Can you blame British Airways stopping flying to Saudi? Heck, from what I’ve heard around me, even us locals think twice about going to Riyadh or Jeddah now with all those bullets and hand-grenades flying out at a moment’s notice.
The body count since that terror attack in Riyadh stands today at 16 suspects killed together with 11 policemen. What ratio is that? For every policeman killed, they get 1.4 “bad guys”. This tells me that the Saudi police are anything but prepared to deal with the situation and they must be getting pretty frustrated by now… and what happens when you’re frustrated? Hit out at anything that moves!
I’m not going to be a target practice object thank you very much.
Come to think of it, none of the Arab police – yes I mean countries from Morocco through to Bahrain and that encompasses all the Arab countries – are equipped to deal with this phenomenon. They’re more equipped and trained to support whatever regime they happen to fall under. They are the real terrorists, the instruments of torture and suppression.
Here’s what Thomas Friedman has to say about the mentality of the police in Iraq, again, replace Iraq with any Arab country you want:
We sat in on a class where a U.S. police trainer and his translator were going through the basics of how to start an interrogation. The Iraqi policemen, who four months ago thought removing a suspect’s fingernails was how to start an interrogation, dutifully took notes in their U.S.-provided notebooks.
If we are to go forward and become part of the world we have to do something about this. Parents all over the Arab world still terrorise their children by telling them something like “if you don’t behave I’ll call the police” and of course that threat means that if they come they’ll beat the shit out of you! And this behaviour (of the police) is taken for granted.
I guess you got the idea by now that we (Arabs) don’t trust the police. We never will unless there is a concerted effort at re-training them, getting them to respect human rights, getting it through their thick skulls that they are servants of the people to protect them, look after their lives and property rather than bludgeoning to death anyone with a dissenting voice.
You want another example that we just don’t trust “our guardians”? Three days ago a thief broke into a house [arabic] in Bahrain wanting to steal a car, the car alarm sounded which alerted the occupants (a father and four sons) they all woke up, chased the thief, beat the shit out of him, stripped him of all his clothes and chased him off down the street!
When asked by the press why they didn’t just apprehend the thief and call the police, they said: “What are the police going to do?”
I rest my case.
