Thoughts on Terrorism

First of all, thank you to all the concerned souls who have sent emails in the past few days warning us of the new terror warnings in the UAE. Luckily, as sheltered as we may feel, we do still get MSN and CNN and stay caught up (well, I do... I definitely don’t vouch for Stu… he didn’t even know Brangelina were expecting twins! Gahhh!) on the goings on of the world (yeah, mostly celebrity gossip).

I do think there are a few things to be said though. Number one, you DO get relatively jaded when you live here (or, I would imagine, any Middle Eastern country as a foreigner) simply because it feels like the underlying “threat” of “something bad happening” (net necessarily terrorism… could be a wicked case of food poisoning) is ever present. Secondly, there is so much hostility in this region both now and, um, forever thus far, that it doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary.

Right now, a couple hundred miles from here in a northwesterly direction, Hamas and Israel are “keeping it real”, Yemen to our southwest can’t keep its rebels under control, there’s all of the obvious turmoil still present in Iraq, and now Iran, which is separated from the UAE by a mere 42 kilometers of “Gulf”, insists on continuing its nuclear proliferation, much to the dismay of… the world. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia remains sitting as the comfy neighbor to the west.

It should really be no shock to anyone that The US Embassy (following UK’s example) issued a warning to Americans living or travelling here. In an article on MSNBC (*click the hyperlink on the word “warning” to read the story) I thought it was a worthy point made about how the UAE isn’t quick-to-frighten people as America may be prone to do. Here, tourism is such a huge industry (and will become more so once the oil is depleted), in addition to the vast amount of money pouring in from big business interests all over the world that have set up shop here.

Anyway, the warming is for “as summer approaches” and is a general threat, nothing specific. I imagine we won’t be changing our routine much. We don’t do a whole heck of a lot outside or in heavily-populated-by-westerners areas anyway. (The bank account doesn’t go up if you’re spending!) But I did want to touch on it since friends and family seem much more concerned about it that I had let myself be. We love you all and appreciate that you don’t want to see us blown up!

Iran, cooking up some "nookler energy" (thank you, Gulf News.com for the pics)

Yemeni Rebels