Enough!

Image by el7bara via the banned website Flickr thanks to the wonder that is RSS...

The Guardian's been at it again. This time it's Simon "I saw the place two years ago through a plane window" Jenkins who has followed in a long and honourable line of Guardian writers who have lined up to give Lalaland an almost weekly kicking.

Simon's article, however, beats even Germainipops' whine for its inaccuracy and sheer noodle-headedness. He slags off Dubai for being super-planned, architect-designed and "bailed out by Bahrain and Dohar" (sic) among other things. As usual for The Guardian on Dubai, the article is so packed with untruth and unsustainable assertion that it simply does not stand up as a piece of professional writing.

It's amazing to me that one of the UK's leading and most respected quality newspapers continues to publish completely inaccurate rubbish about Dubai from people with no qualification whatsoever to be writing about the place - and I'd include actually visiting Dubai and speaking to some people here as qualification.

But the rubbish is popping up everywhere - not just The Guardian - to the extent where I'm finding myself, to my immense surprise, coming out of the Dubai corner boxing FOR the city.

I never thought that would happen!

Like many other residents who have commented on these articles, I've had enough, really. There are now so many articles packed with so much rubbish, from so many writers who have spent so little time here that you start to question whether you were right to believe in journalism in the first place.

Germaine did her research from a tour bus. Simon talks about looking out of a plane window. But the Sydney Morning Herald's Elizabeth Farrelly goes one better, starting her piece with the immortal words, "For longer than I can remember - six months at least - I've wanted to write on Dubai as a ruin. Not that I've been there..."

She goes on: "Dubai, the oilless emirate, was conceived as the business end of Abu Dhabi's more oleaginous cultural empire."

You don't have to believe me when I tell you that her article goes downhill from there - you can go and read it for yourself. I bet it makes you angry. And yet it's merely symptomatic of a whole outbreak of similar pieces, written by people that have never even visited the place they're so eager to vilify, never walked on the streets they accuse of being filled with prosecco swilling expats dazed with the crash around them.

Another excellent example of the genre is here, featuring yet another marvellous line: "So last week I spent an entire day reading newspaper articles and travel guides about Dubai and am now much better informed..."

There's plenty to accuse Dubai of - many of us posting to blogs here have had more than a few swipes at a whole range of issues. And there are plenty more, for sure.

But enough of this uninformed rubbish, really!