Adventures in Bad Viral Journalism: Did it Really Rain Money in the Gulf, and if so, Where? Dubai? Asir in Saudi Arabia? Kuwait?

A viral YouTube video that shows money falling from the sky has variously been described as happening in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, and involving sums anywhere from a few thousand dollars to half a million pounds sterling. Before we embark on the competing claims, let's see the video itself:


Certainly, the video shows some amount of money falling from the sky, somewhere. Since there are multiple incompatible stories, we need to start with a control version of this urban legend/social media viral story. I'm not sure any of the multiple reports describing this event in Dubai/Kuwait/the Asir Province of Saudi Arabia can be called totally reliable. So let's make our control one that can be called dependably unreliable, The Daily Mail:

 Fact checking: yes the statement that It is estimated that notes valued between two and three million Dirham were loose - meaning up to £500,000": As of yesterday, three million dirhams would have been about £527,000. or US$817,000. Even if the total number of notes is misstated, each 500 dirham note is just under the £88 pounds cited (£87.95 yesterday) Not a bad "windfall," so to speak.

If it happened.

The Emirati press says it didn't happen in the UAE. No doubt Dubai's reputation for extravagant expenditures and outrageous building projects fueled the idea that this happened in Dubai.

Emirates 25/7 News offers a thoroughly different story:

Two bank employees supplying ATM machine during sandstorm when nearly SR10,000 in SR100 notes blown away. (Reuters) [I have not found the supposed Reuters story.]

A wave of sand and thunderstorms in Saudi Arabia brought dust, rain and snow across the desert Gulf Kingdom except one place, where it rained money.

Residents of a neighbourhood in the Southern Asir province could hardly believe their eyes when they were flooded with hundreds of Saudi riyal notes.

Unlike in rainfall, instead of seeking shelter they welcomed the money storm with open hands, open hearts and a big smile on their faces.

They apparently were very curious as to where the money came from but not to the extent they would return it to the source. They simply picked the notes and vanished happily inside their homes.

In a report from Asir, ‘Sabq’ newspaper explained the phenomenon. “Two bank employees were supplying the ATM machine with notes during a sandstorm when nearly SR10,000 in SR100 notes were blown away.”

“The two called the police, who called back-up to search for the money, but not a single note was found.”

The story says these were Saudi Riyal  SR100 notes, each worth a bit over US $26  or £17.20 Sterling, so SR10000 would be $2600 dollars or £1720, an amount that may be credible for loading an ATM machine, but hardly The Daily Mail's half a million Sterling.

The quoted Saudi newspaper Sabq is an electronic one, and i haven't yet found the alleged story, but let me also note that the Emirati report cited above is illustrated with a man holding up a  Saudi 50 Riyal banknote as if it were one of those that fell from the sky, but the story says they were 100 Riyal notes.

Also, Asir is the Saudi Province just north of Yemen. I've never been there, but both the tall buildings and the spoken Arabic in the video make me think this is somewhere in the Gulf.

Skeptical yet, Watson? It gets better. Multiple reports noting background buildings say it's filmed in Kuwait.

Abu Dhabi's The National: "'Raining money’ video was filmed in Kuwait - not Dubai"
notes:

A building, Burj Jasim, can be seen near the car park, where a Fatburger restaurant is also located. Both indicate that the incident happened in Al Murqab area’s Al Soor Street, in Kuwait City. 

Arabian Business adds:

A video of the incident has gone viral on Youtube and social media websites. While some reports have claimed the incident took place in Dubai or Saudi Arabia, verification of the buildings where the video was filmed, it appears that the incident happened in Kuwait. Midway through the video, the name Burj Jassim (Jassim Tower) appears on a building outside where people are gathering the money. The presence of a FatBurger outlet, also located at Burj Jassim (pictured below) would support the belief that the video was shot in Kuwait.

So what are we dealing with here? Clearly such conflicting stories can't all be true, and no one in Kuwait even seems to have reported it. Possibilities:

1. Perhaps this is real, but misattributed. The Gulf has been windy and unseasonably cold and maybe a crew reloading an ATM did lose some currency but not some huge mount.
2. Perhaps the video was done for some sort of commercial promotion, or as a commercial for television.
3. It could also be a hoax.

Because it Can: Dubai Marks the New Year with Attempt to Break Last Year's World's Record

It's still several hours from 2015 here in the US, but the New Year has already arrived in Dubai. Having last year claimed to have set the world record for New Year's fireworks displays. How to follow up this year? Try to outdo last year, of course. I mean if you've got the world's tallest building, you might as well appear to blow it up once a year.

Excess Meets Excess: Lady Gaga Arrives in Dubai on Mideast Tour

Lady Gaga has arrived in Dubai for her first concert. The world has not ended, and in fact she has reportedly said she will dress modestly out of respect for local sensibilities..

Confirming that celebrities are not in fact bound by the same rules as the rest of us, Israeli press reports say she will fly directly from Dubai to her next gig in Tel Aviv. I thought only John Kerry got to do that.

Dispatches from the Sidelines of the Culture Wars

It's been a while since we've looked at the lighter side of the culture wars in the Middle East. This in no way is intended to minimize the darker side, so visible in this weekend's drive-by shooting of a Coptic wedding in Imbaba, Egypt, presumably by Islamists, that left four dead, including a young girl. Those grim events are the front lines; these are reports from the less depressing sidelines.

• Usually, Arab countries carefully screen and censor movies before permitting their release. In Dubai, recently, however, a Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Escape Plan was shut down halfway through. (I've never heard of the film, but given the age of these two action heroes, are they escaping from an old folks' home? Are there wheelchair chases?) (Before you complain, I'm a senior citizen myself. I just don't star in action films.) Anyway,  according to  The National, the showing at the Ibn Battuta Mall's Grand Cinema was stopped in mid-film when it was discovered a character in the film curses in Arabic. Somehow that had apparently been missed by the original censors.  The National does not enlighten us as to what was actually said.

•  You've probably already heard that the singer Rihanna is being criticized for posing at the Shaikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. She was fully and conservatively covered but some of the shots are posed in ways the authorities did not consider appropriate for Abu Dhabi's crown jewel mosque.

•  In Paris recently, Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) was giving a talk to the Institut du Monde Arabe when demonstrators opposed to the Egyptian coup and apparently supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood interrupted and then disrupted his talk, leading to at least one broken window and Aswany being rushed out of the hall. (Le Monde's account, in French, is here.) Video: 

• "Turkey Opens First Online Islamic Sex Shop."  Another report here. Since I don't read Turkish, I can't comment directly, but quote from Ahram Online:

The "Halal Sex Shop" website presents its products as being "entirely safe," and in compliance with Islamic norms.

Internet users who enter the site find two different links directing them to separate sections for male and female products.

Other sections of the website are designed to discuss sex in the context of Islam under various headings: "Oral sex according to Islam", "Sex manners in Islam" and "Sexual life in Islam."

The anonymous founders of the website said they believed the online shop would help correct prejudices against Islam which they claimed is perceived as "against sex."

• Finally, the headline "Union Formed to Represent Tunisian Rappers," may strike you as funny at first, but perhaps not if you read it in conjunction with "Tunisia Rapper Acquitted on Appeal."

When "Wretched Excess" is Your National Motto, Just Dropping a Ball Would Be, Well, Dropping the Ball

In about an hour and a half, 2013 will arrive in the Eastern time zone of the US, but it has already swept across the Middle East. In New York City, they're going to drop a shining ball in Times Square and the crowd will go wild. But New York City hasn't had the world's tallest building in years, and actually has budget constraints and such. To see it done right you need to go to Dubai, city of the world's temporarily tallest building (the Burj Khalifa, which appears to explode in this video), city of indoor ski slopes in the desert and flagrant wretched excess. A report here.


Okay, Times Square, the ball's in your court.

Dubai Now, Building a Bigger Taj Mahal; and Dubai Then (1907)

You've probably already heard this elsewhere, but what do you do when you already have the world's tallest building and the Persian Gulf's first indoor ski slope? Well, Dubai's next project is to build a replica of the Taj Mahal as a hotel and wedding destination. It will be called Taj Arabia. But wait for it — this is Dubai, after all — it will be four times the size of the one in Agra. It will also cost $1.2 billion or thereabouts. Shows you what Shah Jahan could have done if he'd had money.

Why? I don't really know. Maybe because they didn't have one yet?

Just for the hell of it I thought I'd remind everyone that a century ago Dubai was a very different sort of place. I've talked about Lorimer's Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf before, and here's "Dibai Town" as he calls it, in Volume IIA, pp. 454-456 as it was around 1907:

Two Odds and Ends

Two of the week's odder links:

• On this one, I think the headline says it all: "First Arab-Muslim Sumo Wrestler Faces Challenges in Japan"

•  Coming soon to a Starbucks near you?: "Forget cappuccino, Dubai drinkers get a taste for camel-ccino." Apparently in Dubai, the latest Big Thing is camel-milk latte, camel milkshakes, etc.

