Debauched Dubai

Much merriment over the year's six thousand arrests for indecency on Dubai's beaches. Kissing, holding hands, bearing the midriff, you know the sort of thing? Oh, yes. We know the sort of thing, all right. And there is a lot more to it than kissing, or holding hands, or bearing the midriff. In Arabia, of all places, has been set up the full debauchery of the pseudo-West that the neocons castigate the rest of us for hating. It has brought slavery and now bankruptcy, along with so much else equally edifying and elevating, not least on the beaches. But now there is a backlash. When will there be a backlash here? When there is, it looks as likely as not to be rather more in the spirit of Old Arabia than in the spirit of Old Europe.