US approves sale of a port to a nation we have a GOOD relationship with...

[A Black Falcon]

A British company is selling property to a company from the UAE. So? Why is this bad? Because it's American land being bought by a foreign country? That's not new news... the majority of this state, for instance, is owned by foreign companies (paper companies own huge amounts of forestland... and most paper companies are, at the top, foreign-owned. Including Arab country based companies, I believe, though I'm not certain.) Look, if this were happening five years ago, it'd be no news... but because now there's a huge amount of racism towards Arabs in this country because of 9/11, it is ("But they deserve it"? In certain things, they do... but this is business, not the amount of democracy in their governments or their respects for the rights of their citizens or Western standards of law. Business. As in, this won't affect anything... (oh, and anyway, security doesn't change; this is just the port, not the port security. That isn't affected.)

It's somewhat absurd that so many politicians are jumping on this as "an issue to unite behind because we know there's a lot of misplaced popular outrage over it"... sadly absurd...

Really, what means could you find to deny this based on? That UAE's rights record isn't perfect and their freedoms ... well, in line with the region... that'd probably be true, but... with a few exceptions, we don't censure companies based on their nation of origin. Perhaps we should, but unless we had a coherent, CONSISTENT policy... and anyway, this would be punishing a company for something that is not their fault. Dubai Ports World is just a company, not the government... (yeah, the government owns it, at least in part, but still, that doesn't mean that it has anything to do with anything related to rights, or terrorism, or whatever else...