But everyone is just as bad as each other
Disclaimer: I am a Luton Town fan who backed no horse in the title race between City and Liverpool.
It is getting really tiring hearing ignorant generalisations in the mailbox about the owners of Man City. People write in to this website almost every day from positions of ignorance, assuming they understand the realities and political intricacies of life and policy in The UAE. Firstly, Abu Dhabi, despite being the seat of the UAE government, is an Emirate that is politically distinct from the other 6 Arab Emirates; therefore, the actions of the Abu Dhabi royal family is distinct from the UAE as a whole, just in the same way that England and London have policies and practises that differ entirely to those in, say, Blythe in Scotland. Consequently, the Man City owners are not a vanity project for an entire country, as frequently espoused on these pages, but are representative of one royal family in one emirate. In reality, the Abu Dhabi group, and its business interests are in direct competition with groups from neighbouring Emirates e.g. Etihad vs Emirates (airlines) and Etisalat vs DU (mobile networks).
Furthermore, the frequent assertions about the treatment of homosexuals in The UAE smacks of the kind of imperialist head burying that Nigel Pearson would be proud of. In our ‘progressive’ society in the UK, same sex marriage has been legalised for four and a half years, but homosexuality has been ‘tolerated’ for much longer; the UAE is still in the ‘tolerated’ phase. UK Legislation banning gay people from joining the army was only formally repealed in 2016. A royal pardon for Alan Turing being chemically castrated for homosexuality was only forthcoming in 2013. Britain has literally just made things adequate for gay people, and yet we have mailers writing in to decry the circumstances surrounding homosexuality in the UAE that they know nothing about, most probably lumping ‘them lot that are all the same’ in together and assuming that Brunei and Dubai are the same place. They are expecting the same level of traction and rate of change in a 2nd world nation, that operates Sharia law, as they have had in Britain (which itself has been glacial in the rapidity of its changes). The reality in the UAE is that homosexuality, whilst illegal, is tolerated and accepted in a live-and-let-live fashion, in much the same way as it had been in Britain until very recent legal changes. I say this as someone who lived with three different gay housemates in the UAE in the last 10 years, none of whom ever felt persecuted or unable to live the way they wanted to. Rates of homosexuality amongst young, unmarried Arab men are high, and tolerated, though there is still the cultural expectation of a heterosexual marriage – not really all that different to most countries where legal progress is not always reflected by the cultural zeitgeist.
Given that the pope condemned the burgeoning legal rights of homosexuals in the UK upon his visit to Britain in 2010, it is not hard to see, in a country underpinned by its religious theology, why the rapidity of change has been slower in the Gulf states than in the UK and Europe. And, given the opprobrium and hostility that my sister has faced as an openly gay woman whilst outside of cosmopolitan city centres in the UK, the legal rights of gays in the UK are masks to deeply-rooted prejudices based on sexuality in large swathes of people in the country. Hatred and intolerance for gays is present in the UK, just as it is in the Gulf states. Legal alterations represent progression, but not ultimate solutions to the cancer of homophobia. It will take time for the same legal changes to become manifest in the Gulf, just as equal-rights bills for women have taken longer, but are now in existence in a growing number of Gulf states, including the UAE. I say this not to excuse the absence of progressive legislation for gays in the UAE, rather to point out the hypocrisy of the soapbox criers in the mailbox who have total misguided faith in their moral authority and superiority because they are British (full disclosure – I am too).
As for the UAE’s involvement in Yemen, the UK are just as culpable as any of the countries involved in the war, and arguably have the greater power to stop hostilities. Every airstrike, tank or sophisticated military weapon in the hands of a Saudi or UAE soldier was provided to them by UK arms dealers, sanctioned by the British government, and increasingly aggressive foreign policies in the Arabian Gulf have occurred thanks to the emboldening of the ruling families, particularly in Saudi, thanks to political partnership with our country and the US (amongst others). We have either backed, directly participated or turned blind eyes to almost every military incursion in the Gulf and Middle East for the last thirty years. It was us and the US who stuck Saddam Hussein on the throne, only to return and depose him, send Iraq into political disarray and create the power vacuum that allowed for the disease of ISIS to fester. We have no moral authority to criticise anybody for inhumane military incursions; our, and our American cousins’, foreign policy is responsible for more unnecessary bloodshed than any Middle-Eastern regime. Go to Kurdhistan, Kabul, Damascus, Palestine or Basra and ask the citizens there about the moral authority of the British. Again, I say this not to condone what the UAE and Saudi are doing, but to reassert that the UK has no moral highground from which to judge when it comes to unethical military intervention; it is a shame that we all share.
So stop throwing ‘them lot over there’ style comments out about people and governments that you know nothing about, and check your own history before falsely asserting your own entitled sense of moral superiority. The world is, tragically, an unethical sh*thole and pretty much all of us are complicit in some sort of atrocity, from climate change to unwittingly buying products that fund zionist extremists. Don’t pretend you are any different.
Jurgen Guardiola