UAE: The Other Emirates

Dubai and Abu Dhabi are of course international superstars; the other five Emirates tend to get little attention, abroad or, to some extent, at home. Jenifer Fenton at The Arabist has a useful post on "The United (But Not Equal) Arab Emirates.  (Sorry, link was missing for a while. It should work now.)

Iftar is Later for Those on Upper Floors of Burj Khalifa

In case you missed this over the weekend, the Grand Mufti of Dubai announced that for those living in the the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building (until the Saudis build this half-mile high one), has announced that during Ramadan, residents of the 160-storey-tall building must observe three different times for iftar (breaking their fast), dependent for when the sun sinks below the horizon at their altitude. Those up to the 80th floor may break fast when the ground-dwellers do; those on floors 80 to 150 must wait two minutes after the muezzin's Maghreb prayer call; also after the evening call; and those above the 150th floor must wait three minutes. The same in reverse for the Fajr prayer at dawn, since the high-dwellers can see the sun earlier. It all makes perfect sense, since Ramadan is always regulated by when one actually can discern the dawn. It's just refining the rules for those who live at unprecedented heights.

If You Build the Burj Khalifa, Hollywood will Come

Don't tell me you didn't see this one coming: now that Dubai has the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, somebody was going to use it as a movie set. Sure enough, Tom Cruise and company have arrived in Dubai for filming of the fourth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Filming will start next week and is likely to last more than three weeks. It will take place in locations across Dubai, including the Burj Khalifa and the Meydan racetrack, said an industry insider, who asked not to be named. Car chases will be filmed on the Sheikh Zayed Road and in Bur Dubai and Deira, the source said.

I guess it's a step up from the last Sex and the City, in which Abu Dhabi was played by Morocco, with lots of CGI. Dubai is presumably playing itself.

Side note: four of my last five posts have dealt with the UAE. That may be a first.

Hunting for Housing?: A Bargain in Dubai if You Don't Mind Heights

We all know Dubai has been hit hard by the property values crash, so much so that the World's Tallest Building®, the Burj Khalifa (AKA the Burj Dubai before Abu Dhabi bought the naming rights), has a major fire sale going on because only 8% of the giant tower is occupied: the cheapest studios starting at 80,000 UAE dirhams annually. or some $21,780. I suppose that's not really that bad (though it's more than I pay in mortgage annually, but I'm not in the world's tallest building), and it's a 40% cut from the list.

Of course it's renting, and the article doesn't state the size of a studio, and I still can't afford it, but it almost is starting to sound affordable. Not to me, but it's not pricing itself out of the depressed Dubai property market I suspect. So what began as wretched excess has become affordable? But can it sustain itself? We'll see. Prices slashed! Unprecedented bargains! You can see Iran from your house!

Possible World's Biggest Guitar Coming to (Where Else?) Dubai

A new Hard Rock Cafe is coming to Dubai, replacing one that closed last year. The new one will have a 118-foot guitar over the front door. We're told that "The owners have also submitted their immense guitar to Guinness World Records."

Dubai, of course, has the world's tallest building, but the Saudis beat them to the world's biggest clock.

Dubai Nights on the Beach

The National waxes romantic about nights on the beach in Dubai, after midnight. It sounds fairly nice, since as I've noted previously, Washington has been giving Dubai a run for its money this summer, both in temperature and humidity, but we don't have nearby beaches.

Of course there are some limitations on what you should be doing on the beach in Dubai, though there may be some exceptions, and there is apparently an underground culture of sorts, this article is talking about the good, clean, enjoyment of a night on the beach.

The Heat: Dubai on the Potomac

If I've been slow posting, it's partly because I'm busy and partly because of the heat wave that's been plaguing the eastern US all week. The only connection this post has with the Middle East is that the weather is positively Middle Eastern: in fact Washington's highs have been tracking pretty close to Dubai's all week, in the low 100s Fahrenheit, with us probably besting them once or twice. I'm doing most of my work in the evenings, taking time away from blogging.

