Shame On You Vanity Fair, For Publishing Such Trash

What kind of poison did A.A. Gill have for breakfast that caused him to spew such a disgusting torrent of racist, slanderous vitriol on Dubai and its residents ?



Oh wait. No poison required. Mr. Gill is a well-known racist and bigot with a long history of political incorrectness. He has managed to offend individuals, ethnic communities, and entire nations.

In 1998, he described Welsh people as "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls" in The Sunday Times, and as a result was reported to the Commission for Racial Equality.

Likewise, Gill has called the English "embarrassing," an "ugly race," as well as a "lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd," and Albanians as "short and ferret-faced."

In 2010, BBC presenter Clare Balding filed a complaint against Gill with the Press Complaints Commission for referring to her as “the dyke on a bike.” The Commission subsequently made a formal judgment against him.

Just last month, In February 2011, Gill described the county of Norfolk as ‘the hernia on the end of England’, causing outrage across the East of England.

In his article on Dubai, he slates the local population…

"And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy.

Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces."

…as well as the expatriate community, the members of which he describes as:

“… white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling."

"None of them are very clever?" Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black Mr. Gill. You may find yourself witty, but we surely don't.

And shame on you, Vanity Fair editors! I thought yours was a publication that prided itself on maintaining at the very least acceptable standards of journalism. What prompted you to publish such rubbish?

Sadly, those of us who live in the United Arab Emirates have become accustomed to this never-ending stream of trash by various and sundry writers who eschew balance and objectivity in favour of hearsay and sensationalism.

I have previously responded to similarly thinly disguised hate mongering with blog posts you might find of interest. (Start here: An Open Letter to Johann Hari of the Independent)

Finally, in this age of instant news, I find it curious that Vanity Fair should choose to publish an article that was clearly "researched" (I use the term loosely in this case), about a year ago.

All in all? A disgraceful piece the quality of which falls infinitely short of what your readers have come to expect from Vanity Fair.

Forget about Dubai. If you can't do any better than this, you are clearly the ones running on empty, not us.

Shame on you Vanity Fair, for scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel, publishing muck and flogging it as fair comment.