Dubai and armageddon

According to Outer Space, the world-shaped islands being built in dubai are sinking into the sea. Just another piece of bad news in this country having a bad year century existence. For those of you just tuning in to the scene at United Arab Emirates, let's have a quick history lesson. In 1971, Allah and Garfield decided that we mortals needed a literal hell on earth to motivate us not to wake up our pet cats unpleasantly, and also not to be women.

The UAE is one of the only countries in the world where citizens are a minority of residents. In other words, there are more people from other countries living there than there are Emiratis. Don't worry, there's no path to citizenship for noncitizens. The only way for a noncitizen to get a visa is to have a job. The minute you lose your job, your lease contract will be invalid, your visa revoked, and you will be put on on the next flight home, often in police custody. Thankfully, some noncitizen residents don't have to worry about losing their jobs, because they are slaves. Planeloads of men from Pakistan and women from Sri Lanka arrive daily, lured by promises of high wages, low rent, and a good standard of living. When they land, however, their passports are confiscated by their employers. So if they try to flee, they will be arrested at the airport. Dubai doesn't have bankruptcy, so if you go in debt and can't pay it off, you go to prison. These immigrants imported people have to keep working, or they will be arrested, jailed, and then if they're lucky, deported.

But how do these people keep getting hoodwinked? This isn't the 1700s, where European ships could weigh anchor off the coast of the nearest island and lure the natives aboard with candy. These people have internets! And cable news! The answer is something we Americans (and, you know, the modern world) take for granted: freedom of the press. The only media is state-run. When, for example, the brother of Abu Dhabi's ruler was caught on videotape methodically and ruthlessly torturing someone, the entire incident was not reported by the UAE press, and blocked on the whole internets. And when that man was acquitted and his accusers convicted on charges of drugging him (presumably their fetish is getting run over, electrocuted, and having things stuck into sensitive places, and then having it videotaped and broadcast globally), that was also covered up. [NOTE: if you do watch the video, it's extremely graphic. That's why I didn't post a link. Just google "uae torture".]

The media instead runs stories such as "Oman Divorce Rate Drops 12%", in which we are informed that the corresponding "rate of second marriage" has risen by 10%. They even interview a female marriage counselor, to ask why that is. She tells us that first wives have only themselves to blame for causing their man to lose interest. As if you could help being 55! A 55-year-old woman cannot be as young, wrinkle-free, athletic, and fertile as a 20-year-old. It's just not possible. But this is the image presented in the media. What's fed to kids in school is even worse. Any mention of Jews or pigs is forbidden. No sex education, of course, but also no real history. The history they present in their schoolbooks is about as complete as the one I gave earlier in this post. As a student, if you fail your Islam course (which is required for many children) you have to repeat the grade, but you can fail your math, chemistry, and physics without worry.

Some say that the justice system is improving in the region, but you may have heard about the most recent in a long line of outrageous cases? An English woman in Dubai for a Christmas vacation with her fiance. She passed out drunk in a hotel bathroom, and was raped. When she reported it, she was arrested for having sex outside of wedlock with her fiance. She was advised to marry her fiance immediately and drop her rape charge, otherwise she would be detained and probably jailed. Or these was this tragedy, wherein a French boy was offered a ride from a (citizen) friend and schoolmate. But the car also contained two (citizen) convicts. The three of them took him to a desolate stretch of desert and raped him. When he and his family went to police, they discouraged him from pressing charges and even raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity. On top of that, they delayed telling him for weeks that one of those convicts had tested positive for HIV four years earlier.

These people want it both ways: they want to keep their dogmatic conservative ideals of tribal islam, and at the same time want to promote this image of modernization and liberalism, so that they can can attract tourists and investors. They'll deport any foreigners with HIV, but they will conceal the identities of citizens with HIV. These three cases are only the most recent and notable of the injustices of the UAE. You can be sure that there are many more that are hidden by the state-run media, or guarded by the corrupt police.

One aspect of the culture of the Gulf States that I was abruptly confronted with recently is their sense of entitlement. Every business in the UAE has to hire a certain quota of Emiratis. Which means there will be fierce competition to hire you, if you're a citizen. That in turn leads to high wages, lots of power, and little responsibility. But you don't even need to work to get money, if you're a citizen. There's no tax for Emiratis, and they're given a yearly stipend, in fact. The stipend isn't much, but if you get married, you get a ton of money. And you can get married four times! It's this culture of irresponsibility and entitlement that contributed to the essential bankruptcy of Dubai (that's why the Burj Dubai , the tallest building in the world this year, was renamed: they basically sold its name for money). And this sense of entitlement spills over into nieghboring Saudi Arabia, where King Fahd University sent me several emails informing me of employment opportunities. I don't know why they think they are entitled to directly spamming all potential employees, when every other university sends a little letter to the department head, who puts that letter in a large sheaf of letters, and sets that in a public place so we can go look if we're job-hunting. I went up to look at that stack of letters, and discovered that King Fahd's was special: two pages pinned to the cork-board, where literally hundreds of similar letters are collected in a sheaf together. I don't know how they wrangled special treatment here, in one of the departments of a premiere American public university.