Depicting outsiders

The New York Times bursts the bubble on the persistently good press Dubai has received since it began expanding and becoming more "westernized" by suggesting that in some ways, the emirate is quite resistant to Westerners. The article, about the rape case of a French boy who had been living in Dubai with his family, describes the horrifying incident in detail, both shocking the reader and securing his sympathy from the beginning of the story. Parts of the story remain unclear, though. The narrative paragraphs in the lede are a little hard to understand in terms of the people portrayed in them; I was uncertain at first about the country of residence of the alleged victim and his relation to the other people in the car. There is also no mention of the role of the victim's friend in the crime. Additionally, despite the caption under the photo, the article did not convince me that the injustice of Dubai's legal system only affected foreigners. It sounded to me as though Dubai's laws regarding homosexuality and rape would be unjust for anyone. Only later in the article does there appear a suggestion that the injustice lies in forcing Islamic law on non-Muslims. I think this is a point of contention, as ex-patriates who move to the emirate ought to know what kind of government they will be under. I would have liked to hear more evidence about the different treatment foreigners receive compared with native citizens.

A Boston Globe article, on the other hand, does a great job detailing attitudes towards outsiders in its story on Everett's distaste at being surrounded by two cities that call themselves "sanctuaries" for all immigrants, legal and illegal. The article's most useful in paragraphs in explaining the situation are those that compare Everett and Chelsea. Both have similar blue-collar backgrounds, but Chelsea has become more ethnically diverse than its neighboring town. These comparisons also show how Everett's and Chelsea's attitudes are put into practice, using as an example the telephone recordings at their respective city halls--bilingual in Chelsea but English-only in Everett.

The Washington Post considers displaced Kurds forced to become outsiders as Turkish shelling campaigns compel them to leave their homeland. The article draws a distinction between the group of Christians who have fallen victim to violence targeted at the PKK and the terrorists that Turkey is trying to drive out. This is a different approach to a story from the NYT one today in which native residents are ignored as if they were outsiders or did not belong in their own homeland. The article clearly gives a lot of background information and calls attention to an under-acknowledged group of refugees.