The deal is that a Dubai-owned firm has purchased Barney's New York.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is the country that is too
non-American
to own and operate a port inside the United States. Our friend Frist and others "feared giving a state-owned Arab company control of U.S. port terminals would threaten national security."
But I guess it's perfectly okay if "potential terrorists" dress the cast from the Sex and the City Movie.
i have nothing to say. it just is getting so weird.
ReplyDeleteDo you ever read the Khaleej Times? The UAE is, by the standards of that part of the world, actually a pretty open and enlightened place.
ReplyDeletewell, it should be remembered that the Bush administration - always cozy with oil-rich Arabs - was perfectly OK with this deal. The administration was flanked from the right by, of all people, the democrats.
ReplyDeleteso now when i go purchase a pair of socks for $95 or a belt for $400 or a tie $600, i get to know i am supporting the arabs...just like the $3.50 gallon of gas.
ReplyDeleteif we keep giving them our money, and they will continue to buy stuff in this country. we need to tell the arabs to swim in their oil.
but not the commander-guy, this whole fucking war is about oil, his friends, the Carlyle group etc.....
one big clusterfuck to 300,000,000 americans to benefit his friends
lol BlueGal. Do you think Laura Bush has a pair?
ReplyDeleteTry reading the Gulf News instead it's marginally better.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, Dubai is quite an enlightened place where people live in actual house and drive cars to work instead of taking camels!
This thread (and to a certain extent, the post) has a very uncomfortable and (in my opinion) inappropriate sense of being a Muslim-bashing or an Arab-bashing one.
ReplyDeleteNeither "supporting the Arabs" nor permitting commerce (if anyone choosing to make purchases at Barney's could be considered engaging in commerce rather than some bizarre display of affluence) seem problematic to me.
Allowing one's strategic installations to be owned and operated by another country does, however, seem problematic.
More problematic, even, is the use of the phrase "supporting the Arabs" or the picture of women in traditional clothing.
My tradition differs from that tradition; but snickering at traditions that differ from the one in which I live is a step toward disenfranchising people for whom that tradition is their home. Snickering at "them" pushes the designated "them" out of civil discourse.
In the case of Arab and Muslim tradition, that would make our world immeasurably poorer.
I want to respond to what Yossi and Shunra said.
ReplyDeleteThe Dubai ports deal is the ONLY time I can remember where I fully supported Bush. I thought it unconscionable that an ALLY of the US should be treated this way because of knee-jerk anti-arab sentiment primarily coming from Fox News. My posts here and here make this clear.
It's hard to make a distinction between being anti-Arab, which I'm not, and being against the incredible crass materialism evident in BOTH the NYC fashion scene/Barney's New York and the Dubai "we really want to be the Rodeo Drive of the Middle East" shopping fetish. Our addiction to UAE oil pays for a country whose citizens import labor from impoverished countries in order to have more time to shop at Saks.
I don't pretend that the US hasn't done the same and isn't exploiting poor people and that I don't have some or even a lot of culpability in all that.
The image may be a bit over the top. I didn't post it on the main page for that reason. But if rainbow burkas sold and sold well, Barneys New York would sell them. The whole burka thing is an issue for another post, for certain. Watch this space.
Oops here are the posts where I agree with Bush on Dubai ports deal:
ReplyDeletehere
and
here.