Dubai Reinstates the Nuremberg Laws

The Con

This headline and article were posted on the Pravda.Ru website 3/04/2010:

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES TO FOLLOW THIRD REICH POLICIES AGAINST JEWS.

The authorities of the United Arab Emirates made an unusual decision. Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim said on March 1 that anyone who looks or sounds like a citizen of Israel will be blocked from entering the country, even if a suspected individual produces a passport of a different state.

“It is easy for us to identify [Israelis], through their face or when they speak any other language. We used to respect them when they would come holding European passports; we regarded them as Europeans and never treated them badly. But from now on, anyone we suspect to have a dual citizenship, they will be treated with great suspicion,” the police chief said.

The decision is directly linked with the assassination of a high-ranking official of Palestine’s Hamas movement in one of Dubai hotels on February 20. UAE officials believe that Mahmud al-Mabhuh, one of the founders of the military wing of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, was killed by Israel’s Mossad. The secret agents most likely used passports of other countries to commit the crime.

It is not quite clear, though, how Arab officials are going to identify Israelis. They would obviously have no difficulty in identifying Orthodox bearded hasids for their side-locks, hats and glasses. It looks like a joke though: “Wearing a hat and a pair of glasses makes you a Jew.”

Such people would never think of traveling to Emirates. Will Emirates liken itself to the Third Reich and use rulers and protractors to measure the shape of the nose, earlaps and the skull structure? If it does, the UAE will lose all of its friends in the West.

The police of Dubai suspect 26 people in the killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh. The suspects hold passports of Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and other countries.

Mossad’s participation in the plot to kill the high-ranking official of Hamas is just a theory. Even if we assume that it is true, the passports, which the suspected Israelis produced, may not necessarily be fake. Israel has dual citizenship agreements with dozens of countries, including those mentioned in the criminal case.

It may just so happen that law-abiding Britons or Australians will not be allowed to enter the UAE. Such a state of affairs will quickly develop into an international scandal. There are influential Jewish communities in the two countries, and the members of those communities hold two passports on absolutely legal grounds.

In general, the situation is a comic one. However, the scandal related to the assassination of the Hamas official does not look like a joke at all.

Israeli scientist of politics, Avigdor Eskin, said in an interview with Pravda.Ru that the police chief of Dubai released the above-mentioned statements for propaganda purposes.

I am a child of the Cold War so when it comes to propaganda, I tend to believe it will come from a newspaper whose name translates into English as ‘Truth.’ However, a New York Times blog dated two days earlier (3/2/2010) covers the same territory with this coda:

*Note: As some readers suggested, it appears that an Arabic-language newspaper account specified that Dubai’s police chief did not use the Arabic word for “Israelis” to describe the Jewish citizens of Israel he said his staff could spot by the way they look and their accents, he used the Arabic word for “Jews.” The source I cited, The National, is an English-language newspaper published in Abu Dhabi, which paraphrased part of the police chief’s remarks and quoted the rest without attributing the word “Israelis” to him, but suggested that he was talking about Jewish citizens of Israel.

Since it was already clear from the context of the police chief’s remarks that he was talking about introducing a policy of racial profiling — to identify and exclude Jewish citizens of Israel from Dubai, because of suspicions that they might be agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad — this does not change the fundamental point of the post.

My colleague Neil MacFarquhar, who reviewed the Arabic-language report, writes that Arabs in the Middle East generally “use ‘Jews’ as the word for the citizens of Israel.” He adds that this “probably stems at least partly from all the decades when they refused to use the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Israelis.’”

G-d bless the modern journalists at the Times and Pravda.Ru, they have, once again, missed the story. The United Arab Emirates accomplished a feat so rare only the EU can claim to be to be breathing the same sanctified air: anti-Semitism with no Jews. In this case a Nuremberg-esque travel restriction on Jews.

I’m assured by Ali Abu Dhabi, a well-placed source working as a busboy in a Lower East Side delicatessen, that Auschwitz Arabia -with modern gas chambers and far more efficient crematories will so be opened. The world will marvel at the Tower of Babel like spires of the chimneys and the modern metal bunk beds for those Jews selected by Arab doctors to be worked to death in the various hotels and constructions projects that will surely spring up as the world economy strengthens.

“The Kafir western women will all want to emulate the starvation diet we put the Jewesses on,” he tells me with the certainty of a Saudi PR representative.

Of course there are no Jews living in Dubai.

“Semantics,” Ali Abu Dhabi assures me. “We have built a capitalist oasis near the water, a Miami Beach on the Arabian Peninsula.  They will come.”