In Der Spiegel, Gerhard Spörl and Bernhard Zand have a piece about the Arab world’s hopes for the Obama administration. The article opens up with a description of Dubai as a wonderful land of capitalist opportunity. While the authors speak to the emirate’s big shots to get their opinions on Obama, they leave out a pretty important historical factoid:

“I love everything about America,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, said two years ago. His words reflected the sentiments of a growing class of ambitious Arabs who are tired of being seen as the eternal losers in world history. He spoke on behalf of those who are simply interested in doing business and have long felt alienated by the leftist and nationalist ideologies of pan-Arabism, by Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and by the Palestinians’ obsession with victimhood. But despite the rapid pace of progress in this futuristic region during the last eight years, the current administration in Washington has made things difficult for these modern Arabs. This explains why the sheikh of Dubai followed his words of adoration with a much-quoted caveat: “I love everything about America, except for its foreign policy.”

The current administration has made things difficult for Dubai, huh? And therefore the prospect of President Obama may be cause for celebration? Well, Spörl and Zand obviously don’t recall that, when President Bush tried to give some port management business to a company in Dubai, Barack Obama responded with this cowardly bit of isolationist fence-sitting:

Over four years after the worst terrorist attack in our history, not only are we failing to inspect 95% of the cargo that arrives at U.S. ports, but now we’re allowing our port security to be outsourced to foreign governments. Clearly, more time should have been spent investigating this deal and consulting with homeland security experts and local officials. I support my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who are seeking a full review of this deal.

Perhaps that’s why, despite the article’s obvious intentions, the Sheikh was never quoted as saying anything positive about Obama.