A British MP who recently went on two trips to Bahrain paid for by the repressive Gulf kingdom's rulers is due to return the favour next week by hosting a reception in the House of Commons "celebrating" 200 years of Bahraini-British relations.
Last October, Bahrain's foreign ministry...
Blog archive: Bahrain
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9th July 2016
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29th June 2016The dissemination of hate speech on Twitter is an obvious cause for concern. Until recently it seems to have relied mainly on the efforts of bigoted individuals and – although there is a lot of it – the need for manual posting has set some limits on how many offensive tweets there might be. But...
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23rd June 2016A few months ago I began to feel that something odd was happening whenever I posted a tweet about Bahrain. My tweets, usually critical of Bahrain's government, rapidly disappeared from view – pushed down the #bahrain live Twitter feed by lots of newer tweets, mostly supporting the Bahraini...
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22nd June 2016Twitter announced yesterday that it has suspended hundreds of apparently fake accounts that have been posting sectarian tweets directed against Shia Muslims. Marc Owen Jones, who lectures in Gulf politics at Tübingen University in Germany, began investigating when he noticed a series of...
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16th May 2016Today Queen Elizabeth will deliver her annual speech to the British parliament setting out the government's programme for the next 12 months. High on the list of proposals is a renewed effort to combat "extremism", and one idea is to establish a register of "extremists" – similar to the...
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4th April 2016The headline on the story Gulf News published and then removed A headline on the Emirati website, Gulf News, caught my eye yesterday. It said: "British House of Commons praises human rights in UAE". Reading the story below the headline it became clear that the "praise" – if that...
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20th March 2016One year ago this month, an event occurred in Bahrain which – to quote Gulf News – "shook the nation to the core". A secondary-school student and two teachers were arrested and Bahrain's parliament established a special committee to investigate the matter. Its official title was the "Committee...
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27th February 2016There are smart dictators and foolish dictators. The smart ones stay out of the limelight and don't make waves internationally. The rest of the world then lets them get on with their dictating and doesn't usually interfere. The foolish ones, not content with having a country to run more or less...
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21st February 2016Perhaps it's a sense of their own insecurity that makes Bahrain's royals so eager to "win" obscure and meaningless awards which can then be trumpeted in the Gulf kingdom's media. There was a notorious occasion in 2013 when King Hamad, in the midst of ongoing repression, was named "...
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30th December 2015Bahrain has an outstanding human rights record based on modern and advanced constitutional and legal texts and principles, the Gulf kingdom's prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, claimed on Sunday. It is a record which plays a crucial role in "defending the kingdom and...
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30th September 2015Bahrain's latest PR offensive, which involved sending a 200-strong delegation to the United States under the banner "This is Bahrain", has ended in a rather comical fiasco. Earlier this week, the delegation – from the pro-government Bahrain Federation of Expatriate Associations (BFEA) – claimed...
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28th September 2015A campaign to polish up Bahrain's tarnished image in the United States is reported to have enlisted help from the Israeli propaganda outfit, MEMRI. A 200-strong delegation from the pro-government Bahrain Federation of Expatriate Associations (BFEA) is currently in the US promoting "This is...
