Redhead Rambles

Western arms merchants’ profits from the sale of weapons to Arab oil producing states are staggering: tens of billions of dollars are spent annually. The Americans are the biggest pedlars of weapons for petrodollars, but the British, Canadian and French authorities have also kept silent on the region’s political abuses in order to secure their access to the world’s most lucrative arms bazaar. Washington and London are not just looking away. Rather, they are complicit in and have helped build the political order that rests on oppression and the indefinite detention of hundreds of children… Last week I received an email from the father of Abdallah Madan, a 17-year-old Bahraini-American citizen, who was arrested for protesting in early March. He has been beaten, his nose has been broken, and there is no sign of his being released any time soon. US embassy officials were made to wait three weeks before being allowed to see him, and have so far not made his case a priority. Meanwhile, Abdallah has asked his father to take up the cause of more than 450 other children languishing in Manama’s prisons for standing up to autocracy. Reflecting on how all this came about, Madan wrote that they often told Abdallah that his support for democracy was because ‘he drank a lot of American water’ when he was a small child in Virginia. The US authorities would do well to drink some more of that water, too.