in Manama, along with its subservient ties to its former colonial master, Britain, will prolong its precarious survival and safeguard it from the wrath of the people.
Its trust is misplaced, and the moment the Americans and the British realize that the regime is a liability to their vested interests, they will dump it in the dustbin of history, provided they find a secular democratic alternative – of course, not the popular government of Bahrain’s long suppressed majority, which is anathema to the imperialists and the Zionists.

Bani Saud and Bani Israel

By Zafar Bangash

Two alien regimes, in occupation of holy lands, are forced by circumstances to declare their unholy alliance. Two regimes in the world claim legitimacy on the basis of religion: Bani Saud (aka Saudi Arabia) and Bani Israel (otherwise known as Israel). That neither claim is valid is amply demonstrated by their anti-human practices. Bani Saud follow a rigid literalist interpretation of Islam (for the cameras) that the vast majority of Muslims in the world categorically reject. The Zionist State of Israel claims to be “Jewish” but even most Jewish people do not accept this ludicrous claim. There are other similarities between them leading some to speculate that Bani Saud are in fact descendants of the Jews. In the absence of clear proof we will refrain from indulging in such talk. Bani Saud have illegally occupied the holy land of the Arabian Peninsula including the Hijaz while the Zionists occupy the holy land of Palestine. They are both alien invaders in the lands they occupy. Bani Saud are Bedouins from Najd whose trademark is mass slaughter and the destruction of holy sites in Makkah and Madinah. Bani Israel have no roots in Palestine. The vast majority came as colonizing occupiers from Europe — East and West — and North America and pushed the indigenous population from their lands at gunpoint.

The other common factor between them is their total dependence on the US. True, there are major differences as well. The Americans treat Bani Saud as a cash cow while the wily Zionists pilfer money from the US. They would not survive without such US handouts. No American president can say no to them because the Zionists have a stranglehold on the US political, economic, and mass communications systems. While Bani Saud and Bani Israel do not have formal diplomatic relations, this has not prevented them from hugging and kissing each other, even in public. Both are mortal enemies of Islam and fear the Islamic movement because they are aware that only committed Muslims are capable of consigning them to the dustbin of history where they rightly belong. Two developments among others have brought them into an even tighter embrace and forced them to discard their coyness about each other. One is the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 that led to the establishment of the first Islamic state in contemporary history. The other is the impact of this revolution on regional developments whether relating to the emergence of Hizbullah in Lebanon, Tehran’s principled support for the Palestinian struggle, or adherence to its agreement with the Syrian government to prevent its collapse through an international conspiracy.

While these developments have caused panic among the imperialists, they have also exposed the true nature of Bani Saud and their kissing cousins, the Zionists. Bani Saud stand exposed as the enemies of Allah (swt), His Prophet (pbuh), and the committed Muslims while Bani Israel emerge as habitual troublemakers in the world. They deserve each other but their criminal conspiracies against committed Muslims not only expose them, they also bring the day closer when they will both disappear from the face of this earth. Injustice and oppression cannot last forever. They will both discover this sooner rather than later, insha’allah.






  -Zafar Bangash

Iran Confident of Islamic Ummah’s Victory Over Unholy Alliances

By: S. Nawabzadeh

The sanctities of Islam, irrespective of their geographical location and in whichever of the spurious time-bound political entities they may be situated at the moment, belong to the whole Ummah, which means the regimes that have usurped control over them, have no right either to desecrate these sites or place restrictions on the entry of Muslims into their sacred precincts. This was the gist of yesterday’s memorable message of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution on the threshold of the annual Hajj pilgrimage, concerning the three most sacred cities, that is, Mecca and Medina in Hijaz and Bayt al-Moqaddas in Palestine. Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei minced no words when he said in a clear tone: "The Masjid al-Haraam in Mecca that encloses the holy Ka’ba, the Qibla (focal point) of the daily five-times-a-day ritual prayers of Muslims all over the world, belongs to all Muslims, and so does Medina – the holy city housing the blessed shrine of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) – and not to those who dominate the land where these most sacred Islamic sites are situated… Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia creates problems for the Hajj pilgrims and prevents some Hajj rituals from being performed.”

He also said in the most unambiguous words regarding the quixotic US president, Donald Trump’s devilish plot to Judaize most of the Zionist usurped land of Palestine: "The Americans call their satanic policy on Palestine ‘the deal of the century’ but to their dismay, by Divine Grace, this will never materialize, and the city of Bayt al-Moqaddas, the first Qibla of Muslims, will forever be for Muslims and will always remain the centre of Palestine.” It is an undeniable fact that in 1925, with Britain’s backing, the desert brigand of Najd, Abdul-Aziz Aal-e Saud – a salaried servant of the British crown who had earlier occupied the eastern Persian Gulf coast of Arabia – seized the Land of Revelation Hijaz by shedding torrents of Muslim blood in the sacred precincts of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Red Sea port of Jeddah and the Shi’a Muslim-majority mountain resort of Ta’ef. As a reward for his blasphemous crimes against Islam and Muslims, the spurious entity called Saudi Arabia was created in 1932 for him by Britain, which sixteen years later in 1948 planted in Palestine the illegal Zionist entity called Israel – having illegally settled between the Two World Wars tens of thousands of east European Khazar Jews in this Muslim land. The plot was to keep under perpetual colonial control the holiest sites of Islam, and thus, with the setting of the sun on the British Empire, London handed over both Arabia and Palestine to its imperialist heirs, the Americans.

For those still in doubt about the Jewish origin of the Saudi clan, the divisions and destabilization caused in the Muslim world by the heretical Wahhabis, mostly through their creation of Takfiri terrorist outfits, and their open dalliance now with their Zionist cousins against the interests of Palestinians and the rest of the Ummah, ought to be sufficient proof of the devilish designs of the archenemies of Islam. The Leader of the Islamic Revolution in his Monday’s speech stressed Muslim unity for restoration of the dignity of the Ummah by pointing out that the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca is ample proof of the fact that there is no separation between religion and politics in Islam, or for that matter between the transient world and afterlife, as well as between spirituality and materialism. He cautioned the regime in Riyadh against meddling with the Hajj rituals and called for serious probe of the trampling to death in 2015 in the inviolable land of Mena of over 2,000 pilgrims including some 500 Iranians. Ayatollah Khamenei expressed regret: "Unfortunately, some Muslim states, due to their lack of belief in the essence of Islam – let alone the Palestinian cause – have turned into servants for the US and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the US. They will gain no benefits. By God’s grace, the Palestinian nation will gain victory over the enemies. The day will dawn when the Zionist entity is obliterated.” The Islamic Republic with its principled policies on Islamic affairs, as well as national, regional and international issues that include end of American hegemony throughout the region and a referendum under UN supervision to resolve once and for all the chronic question of the Zionist-usurped land of Palestine, has been target of the most intricate plots of the US, which following forty years of failure, has teamed up with the Zionist devils and the rootless, repressive, unrepresentative, reactionary Arab regimes, to try to browbeat Iran into submission.

With trust in God, with faith in its dedicated Muslims masses whose spectacular progress in all fields enables them to defend the interests of people throughout the neighbourhood, and with firm belief in the reappearance of Imam Mahdi (AS) for establishment of the global government of peace, prosperity and justice, Iran is confident of its grand victory over the Great Satan, the liberation of Palestine, and the rebuilding of the holy shrines in Hijaz – the Land of Revelation where only Islamic laws will prevail and not any heretical tendencies.