In Defense of the Spring of Culture
In Defense of a Culture of Love and Life

The face of aggression has, once again, appeared in full display of its dark-age menace, waging an anachronistic war against the Spring of Culture in Bahrain, and against the basic notions of love, freedom of expression, and the pathways of culture and art, represented here by Marcel Khalife and Qassim Haddad.

This dark-age assault on the Spring of Culture in Bahrain is nothing but a protraction of the prosecution which Marcel Khalife endured some years ago in Beirut, and of all the suppression and aggression to which Arab writers and intellectuals are subjected to by a number of Arab regimes.

Such obscurant, fundamentalist currents build no future or genuine culture, liberate neither land nor people, and augur no spring, and no love. Freedom alone, specifically freedom of expression, innovation and creativity in all its diversity, difference, and richness, can raise the foundation of our future, guarantee a culture of life, liberate women, and address the debilitating scourges of poverty, ignorance, disease, illiteracy, regression, corruption, power-mongering, aggression, suppression of thought, and dispossession of Arab lands.

We salute the institutions of civil society in Bahrain that stood up in defense of liberty and love. We salute the Spring of Culture in Bahrain and throughout the Arab World.

We salute Marcel Khalife and Qassim Haddad.