Dubai Bumper Cars

The National links to a video and writes about the phenomenon of outrageous driving on Sheikh Zayed Road. The article offers all the official deplorings. The video is going to reinforce every stereotype of Arab driving anyone has ever harbored. But I have to wonder: is some of this staged? It really is hard to picture this going on for any period of time without law enforcement showing up:

Sex and Some Other City

Some of these links are from back in April, but heck, I'm an old married man with a kid who doesn't keep up with the whole Sex and the City thing (though at least I no longer have to watch Dora the Explorer cartoons), and it took a younger colleague to flag this issue for me. As apparently everyone on earth and several of the inner planets knows, the forthcoming movie Sex and the City 2, opening soon, is at least partly set in Abu Dhabi.

Except that both Abu Dhabi and Dubai declined the honor of allowing filming in their fair cities, since, as certain British and Pakistani couples have learned recently, and despite a general sense of openness, and some locals who know how to get around the rules, there's no sex in those cities. At least not officially, and especially not on the beaches. So Morocco is playing Abu Dhabi for the movies. What part of Morocco is not specified in the material I've seen, and it's been a long time since I've been in Morocco, but I'm guessing there's a lot of computer graphics backgrounds in use, unless Casablanca has gone all Shanghai on us, or they just figure nobody knows what Abu Dhabi looks like. (Anybody want to bet there are camels in it? Gotta be camels or you'd think it was Palm Springs, right? Our heroines are going to ride camels, right? Isn't that how you get from the airport to your hotel in Abu Dhabi? It was the last time Wilfred Thesiger was there. Except there was no airport. I'm ranting. Sorry.)

It would be interesting to know why the brains (if that was the bodily organ involved) behind Sex and and the City 2 decided to set the story in Abu Dhabi in the first place. Was it a Maurice Chevalier "Come wees me to ze Casbah" thing? Except for the old fort and a mosque or two, the oldest building in Abu Dhabi dates from the 1980s (oh, sorry, that one was just torn down to build a new one: make it the 1990s: wait, here come the bulldozers) so it's not exactly Casbah country.

The National, Abu Dhabi's increasingly lively English daily, has been on the case, with an early take here; an article here on potential tourist boosts, and a piece on films made in locations other than their alleged setting here (familiar to Washingtonians who've seen plenty of films and TV shows where the chase passes the Lincoln Memorial and then the Sierra Nevadas show up in the background).

So Morocco, which has played a lot of other Arab countries in films before (as has Israel, for that matter), may drive a tourism boom to Abu Dhabi. But to paraphrase the title of a famous British play: no sex, please, we're Emirati.

Late Addition: A commenter has noted that my 1) CGI Abu Dhabi and 2) camel comments are not only dead on, but in the trailer (1:17, 1:23). So I have no alternative but embedding the trailer:


Forgive me. It's worse than I'd imagined.

Weekend Links, Shamelessly Borrowed from The Arabist

I'm outta here for the weekend, and was busy today and tonight, but The Arabist dropped a whole lot of link dumps today and you may want to follow them; one of Algerian links (the merguez picture is a nice touch), though I've already linked to two of the articles he mentions; another on the whole Mabhouh/Mossad/Dubai soap opera; a big roundup of general links; and a whole bunch of Egypt updates.

While you're over there, see Ursula Lindsey's post on "Where is Cairo headed?", which samples her longer version for The Review at The National called "And then Cairo Turned Itself Inside Out."

And another item, this one not stolen from The Arabist, but also from The Nstional: "Was Mabhouh betrayed by someone inside Hamas?"

I thank Issandr for saving me work, and hope those links hold you for the weekend.

Another Twist in the Dubai Tale: Some Pertinent Questions

The Dubai investigation goes on. Here, from Gulf News, is a new twist: the role, or possible role, of Yuval Tal, Israeli entrepreneur whose Payoneer service is mixed up in the credit card side of the plot Ex-IDF, apparently a guy who bragged about his IDF exploits.

In general, when I hear of somebody bragging about their military exploits, I assume real covert operators would avoid them like the plague. But who knows? Maybe they used his services without his knowledge; maybe they didn't mind exposing him; maybe it's all bogus. But the Dubai authorities are not just screaming "Zionist plot!": they're documenting the links.

If the story linked above is correct, this guy doesn't sound like a reliable (from operational security viewpoints) asset for a covert operation. But I'm starting to wonder if this operation was supposed to be transparent, and obvious, with a big "F*** You, signed Mossad" or rather, "we can hit you, leave fingerprints and calling cards and appear on all your cameras and all over YouTube and still get our man, get away, and laugh at you"? Mossad has tripped over its own feet much more frequently than its admirers like to admit, but this was so obvious and thoroughly documented that one wonders if it was really intended to remain covert, or if the whole point was intended to be obvious.

