The United Arab Emirates celebrated its National Day on December
2. There were flags everywhere..flags to
tie your misplaced identity to, flags to hide your identity if you can cleverly
use them to cover the registration plate of your car. Dala al Hashemi used an Emirati flag to hide
the number plate of her SUV, when she went out to stab to death a
Romanian-American, and place a home made bomb outside the residence of an
Egyptian-American doctor. The attempt to
kill the American doctor (fortunately unsuccessful) was premeditated--Dala
allegedly went to the doctor’s residence, several days earlier, to make sure he
lived there. But Ibolya Ryan, the special education American teacher, just
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dala stayed in the women’s room of a mall for
an hour waiting to kill an American, any American…Ibolya finally walked in; it
is not clear how Dala identified Ibolya as an American.
For those of you who have been fortunate not to visit the
UAE, understand that that union of seven Sheikhdoms along the Persian Gulf
reeks of gaudy phoniness. It is a place
of the foreigners, for the foreigners, (build) by the foreigners--all three groups
of foreigners pretty much living in mutual exclusion. This is where European-descent people and
the wannabes can shamelessly get a taste of life once lived in the colonial
era. The social hierarchy is hard to
miss: Westerners at the top, non-Emirati Arabs and skilled workers from other
places in the middle, and disposable labor from South Asia, Philippines, and
other countries at the very bottom. Many
have been wondering how long this last vestige of ‘colonialism’ will last. Ibolya Ryan’s murder may be signaling an end
of that era of exploitation.
Thanks to the surveillance camera footage; Dala’s folly of
visiting the doctor’s residence for reconnaissance, days earlier, when the
registration plate of her SUV was not covered with anything; and the hard work
of the Abu Dhabi police Dala al Hashemi was nabbed.
But what can be done about the malice that exists in the hearts. Can Dala’s arrest deter others who might be
harboring the kind of ill-will towards Americans and Westerners that Dala holds? Probably not, especially if such people are
driven by religion.
Many in the Western expatriate community of the UAE must be
thinking along these lines.
Photo, courtesy of the Abu Dhabi Police.
