Another Westerner mistakes the UAE for a free country

FPM:

Quick quiz. What do these universities have in common: New York University, London Business School, Michigan State University, Middlesex University, Murdoch University (Australia), Heriot-Watt University (Scotland), the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Birmingham, the University of Bradford, the University of Exeter, the University of South Wales, City University London, and the University of West London?

Answer: they all have branches in the United Arab Emirates. This is a perfect set-up for the petroleum millionaires of the Persian Gulf, who want their sons to have American or British degrees but who may not want them to be exposed to the haram aspects of life in the U.S. or U.K. It’s thus also a perfect set-up for the universities themselves, because these oil sheikhs can afford whatever price these universities charge them to educate their little darlings.

A few decades ago, the idea of establishing branches of Western universities in a country like the UAE would be considered ethically problematic. No free speech, no free press, no due process, and all that. Premarital sex and the drinking of alcohol are punishable by flogging. The penalty for adultery and apostasy is death by stoning.

Fortunately for the American and British universities in question, these drawbacks are more than balanced out by the huge piles of cash that are in it for them. In any event, as you know, it’s politically incorrect – Islamophobic, in fact – to get too worked up about sharia law. And nowhere are people more determined not to be politically incorrect or Islamophobic than at your typical American or British university.

So if you look at it the right way, installing a university campus in the UAE is a supremely liberal act. So what if, as NPR noted in passing in an otherwise enthusiastic 2010 report on these colleges, “students and faculty from Israel cannot get visas to the UAE”? So what if, as an otherwise celebratory article the same year about NYU Abu Dhabi, the New York Times noted (in the mildest possible summation of sharia) that “homosexual acts are illegal and the Internet is censored” in that emirate?

These universities have provided the UAE not only with high-level educational facilities but with a terrific front. Along with the shiny buildings of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the UAE branches of NYU, MSU, and so on do a great job of making a primitive country look modern.

So do the media, CNN above all. I’ve written here previously about a truly nauseating series of promos on which CNN hack Becky Anderson slathered Abu Dhabi – a place where real journalists are thrown in prison – with the kind of praise Donald Trump will never get on that network in a million years.

Thanks to that kind of shameless propaganda, Westerners have been fooled into thinking that the UAE is indeed, as the Times put it in that 2010 article, a “modern, multicultural” state, and thus a safe place to do business or go on vacation. As a result, every so often you read a story about some foolish couple from North America or Europe who, thinking they were in a civilized country, committed some innocuous act that landed them in the clink.

Some random examples. In 2014, a U.S. architect in Dubai for a conference was arrested for photographing a building. In 2015, an American was arrested in the UAE for something he’d posted on Facebook while in the U.S. In 2016, a British woman was arrested in Dubai on charges of adultery after reporting a rape. Last year, a British tourist faced three years in a Dubai jail “after putting his hand out in a bar to stop himself spilling his drink and touching a man’s hip.” Last December, a British woman was arrested in Dubai “after witnessing a physical altercation in a hotel lobby.”

MORE HERE