Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The best joke I read all weekend

"When people in Dubai are asked to pray for rain, it ends up raining in Iran"--
Nasser Hashempour, vice president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai.

LOL, eh? It's from a fascinating article in the NYT Sunday Magazine. The article is ostensibly about how the US is co-opting private firms into sanctioning Iran, but, to this ignorant Okie at least, it is most interesting for describing the Iran-Dubai connection.

Some further excerpts:

"Dubai now has as many Iranians as it does its own citizens."

"Since 2003, the number of Iranians in the United Arab Emirates has doubled to more than 450,000, he told me, and the number of Iranian businesses quadrupled to almost 10,000. Most are in Dubai, giving it the world’s second-largest concentration of Iranian expatriates (after California)."

"Iranians now have an estimated $300 billion in assets in tiny Dubai alone."

"Dubai and Iran are now so economically interdependent, local analysts told me, that the city-state has become to Iran something like what Hong Kong is to China."

No comments: