Monday, February 23, 2009

Sudetenland 2.0?

Following up on the 'Netanyahu vs. Ahmadinejad = Churchill vs. Hitler' story; is Bahrain the new Sudetenland?

History buffs will remember Sudetenland as the predominately-German region of Czechoslovakia ceded by Great Britain and France to Hitler's Germany, without the consultation of the Czech government. Hitler claimed that after the Sudeten question was resolved, Germany had 'no more territorial ambitions' in Europe. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, upon returning to Great Britain, claimed that the ceding of Sudetenland to Germany brought 'peace for our time'. History shows what happened. Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia within six months, and Poland within a year, starting World War II.

Bahrain is a predominately Shiite Muslim island-nation, ruled by a Sunni monarch. Iran is also mostly Shiite. Bahrain has been a part of the Iranian/Persian lands for millenia, but in 1971 Bahrain became an independent state.

Now, an excerpt from a Reuters article:
Bahrain has criticised as irresponsible reported remarks by an Iranian official that questioned the Gulf Arab kingdom's sovereignty and caused a diplomatic furore in the region.

According to media reports, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, a close adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said earlier this month that Iran had sovereignty over Bahrain.

"If these statements are meant to test the waters then the response was clear internally and externally, and this was affirmed by the magnitude of Gulf Arab and international condemnation to these irresponsible statements," Bahraini Interior Minister Sheikh Rashed bin Abdullah al-Khalifa told the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

Here's another possible reason for the rhetoric coming out of Tehran:

The Islamic island country, populated by 500,000 people, has recently made many pro-Jewish gestures, despite the fact that only 50 Jews currently reside there.

In 2008, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa issued a royal decree appointing female Jewish lawmaker Hoda Nono to the post of ambassador, making her the first Jew in the modern Arab world to become an ambassador. The businesswoman and mother of two, who serves as one of two Jews on the king's 40-member legislative upper chamber, is stationed in Washington.

In November, the king extended an invitation for all Bahraini expatriate Jews to return to live in Bahrain, saying "It's open, it's your country."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, alternatively, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, claiming that the Jews manipulated the Holocaust to gain sympathy for the Jewish state, calling Israelis the "most detested people in all of humanity."

(from IsraelNationalNews.com)

We shall see how President Obama and the rest of the world leaders deal with this situation, should Iran begin to press for annexation at any point. Thank God that Bibi is going to be Israel's Prime Minister.

1 comment:

  1. I tend to agree with you about Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel needs a very strong leader at this point in time and he is just the man they need.

    ReplyDelete

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