Rod Liddle thinks I’m evil

Sample quote: “I take a cab to the beach, Jumeirah beach, and spend three minutes watching sarcomas grow on the semi-naked expats strung out across the sand under flimsy shades, E-numbered Slush Puppies to hand, their eyes-closed against the vicious glare, their bodies porky and immobile.”

You get the idea. And if you don’t, there are roughly 5,495 more words of it.

The vitriol is fairly evenly distributed between expatriates and Emiratis. To Liddle, Dubai is “a slave state” in which various laws are “vindictive” and treatment of labourers is “evil.” The expatriates are all “fervently racist,” he says. In fact, in Liddle’s experience of Dubai, expatriates are a busy bunch, variously spending their time dressing “like infidel whores” and getting howlingly drunk, or “bringing” the credit crunch to the city.

He describes Dubai’s skyline as “a vast architectural experiment conducted by, seemingly, Albert Speer and Victoria Beckham.” By about word 5,000, it is safe to say Liddle not only hates Dubai, but hates you too, if you live in the city. “But that’s what you sign up to [er, all the bad stuff above] when you buy property in Dubai, or go there to work, or stay in one of its bling hotels. You sign up to all of that stuff and you condone it.” The implication, of course, is that you too are evil. Rod Liddle thinks I am evil.

I took this hard. After all, Liddle is one of the best journalists working in the British media today. His writing is typically stellar and spot-on. Johann Hari and Germaine Greer, who recently also deigned to write pieces with the intention of showing Dubai its own beating heart in major British newspapers, probably think I am evil, too. That I can cope with, I don’t care what they think. Who would? But Liddle? Say it ain’t so, Rod.

So I emailed him.

Rod, I said, Rod I love your work. I even met you once. I read you all the time. But now you’ve come to the place I call home, and treated it with all the respect of a career vandal. I asked him if, even though he took objection to the architecture and the “relentless, enervating fornicating” we all do here, he could at least acknowledge that it is better that Dubai exists than that it doesn’t?

I said: what about the good stuff? What about the schools and the hospitals and the financial centres and the infrastructure that Dubai has built? I told him that Dubai has led the Gulf in its drive to modernise, and surely modernising is a good thing? I asked him if standing against that was to stand against modernity? I said sure, Dubai is no Islington, but is only 30-odd years old, and only really started aggressive expansion in the mid-nineties.

I also said that if he objected to the treatment of labourers, had he considered their plight was as much the responsibility of the embassies and consulates – Indian/Pakistani/Filipino/Chinese etc. – who vet recruitment agents and don’t pressurise Gulf countries to make sure workers are well treated as anyone else’s? Not to mention the many, many British companies that employ labourers in Dubai.

Two days later, he replied.

He said that he stood by his comments regarding the “mistrust bordering on derision” he encountered in virtually everyone he met in Dubai towards other nationalities – although he did concede that not everyone who lived in the emirate could be teeth-gnashingly xenophobic.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, he said: “But I am not sure I do think it is a good thing that Dubai is trying to modernise; to be honest, I think I prefer Iran, which has at least kept a vague nod to the redistributive impulse of Islam. Nor is it a philanthropic gesture [in Dubai]; it is pure naked greed.”

Well, what are we to make of that? Most social commentators are agreed that the great British multi-cultural experiment has failed, so did Liddle really need to come all the way to Dubai to see that most nationalities are a bit rude about/mistrustful of one another? And as for preferring Iran to Dubai…. in his article he gave the impression he thought many of the UAE’s laws were a bit rum. In Iran today, they still fairly regularly hang or stone people for crimes like being homosexual. Not much evidence of a “redistributive impulse” after the recent elections, either.

And that bit about greed. Is capitalism now a crime? Without wanting to sound all Gordon Gekko about it: greed isn’t the worst thing in the world when it comes to motivating progress. In fact, there is a fairly watertight argument to be made that progress everywhere on God’s green earth since the dawn of civilisation has been motivated by greed and greed alone. At least in Dubai, ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is trying to do the best he can to provide for his people by giving them facilities and amenities their forefathers could only have dreamed of.

So Liddle, by his own admission, is against Dubai’s efforts to modernise? Who else stands against modernity these days? It’s the Taliban isn’t it? Liddle and the Taliban, standing shoulder-to-shoulder? It doesn’t look right. Come on, Rod, you’re too good for this. Get real. Come back, spend longer than a week here, do your research somewhere other than the Rattlesnake and your “sleaze bucket of a hotel,” and then stick the boot in, by all means. But at least have a look at the real story. You said in your email your “job was to write about the sleaze.” What happened to travelling with an open mind?

And as for the legions of Dubai-based readers of this website who like to post abusive comments beneath articles that are in any way non-eviscerating about the emirate, do your worst. I live here and I like it, and Liddle still thinks I am evil. If you live here and you hate it, what does that make you? Cretinous and evil? I am sure your mothers love you. Perhaps you might like to move to Iran?