Homer Simpson over at Bahraini Blog has admitted that he is Sunni. More importantly he is worried where this country is going to taking into consideration the various recent sectarianally-motivated issues both in and out of parliament.
I am quite surprised that he feels that the issue of Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja and the more recent Batool Al-Sayed being evicted from Parliament are tainted with a sectarian paintbrush as well as far as people supporting/opposing these issues.
I have spoken to many people about both events who are both sunni and shi’a, and found that our views were similar if not completely in agreement. In Al-Khawajah’s case the views were that the government screwed up on the one hand and they also agreed with my evaluation that Al-Khawajah went overboard and didn’t do his issues any favours by directing his prayers to God for His Heavenly intervention. While in Batool’s case, there are no gray areas, journalists are the main way that people know what is happening in their societies and in this case what is happening in the Parliament and that by throwing her out, parliament has gone overboard by penalising the whole country for what it believes that Ms. Al-Sayed has overstepped journalistic boundaries and slandered one of its members or attributed inaccurate remarks to him. My contention is that the parliament should have taken the issue up judiciously rather than personally like it did.
These two events were never intimated to me as “sectarian” and that they are “shi’a only” etc. I have certainly never thought of them in such a light. Anyway, I guess I can understand where Homer is coming from.
It’s worth browsing the comments entered for this post to see the psyche unfold. I applaud Homer for candidly discussing this subject. The more we candidly talk about it, the closer our points of view will get and hopefully we will reach a point where both sides at least understand each other, rather than continue the trend of suspicion and conspiracy theories.
