Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the police chief of Dubai, certainly knows how to milk a good story for all it’s worth. It’s now been six weeks since Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room in an airport hotel, and most of the world long ago concluded that Israel’s Mossad spy agency was responsible. Yet day after day Tamim continues to make headlines, dribbling out more details of the clumsy and not-so-clandestine operation and issuing grandiose pronouncements.

Today, for example, he was quoted as saying Dubai would issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu and Mossad chief Meir Dagan. Two days ago, he announced that Dubai would begin training immigration officials to spot Israeli faces and accents, so as to prevent citizens of the Jewish state from entering on third-country passports. That followed a press conference last month at which he said he was “99 percent, if not 100 percent sure” that Mossad was behind the killing.

The general has an eager audience for these repetitive and increasingly implausible declarations -- especially in the Arab and European media, which revel in excoriating Israel for deeds those media routinely excuse or ignore when practiced by other governments. In an interesting bit of jujitsu, an editorial in London’s Financial Times on Monday lamented what it claimed was the softer standard “wimpish” European leaders apply to Israel for its “lawless behavior,” not to mention “possible war crimes” in Gaza.

“If, say Russia’s FSB, or Libyan agents, had carried out a killing… the discussion would have taken a different turn,” huffed the FT.

Well put – except, Russia did carry out a killing in Dubai, less than a year ago. The victim was Sulim Yamadayev, a former Chechen general, who was gunned down in the parking lot outside his apartment. Far from trying to disguise the crime, the assassin left behind a golden gun belonging to Ramzan Kadyrov, the gangster who rules Chechnya under the watchful eye of Vladimir Putin.

To his credit, police chief Tamim tried to subject Russia to the same treatment he has given Israel. At a press conference last April, he named the author of the crime as Adam Delimkhanov, a Kadyrov associate who is a member of the Russian parliament, and said he would ask Interpol for his arrest. It is, he said, “Russia’s responsibility in front of the world to control these killers from Chechnya.”

The difference, of course, is that the audience for a story about a Russian-sponsored assassination in Dubai is nothing like that for an Israeli hit. Relatively few stories were written about the Yamadayev case; there were no angry editorials in the Financial Times. Perhaps it’s needless to say that Delimkhanov and the other suspects identified by Dubai have not been arrested or extradited. As Shmuel Rosner summed it up in a dispatch for Slate: “The consequences for the assassins? None at all. For the Chechen government? None. For the deputy prime minister? None. For Dubai-Russian relations? None.”

It could be that, in the end, Israel too will suffer little from Tamim’s offensive. It will certainly be interesting to see if Dubai, a would-be regional entrepot sinking under its own debt, begins pulling aside travelers at its airport who it deems to resemble Israelis. For now, it seems clear enough that, for whatever reason, stories about the Mossad’s skullduggery are much more interesting to the rest of the world than tales about the Russian FSB --- or Libya, for that matter.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/03/the_dubai_police_chiefs_outlan.html

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