I decided to write to CNN.com about the show, and I’m pretty sure it will fall to deaf ears but anyhow here it is:
Dear Hala Gorani,
I hope you are in good health, I’m writing to you in concern to your ‘Inside the Middle East’ piece on “Poverty in Bahrain” which I want to express my disgust on this clearly bias report.Shi’aas and Sunnis in Bahrain’s history have always lived side by side and even have blood relations between the two Islamic sects.
Things in Bahrain are not exactly rosy, let’s me realistic but I feel that you have not showed the whole story.
I suggest to you if you come to visit Bahrain again (try staying away during the unbearably hot and humid summers!) and visit towns like Isa Town and “Libnan” between East and West Riffa and you will find many Sunni families in similar or even worse conditions that the family you showed in your show.
Shi’aas especially in the eighties and nineties were geniunely repressed, not getting jobs etc. but now things have opened up a bit, I work in the Ministry of Education and both my superiors are Shi’aa whilst I’m a Sunni and I have no problem whatsoever with that..
The biggest problem we face in Bahrain is that we still think we live in the bloody nineties! Times have changed and we are going in the right direction regards democracy and human rights, slowly by surely…
Thank you for your time
Yacoub Al-Slaise
everyday i dislike the ministry more and more .. the sololofish have banned youtube on us, so i couldn’t see the video unfortunatly.
anyway, i read ur letter and find it quit an ignorant to say that all bahraini’s are getting the same treatment. There is a huge discrimination for one side against the other. this is cuased by the royal family and nothing else. T
hey are a cancer in bahrain and have to be removed in order to make things right !!
In what do you see there is a huge discrimination?
in every single aspect of life -in bahrain- that the goverment is controling.
i can write a whole book about this, however, i will stick to ur examples to make short.
since you mentioned Isa Town & Libnan as a sunni poor parts of bahrain (which i havn’t visited before). there is like 10 poor shia places for each single sunni area.
logicaly. this can’t happen without a bias government!!