العربيةSheikh Maytham Al Salman, who heads the Religious Freedom Unit in the Bahrain Human Rights Observatory, said that the crime that the Government of Bahrain committed in demolishing 38 Shiite Muslims mosques encouraged extremist organizations including ISIS to threat of committing similar acts.
Al Salman continued saying: “The government established a new practice of targeting, attacking, demolishing and burning mosques and places of worship in Bahrain as the history of the two sects in the country is far from extremism and barbarism and the biggest sign of that is having the people of the Capital embracing the churches, mosques and Jewish synagogue and places of worship of various religions in Bahrain.”
Al Salman added: “The psychological and social nature of the citizens in addition to their cultural and educational backgrounds prevents them from practicing terrorism and violence and exercising crimes against others of different religions, ethnics and races. Hence, we can only conclude that these extremist ISIS-linked schools of thought and the culture of repression and demolition and burning of mosques and places of worship as being imported to the country and taking root in it. These extremist cells and ideologies began mushrooming in record time since the Government’s demolishment of the 38 Shiite mosques.”
He further said: “It is very natural for people to consider any new targeting of mosques, registered in the Jaafari endowments, as a “foreign” unaccepted practice which was unprecedented in the history of Bahrain before the government demolished 38 mosques(2011) in what Professor Cherif Bassiouni, chairman of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), has considered “a retaliation on a particular sect”.