BahrainHuman Rights

Mainstream media misleading world on Bahrain: Analyst

Mainstream media misleading world on Bahrain

A political analyst says the world is in the dark about the crackdown of anti-regime protesters in Bahrain as mainstream media render a distorted image of developments in the Persian Gulf kingdom, Press TV reports.

In an interview on Tuesday, Daoud Khairallah, professor of law at the Georgetown University, said that there is a certain “deliberate distortion” of facts in Bahrain.

“Unfortunately the international community is fed information [about Bahrain] by a media that is already politicized and distorted,” he said.

“We know that the media is biased, the media is controlled by special interest and there is a huge double standard in the way the world sees what is going on in the entire Arab world and this is very unfortunate,” Khairallah added.

Referring to a recent ruling by a court in Bahrain which sentenced seven anti-regime protesters to 15 years in prison, the analyst said politics is “ostensibly” interfering in the judicial process in Bahrain.

On Sunday, a Bahraini court handed down the jail terms to the protesters after convicting them of an attack which wounded a policeman during a protest in December 2012.

Khairallah said that the Bahrain uprising has been “peaceful” but the Manama kingdom supported by certain regional countries has launched a heavy crackdown on protesters.

Bahrainis have been staging demonstrations since mid-February 2011, calling for political reforms and a constitutional monarchy, a demand that later changed to an outright call for the ouster of the ruling Al Khalifa family following its brutal crackdown on popular protests.

In February, Amnesty International censured Manama for its “relentless repression” of anti-regime protesters, blaming Bahraini security forces for their repeated use of “excessive force to quash anti-government protests.”

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