It wasn’t terribly forceful, however:

“Those spies that are currently present in the Gulf must leave the region within one week. If not, then we will cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Dahi Khalfan Tamim, a lieutenant general with the Dubai police.

So either “we will cross that bridge when we come to it” means something more bad-ass in Arabic, or they just want to evict the wuss spies.

How did Foreign Policy magazine make this joke and not me?

In their post “This will not end well” they make a joke about the Dubai assassination and the subsequent Israeli … blockade … involving the 2008 Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

How did I not think of this?

Of course, we’ve talked about Israelis and Dubai before (see Shahar Peer and Dubai).

But this is different.

The Emirates will now ”deny entry to anyone suspected of having Israeli citizenship,” Tamim said at a security conference in Abu Dhabi Monday.

So if my name sounds Jewish I’m not allowed in?

Huh.

Of course it still amuses me that Jeffrey Katzenberg and Stephen Spielberg are building a DreamWorks Animation theme park there (see News: DreamWorks Animation Theme Park in Dubai).

UPDATE: The article has a little more meat on it now, including this very interesting note:

[Dubai police Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim] did not explain what procedures would be used to identify the Israeli visitors, except that the police will ”develop skills” to recognize Israelis by ”physical features and the way they speak.”

Yes, you heard it here, they’re going to use sci-fi to keep the Jews out.

Perhaps I’m just into it because it’s Dubai, where I always felt rather surveilled to begin with.

Anyway, here’s a The Wall Street Journal article written by a senior military and intelligence analyst for an Israeli newspaper: “Israel and the Dubai Murder Mystery” (the site is gated, so I made a page for it on my site).

Apparently they’ve found info about some of the assassins: “Dubai killers stole identities of UK citizens“.

The Dubai papers played up the fact that it took either 11 or 17 people to kill him, but I think regardless of the size of the team, this is the key quote:

“His murder in his hotel room near Dubai’s international airport took 10 minutes and early forensic tests suggest he was suffocated. The assassins left on flights to Europe and Asia before the body was discovered on 20 January.”

He was dead before the Police even knew they’d been to and left the country.

Jeesh!