If that were the case, then the question is what was the real motive of the hit?: was it to get the target (presumably at least part of the motive); or to proclaim Mossad's invincibility and omnipresence; or perhaps, to genuinely embarrass a country that has always had a softer line toward Israel than most Gulf states? Why do it in Dubai? Didn't Mabhouh ever go to Beirut or Damascus where Israel operates with less restraint? Was this deliberately intended to undermine the limited links already existing between Israel and the UAE?

And if so, why? Can anyone have thought that this would not become the center of attention? Or was that the intention?

And if it was a deliberate provocation — I'm not convinced of this but I'm trying to figure it out — was it a rogue act by Mossad chief Meir Dagan? It's not like it would embarrass the Foreign Ministry, as it presumably would if anyone but Avigdor Lieberman was the chief of diplomacy, but it still seems that if this many fingerprints were left behind, either Mossad has gotten sloppy, or someone was deliberately sending a message. That makes me think it goes higher than Dagan, and was a decision of state.

Of course, I can't prove that Israel did it, but if someone else did, they sure knew how to leave Israeli fingerprints all over the crime scene.

I've been around the track a few times and have spent decades dealing with the Middle East, so I'm not exactly naive when it comes to these sorts of shadow war operations. The real stuff is usually nasty and not usually limited to one side. It's a game fought in the shadows and it's usually rather grittier and less defined than some of the old Eric Ambler Istanbul/World War II stories; I think some of David Ignatius' novels might come closer. Four or five people I knew personally, maybe more, have died in those shadows, most of them not part of the game. (AUB President Malcolm Kerr and AUB Professor Leigh Douglas are two I can name without hesitation, both killed in Lebanon.)

So I'm not naive. But there's still something wrong with this story. Either Mossad's operational security has gone south with a vengeance, or they wanted all this publicity.

I won't, at the moment, speculate on why, if that is indeed what happened.

Dubai Asking FBI About Hit Team Credit Cards?

Interesting piece in The National.

The next few days may be crazy in the real job, so I ask your indulgence if I'm a bit quiet.

Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick

UPDATED: In tomorrow's Ha'aretz, Yossi Melman, who generally knows this beat pretty well, raises some questions about the details emerging: "Was Mossad on a Fantastic Adventure in Dubai?" The more elaborate this gets, the more unprofessional it seems.

There are now 15 more suspects in the Mabhouh hit in Dubai. So there are now 26 suspects in all, and this chart from Gulf News (PDF) shows how they are linked to each other.

Assassination hit squads: mainstay of the Dubai travel industry since 2010.

If this was indeed a Mossad operation, there seem to have been some holes in their operational security. (Well, okay, they got their target and got away, and they may not normally look anything like these passport photos. The number of beards, mustaches, shaved heads and glasses suggests disguise.)

ADDED: I don't usually flag comments since they're there for you to read, but I know some folks don't read them, so I thought I'd flag the three comments so far on this otherwise thin post. First, David Mack:

David Mack said...

Mossad chose its operatives' passports carefully. It turns out that some 33 nationalities do not require visas and are not subject to the routine iris scans that UAE introduced at all points of entry in 2002. Abu Dhabi's National has a good article at [link].

Next, "Will":

Will said:

2010? Come on, Dubai has been the assassination capital of the region since at least 2008 -- Suzanne Tamim, the Chechen warlord gunned down in '09. Who am I missing?

Just embarrassing for Mabhouh to get it in Garhoud when the Dubai Marina has been THE place to get killed for quite some time.

To which I have replied:

Will: I suppose three makes it the "assassination capital of the region," geographically limited, but London balcony falls have accounted for four Egyptians so far (Ashraf Marwan, Nasser's son in law and alleged Israeli informer; actress Suad Husni with vague rumors of shady ties; Al-Leithy Nassif, Egyptian Ambassador to Britain; and Ali Shafiq, aide to the late Abd al-Hakim Amr. Must be the ice on the balconies.

Admittedly, Dubai's been a lot livelier lately, like Istanbul in an Eric Ambler novel or something.

And Larnaca is still in the running, I think.

Since the comments on this post are more interesting than the post, I thought I'd move them up here.