The Rising Threat of the UAE

Until Dubai Ports World, a company owned by UAE ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, attempted to buy six major ports in the United States, few Americans were paying serious attention to the rising threat of the UAE.

Where regimes like Iran or Pakistan offer up more direct threats to the West in the form of nuclear arsenals and terrorism sponsorship, the UAE represents a soft threat that may be ultimately be just as dangerous because it is understated.

While the UAE provided 2 of the 9/11 terrorists, had close ties with the Taliban and served a stop on the smuggling network that moved nuclear technology from North Korea to Iran, the UAE has avoided the bellicose confrontational rhetoric, instead operating under the radar.

Where states like Iran or Saddam's Iraq routinely blew their oil money on weapons and a military that could never actually pose a threat to the West in anything except non-conventional weapons, the UAE has relied on the United States to provide regional security, while aggressively pursuing a program of economic conquest of the US and Europe.

The UAE may have many of the same ties to terrorists that Saudi Arabia does, but it has done a far better job with its own public image, building business ties with Western companies and slowly taking them over. The DPW takeover may have been a shock to the system, but it is part of a slow creeping pattern of UAE businesses seizing pieces of the Western economy.

Compared to the brutal tyrannies of Iran or Syria, or the ruthless public suppression of protest in Egypt or the armed militias of Lebanon or Gaza, the UAE seems to show a placid and sunny face of benign despotic family rule. The UAE of course is ultimately a tyranny based around the same system of clan and family interests that dominates much of the Middle East's politics, even when it's disguised by terms like Federation or Prime Minister. But above and beyond that the UAE is Sparta with a warrior class replaced by a business class.

Less than one in seven of the population of the UAE are actual nationals. The rest are mainly foreigners and foreign workers imported to do the work of the favorite sons of the land. And while it might be the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies who make the headlines, it is the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians slaving away in the homes and palaces, or the small children imported as camel jockeys because of their light weight that make up the real, often enslaved population, of this Sharia friendly Sparta.

The hundreds of thousands of Asians who live in collective labor accommodations resembling slave barracks with no legal rights to speak of, as is commonplace for non-Muslims in a Muslim country, are the real face of the UAE behind the PR spin, the glitzy shots of beaches and glass towers. The UAE, like all tyrannies, is ultimately built up on a base of human misery, oppression and exploitation.

Out of that heart of darkness dressed up in the glamorous light of luxury and opulent wealth, the UAE has advanced steadily into the West. Sharia Finance is a project Made in the UAE and is typical of the UAE's use of economic leverage to impose its power on the West. Even whie UAE royalty steadily financed the Taliban and other Islamic terrorist groups, their economic agenda had a far greater impact in the Clash of Civilizations. Like the airplanes that were flown into the towers, the UAE follows the pattern of Islam employing the modern tools and institutions of the West against it.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority or ADIA, another corporate spawn of the UAE ruling clan, is the largest shareholder in Citigroup, which plays a key role in the US Treasury Securities market. ADIA wields unknown billions across global financial markets, even as it snaps up real estate in New York and London. Among their acquisitions, the Chrysler building bought from Prudential and the General Motors building, the most expensive building in the world. To place this in the proper perspective, you would have to consider that the same UAE royals who helped finance Al Queda now own some of New York City's most notable surviving buildings.

Lenin boasted that the capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them. But where he failed, the fat burnoosed bandits of the UAE are succeeding. Import-Export enabled the UAE to take hold of the building blocks of international trade, which when combined with international finance, gave them the economic leverage to advance their agenda on a wider playing field. Hollywood is already on the block. With an economy in shambles, tomorrow's movies are being financed out of Dubai, and the investors ultimately gain the deciding power. As Dubai becomes the financial center for Hollywood that New York once was, you can look forward to movies that even further advance the Islamic agenda while degrading America and the West.

And as a double twist of the knife, bringing Hollywood to Dubai along with its drove of celebrities, further mainstreams Islam and Islamic culture in the West. This of course is to be followed by business alliances that will market Dubai created films to American audiences, in exchange for help marketing American films to Middle Eastern audiences. And the next stage of the plan involves treating Hollywood, as the UAE has treated every Western company it has done business with, by first forming entangling business alliances and then taking it over. As today Haliburton, once a leading American company is based out of Dubai, the same fate may yet befall Hollywood, as surreal as that may seem today.

Popular culture is power, and the UAE wants to have that power over the West. Its control over international trade and finance now paves the way for making even greater inroads into the West, for forcing Sharia compliant finance, insuring that Islamic law becomes recognized in Europe, that Islamic ideas are broadcast on film and TV for Western audiences, that the slavemasters of the UAE will even own sizable portions of the cities of their enemies.

Terrorism alone cannot accomplish a victory. It can only serve as a prod. It is the financial conquest of a nation and the resulting transfer of power that is far more devastating. The UAE's silent economic war against the West has brought victory after victory, a war that is all the more devastating because of how covert it is, and how well it hides behind a friendly smile, while a knife is held just out of sight behind a billowing white sheet. Sharia finance is only the opening shot of a far more comprehensive economic takeover of the West, no longer funded by oil money alone, but by the trade, the land and the entertainments of the West.