American Jews who cannot do math have the bad habit of
telling everyone, especially the Arabs, what to do when help of this kind is
needed in America and Israel more
than anywhere else.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that they should give bad
advice to America , but they
could give them to Israel ,
for example, because like the saying invented for this occasion goes: beating a
dead horse will not make it more dead.
The latest Jew to venture into this subject area is Daniel
Pipes who wrote “Can the Dubai Model Inspire Arabs?” published on January 4,
2016 in National Review Online. He begins the article by following the
unmistakable Jewish formula that goes something like this: There is at this
time so much chaos in the Middle East , what
I'm about to say is very important … so hear me roar.
He praises the rulers of the United Arab Emirates for their
wisdom in managing the tremendous wealth that's accrued to them from the oil
and gas reserves they were blessed with. But then, Daniel Pipes adds this:
“count the ways the country stands vulnerable.” And he counts five
vulnerabilities while making the mistake of not asking someone to help him
understand the significance of the numbers he cites.
The first vulnerability is demographics. He says that
immigration has nearly doubled the population of the country from about 5
million to 10 million in 9 years. That's an annual growth rate of 8 percent,
which is not really extravagant. He says that of the 10 million, only 1.1
million are citizens; the rest expatriates. And of these, 4 million are from
Arab countries while the rest (4.9 million) are from South
Asia . And so, he opines the following: “one can imagine their
discontent and rebelliousness should the good times end.”
What Pipes does not say is that the expatriates are
transients. Most of them leave the family in the home country and go to work in
a wealthy place such as Dubai
for two or three years where they make enough money to then return home, buy a
house or start a business. In fact the turnover is so high that Dubai started a special air service twice a day to the
south of Egypt
where it ferries workers back and forth – those that take their yearly
vacation, those who are newly hired and those returning home for good. The same
applies for the expatriates of other countries. And so, you can see that when
times are bad, these people will not rebel, they will go home and stay there
till the good times roll again.
The second vulnerability is the economy. He says that the
bad times are here already but guess what; he does not explain why there has
not been a rebellion of the expatriates. Well, never mind ... let's now look at
the numbers he cites. He says the revenues of the nation have gone down from 75
billion to 48 billion dollars a year. That's a shortfall of 27 billion about
which he offers this opinion: “Even in a country with a trillion dollars of
reserves, this trend causes pain, especially if it continues for many years.”
Well, when we divide a trillion by 27 billion, the result
says that the trend will have to continue for 37 years before these people will
have exhausted their reserves. But even if they keep all their guest workers –
having little or no work for them to do – they will not run out of money any
time soon because they invest the money everywhere in the world. In fact, they
only need 2.7 percent interest to get their shortfall back, and not be forced
to dip into their reserves. Rest assured, these people do not go to bed at
night worrying from where their next meal will come.
The third vulnerability is environmental. He says that
nearly 100 percent of the water that Dubai
uses comes from desalination, and then adds the following opinion: “this makes
the country extraordinarily susceptible to hydrological crisis.” It looks like
the man doesn't know what desalination means because that thing has nothing to
do with hydrological activities. Desalination means extracting the salt from
sea water, returning the salt to the sea and using the desalinated (fresh)
water for drinking, agriculture and industry. Nature then returns the used
water back to the sea like it has been doing for millions of years.
There is one more thing to be said about that topic. It is
that from Morocco in the West to the Gulf States in the East, Arab research has
been going on to develop more economical ways to desalinate sea water, and the
progress that's made is encouraging. In fact, the price per cubic meter has
come down so much, it is now possible to rely on solar energy alone to produce fresh
water on an industrial scale. Soon the Arab countries will not find it
necessary to use their non-renewable fuels to produce fresh water.
The fourth vulnerability is regional, and the fifth is Sunni
Islamism. With these two points, Daniel Pipes basically says that Dubai is at the mercy of the forces that threaten all
countries, from the big ones such as America
and Russia , to the small
ones such as Dubai and Singapore .
But if we are to take him at his words, Dubai
has found a way to navigate its difficulties using the wisdom you do not see in
Israel ,
for example, where upheavals have erupted continually since the founding of
that artificial concoction.