Upper Class liberal white boy gets detained and gassed in Bahrain – “OMG it’s terrible here but the hotel food is great”.

Getting Detained and Gassed
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF – Published: December 14, 2011- NYT

Nothing like getting pulled into a police car to glimpse, through a haze of tear gas, hints of a police state.

The royal family in this American ally of Bahrain deserves immense credit for turning a desert island in the Persian Gulf into a modern banking center. The rulers have educated Bahrainis, built a large English-speaking middle class, empowered women and fostered such moderation that the ambassador to Washington is a woman from Bahrain’s tiny Jewish community.

Yet our pals here also represent a brutal, family-run dictatorship, and few countries crushed the Arab Spring so decisively as Bahrain. The regime helpfully displayed this darker side a few days ago when riot police attacked the video journalist accompanying me and detained both of us.

We had tagged along to watch the small protests and clashes that continue to bubble up almost every evening in the villages of Bahrain. The pattern is invariably the same. A small group begins shouting “Down with Hamad,” the king, and begins winding through the streets, with men and women running from their homes to join in.

One clash began when young men hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police (protesters hugely undermine their cause when they do this). Later in the evening, in another village, a different group of marchers remained peaceful and held their arms out to show police that they were unarmed. But then one young man reached down and hurled a rock at the police officers — who immediately fired a barrage of tear gas grenades and charged at us.

I ran.

The Times video journalist with me, Adam B. Ellick, stood his ground to record the scene. Policemen ran at him and — as Ellick shouted that he was an American journalist — one officer roughed him up and clubbed the camera, breaking part of it. If that’s what they do to a Western journalist, you can imagine what would happen if they were to catch a kid with a rock.

Then the police pulled Ellick to a police car and stuffed him inside. He telephoned me, so I staggered through the tear gas to see if I could extricate him.

So much for my persuasive powers: The police promptly detained me as well. They wedged me in the back seat of a different police car but treated me courteously. The detention turned out to be a fascinating “embed,” because the police freely shared their venomous hatred of the protesters and their delusional view that they are all paid by Iran.

After about 30 minutes, a senior policeman arrived, asked us a few questions and then freed us. A few hours later came a classic touch of Bahrain propaganda: The government announced that we hadn’t been detained but had “sought police protection.” …more