The Arab Agenda

The uprisings in the Arab world lead me to note down the events as a witness and as they occurred one by one, Arab nation after Arab nation swept into an abyss of chaos.

Whether the Arab Spring happened by accident, whether it was predetermined with the assisted actors, it’s time to raise questions.

In my recent book, My Arab Spring, it was laced with emotions and a personal experience of a side that was never raised, neither by an activist or a loyalist.

Dark days and nights that never seemed to end. I never wrote the book to justify anything other than my personal journey.

The Arab Agenda will take the reader to a journey behind the scenes of the uprisings and start to question how and why did the events occur?

Where did it all start and do those involved understand the actions of where this is heading.

A wrong turn in the Arab Spring uprisings was the spread to Bahrain. Or perhaps it was calculated. Bahrain cannot be compared to Tunisia or Egypt, however, if only Bahrain was not strategically important to the West and Iran. But it was and still is.

One can perhaps comprehend the reasons behind Egypt and Tunisia, but they are not the same reasons when discussing the Arab Spring in Bahrain. However even uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia did not just occur.

"What happens in Bahrain sets the tone for much of the rest of the gulf," Kristin Smith Diwan 1

Whatever happens in Bahrain will be what other nations in the region will emulate. If it turns out to be a sham in Bahrain, the other nations will install sham democracies. If it turns out to be a genuine system, then other nations will feel the pressure from their own people to install a genuine system of participation and fairness. That's what is at stake and the West must do what it can to preserve a favorable outcome.

That was a mention from an American blogger 2. However it is strange to mention the term "democracy" when it doesn't really exist even in the United States. A genuine system has yet to be established even in the Republic of the United States.

Aindriu Colgan 3 recently wrote, “Firstly, America is not a democracy. It is not, never was, nor ever was intended to be a democracy. And for very good reason.

Democracy--dēmocratía ("power/rule by the people")--is a horrible system of government. It is maintained by violence, mob rule, and a pernicious envy--an envy that arises when one of its citizens rises too far above the others, an envy that drives that democracy to rip them down. The rights of the individual are always supplanted by "the will of the people".

Consider the go-to historical example: Athens. It was not a mythical utopia of philosophers and scientists based on the rule of reason; rather, Athenian democracy was governed by terror, violence, and corruption. It made tyranny its modus operandi. The lives and happiness of its citizens were held hostage to the collected will of their neighbours.

It forced the allied cities of the Delian League into political and economic submission and then massacred those cities that wished to withdraw. And in a wild frenzy, abandoned reason and law and summarily executed its ten leading generals--its only hope of victory against Sparta. Finally, in 404 BC, after a mere century, Athenian democracy imploded and eked out a meagre existence for the remainder of the millennium.

Its legacy? Consider Socrates' pupil and intellectual heir. In Plato's Republic, his ideal state is ruled not by popular assembly or elected council, but by a king--democracy's antithesis. So ended the "great" experiment in democracy.

I write this not as a defence of dictatorship, oligarchy, or any other such form of government, but merely to illustrate that democracy is as capable of tyranny as they, perhaps capable of greater tyranny as dictatorship is the tyranny of one over many and democracy the tyranny of many overall.”

Chapter 1

The Arab Spring sprung years ago; it's not something that just occurred. Nothing just occurs. Everything is predetermined. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to protest. Everything happens for a reason.

For most people the current 'Arab Spring' started in Tunisia.

On the 17th December Mohamed Bouazizi a 26 year old from Sidi Bouzid set up his stall as a street trader selling fruit. Within minutes Faida Hamdi, a municipal inspector and two other officers tried to confiscate his merchandise because he did not have a trading permit.

According to other fruit and veg peddlers, vendors have a choice when faced with a municipal inspector: they can flee, and leave behind both barrow and merchandise; pay a fine equivalent to several days’ earnings: or fork out a bribe.

Bouazizi, it seems, was not prepared to do any of these things.

When Hamdi began seizing his apples, he tried to grab them back, and she slapped him in the face. This was the turning point. Had Hamdi been a man, perhaps the story would probably have ended there, just another incident of low-level, routine degradation visited by the powerful on the weak.

But to be slapped by a woman, in public, is the height of humiliation for an Arab man. He tried to complain through all the official means available but was told flatly "There's nothing you can do about it."

At 11.30am, less than an hour after the initial altercation with Hamdi, Bouazizi was back in front of the governor's building.

He sat down in front of the gates, poured 2 bottles of paint-thinner over himself, and demanded, once more, to see an official. Then he lit his cigarette lighter. The rest is current history.

But this is not where the Arab Spring really began.

In modern times, it all started in Iraq; however for some the real Arab Spring sprang into action when the last monarch of the House of Pahlavi (Iranian monarchy) was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution and when Khomeini returned to Iran in February, 1979.

There was a national referendum and Khomeini won a landslide victory.

Ruhollah Khomeini was a religious scholar and in the early 1920’s rose to become an 'ayatollah', a term for a leading Shia scholar.

He declared an Islamic republic and was appointed Iran's political and religious leader for life. Islamic law was introduced across the country, and Iran became the world's first Islamic republic.

Iran's revolution would not stop there. Many believe that Iran is a nation within a geographic area that has an unjust regime, disrespecting human rights and causing chaos in the Middle East. Well you thought wrong.

The truth is Iran is not a regime, it is an Icon and generations have been raised to worship this Icon, which represents a vision of raising an empire through certain beliefs.

An Icon is not limited to a geographic area; it extends all around the world through the followers of its belief.

The story of Iran and how it became an Icon goes back 300 years when there was a country called Faris "Persia", which was mainly a part of current Iran.

The coast was ruled by Arabs, a country later called Ahwaz and beneath it there was a country called Hormoz, the whole coast was called Arabstan. In the middle of the gulf there were islands, one of them called Qashim, all of these areas were ruled by Arabs, Mostly by the Al Qassimi Royal Family. But that's another story and another part of history.

Now when Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979, he wrote down a 50 year plan to take over the Arabian Gulf, the sequence of the plan is as follows.

Take over Iraq (check), take over Bahrain (working on it), take over Kuwait (not sure yet how this will pan out), take over the East side of KSA (the Shia unrest has already begun, but I have doubts it will ever emerge into anything), take over UAE (this won't be so easy), take over Oman, take over Qatar, take over the rest of KSA (very doubtful).

I am up for arguments and everyone has an opinion but simultaneously there was another plan in the making. A parallel plan, as if one plan complimented the other.