Silly Bahraini Girl: Blocked!

The ongoing insanity that is web censorship and gagging freedom of speech in Bahrain, has again stooped to a new low by blocking Amira Al-Hussaini’s ( Global Voices Regional Editor fro MENA) blog Silly Bahraini Girl . Below is her reaction which she wrote on her blog after it was blocked (There are a million and one ways to bypass proxies you know our dear government )

My deserted blog has been blocked in Bahrain. Out of the blue, I get a message that my blog has been “blocked for violating regulations and laws of Bahrain” when I tried to access it this morning.
What laws and regulations have I violated you dimwits? And how exactly can you block me from writing and expressing myself? And once you have stopped me from accessing my website through your firewall of repression, how can you stop the rest of the world from seeing how childish and arrogant your heavy-handedness on free speech is?

Today, you have proved to me without doubt that you are a regime which lives in fear – in fear of the written word and free minds. You have tried to silence me for no reason. You have stepped on my toes. You have violated my rights. You don’t know what animal you have unleashed.

I have turned a blind eye on the violations that you commit everyday and amid my moral and ethical dilemma pressed on with life, keeping myself busy with my home, family and cats. Yes, you morons. To numb my mind from the atrocities you commit everyday in the name of my country, my Bahrain, I spend my mornings grooming my seven Persian cats. If you need to know, I actually spend a few hours a day combing them and another few hours playing with them. I have curtailed my writing activities when I realised that whatever we write and say is useless, in a country hellbent on distorting the truth and alienating its own people.

I have kept my mouth shut when a minister from your cabinet spoke on television and lied, saying there are no poor people in Bahrain, despite the daily miseries we see with our very own eyes everyday.

I have ignored comments from your government officials saying that the unemployed in Bahrain do not want to work, despite not getting a suitable job in Bahrain since my return to my wonderland more than 18 months ago. Yes, someone with my experience and credentials is unemployed in Bahrain because I have not had the heart to start feeling sorry for myself and talk to people who know people who can employ me.

When your minister in charge of housing spoke on television, stating that every Bahraini had in fact benefited from decent adequate government housing, my jaw fell but I did not blog about it. I was too busy at the time looking for a house within my budget to provide me with shelter from the elements, including the goons on the streets, pointing their guns at passers-by.

And when you had your infamous crackdown on the ‘disenchanted dissidents,’ I was on holiday, protecting myself from witnessing the horrors you are committing on your own people, just because you think they are not your people. I also bit my tongue and swallowed it, when a leading figure spoke in a television interview, defending the Shia of Bahrain, saying that their allegiance is not for Iran. Like we now have to defend ourselves for being Bahraini – for being the downtrodden second-class (third-class if you are a woman) Bahrainis, who happened to live on this land for generations.

And speaking of television, I did not write a post when the ticker on your national television screen called Bahrain’s Shia ‘rewafedh’ – a derogatory term coined by the mountain goats – and hurled insults on my people, who also happen to be Bahrainis to the core, unlike the tens of thousands of naturalised Bahrainis you have imported en masse to change the demographic population of my country – my Bahrain.

What laws and regulations have I violated for my blog to be blocked? And how exactly can you block me? How do you intend to silence me? You can stop my readers from accessing my posts in Bahrain, but how would you shield the rest of the world from seeing the truth as it is, without censorship and repression?

In conclusion, allow me to correct you. You are the ones violating the Constitution in denying me and scores of other bloggers the right to express our opinions. Signing the Human Rights Charter wasn’t just a show for the rest of the world. We don’t live in a circus.

Web censorship, despite its futility, is a disgusting act of limiting freedom of speech and a disregard to human rights. Lest not forget that two Bahraini bloggers , Ali Abdulemam and Dr. Abduljalil Singace, are on trial as part of the ongoing Terror trials and over a thousand websites are now blocked in Bahrain!

We demand this web censorship shenanigan to end now as it 1) absolutely futile, 2) a huge waste of money having web filters and keeping them maintained 3) and most importantly a gross disrepect to freedom of speech in Bahrain, something that is in our constitutional rights..