If you’ve been shopping recently, or even if you’ve just been scrolling your Instagram feed, you may have noticed that “Dubai chocolate” is suddenly everywhere. They’re selling it at Walmart, Target, Costco, and Trader Joe’s now, and big European chocolate companies like Lindt and Godiva are producing their own branded versions. Online, it’s a viral craze, with videos of people trying the various chocolates getting millions of views. People are even sharing ways to customize their Starbucks order to mimic the chocolate’s flavor profile, and the hosts of the Today show have tried it on-air. 

What is “Dubai chocolate?” Basically, a chocolate bar with ground-up pistachios and kadayif (shredded filo pastry) in the middle. In the service of journalism, I’ve tried a bar, and it’s not bad—a nice mix of sweet and savory, with a slight crunch reminiscent of a KitKat or Twix. But there’s a major problem with all this, because the Dubai chocolate trend helps to cover up dictatorship, genocide, and some of the worst human rights abuses on Earth. 

 

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say the government of the United Arab Emirates, and of Dubai in particular, has been involved in pushing Dubai chocolate on the world market since Day One. But they certainly jumped onboard at Day Two. The product was created in 2021 by a confectioner named Sarah Hamouda, who took her inspiration from a pregnancy craving for chocolate combined with pistachio and enlisted the Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin to concoct the recipe. Really, though, “created” is a strong word, since people across the Middle East have been making pistachio sweets for centuries, so “popularized” would be closer to the mark. Initially, the product wasn’t called “Dubai chocolate” at all, but the clunkier and more annoying name “Can’t Get Knafeh Of It,” after the “knafeh” filling. Hamouda’s company did business in Dubai in relative obscurity until 2023, when an influencer named Maria Vehera—whose content revolves around trying different foods and restaurants in the United Arab Emirates—went viral with a TikTok video about the candy. Other influencers copied Vehera, as they do, and before long Dubai chocolate was a full-blown fad. And that’s where the sheikhs got involved. 

Because a lot of our readers are American, and the U.S. education system does a remarkably bad job of teaching us about other countries, a little background on the United Arab Emirates and its leaders may be needed here. There’s no pretty way to say it: the UAE is a dictatorship. It’s even less democratic than its neighbor across the Persian Gulf, Iran, because Iran at least has somewhat competitive elections from time to time, and reform-minded candidates like Masoud Pezeshkian can sometimes get into office (though their power is limited, compared to the Ayatollah’s). In the UAE, there’s none of that. The Emirates themselves are seven hereditary kingdoms, ruled by sheikhs with absolute power, and the president of the UAE is always chosen from among those seven rulers. In fact, since the UAE was established in 1971, there have been only three presidents—all of them the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi, and all related to each other. There are parliamentary elections, but not everyone can vote in them; in the 2019 election, only an “appointed electorate of more than 330,000, representing just under one-quarter of the total citizen population” got to cast a ballot. The sheikhs and their bureaucracy, of course, control the “appointing.” Even this highly limited form of democracy only applies to half of the 40-member parliament; the other 20 members are selected directly by the sheikhs. In terms of democracy and authoritarianism, then, the UAE is in roughly the same category as North Korea—so the promotion of “Dubai” themed products should immediately raise our suspicions, just as it would if someone tried to sell us “Pyongyang taffy.” 

The current Crown Prince of Dubai, and the defense minister for the UAE as a whole, is a man named Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum. He’s the son of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the billionaire ruler of Dubai, and his personal net worth is estimated around $400 million. He also loves the whole “Dubai chocolate” trend. So much so, in fact, that he collaborated with Sarah Hamoud’s candy company FIX last September, producing an exclusive Sheikh Hamdan-themed chocolate bar. This is how the company promoted it online:

FIX is deeply honored to have crafted a one and only flavor in collaboration with His Highness Sheikh Hamdan, tailored for personal taste and for the love of the special ingredient that is Emirati Halwa [UAE flag emoji]

 

This exclusive bar will not be available for sale as this is a first-of-its-kind collaboration.

 

At FIX, we have always strived to represent the city of Dubai with pride as its original viral chocolate.

 

To receive such recognition and support from His Highness fuels our passion to keep innovating and pushing the boundaries of creativity with irreplaceable FIX experiences.

 

A heartfelt thank you for being a part of our FIX journey, which began in the vibrant city of Dubai, where dreams have no limits and anything is possible… [heart emoji]

 

Sarah & Fix Team [UAE flag emoji]

The propaganda aspect of this promotion is not subtle. Hamoud and her company are selling the Emirati monarchy to a global audience, just as much as the monarchy is helping to sell her chocolate. She seems positively awestruck to be dealing with Sheikh Hamdan himself, who comes across as a benevolent Willy Wonka figure who just loves halwa (a sweet flour-and-butter paste that can have various spices mixed in). The relationship doesn’t end there, either: this March, Hamoud was recognized with a special meeting with Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum, Hamdan’s father, and another glowing post from the FIX account followed: “To stand in the presence of someone whose leadership has shaped Dubai into a global hub for innovation was inspiring beyond words.” 

Meanwhile, it seems the Emirati government has been buying media coverage for Dubai chocolate at major English-speaking news outlets. At CNN Travel, we can find a long puff piece about Sarah Hamoud titled “Meet the woman behind Dubai’s viral super-chunky chocolate bar,” replete with cutesy subheadings like “Choc-full of flavor” and “A choco-lot of demand.” It bears a tagline: “Editor’s Note: This CNN series is, or was, sponsored by the country it highlights.” So the network has allowed a Gulf dictatorship to simply drop a sack of money at its door and choose what topics the news network will cover—and Dubai chocolate got the nod. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant form of journalistic corruption. 

There’s a name for this kind of propaganda: “foodwashing.” You might be familiar with “greenwashing,” in which companies and nations pretend to be more environmentally friendly than they really are, or “pinkwashing,” in which they leverage support for LGBTQ rights (real or pretended) to distract from other issues. In the Middle East these days, there’s also a lot of “sportswashing.” Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have spent vast amounts of money to attach themselves to popular sporting events like the World Cup or LIV golf, and thus improve their image on the world stage. But “foodwashing” is just as insidious. Israel and its supporters do plenty of it, describing traditional Middle Eastern dishes and even spices like za’atar, which have been around for centuries, as “Israeli cuisine” in order to promote the nation as a whole. Or, in a more benign case, part of the reason Thai food became so popular in the United States is that the Thai government funded an extensive program to “establish at least 3,000 Thai restaurants worldwide” in the early 2000s. Around the world, food isn’t just food. It’s also an important tool for exerting cultural “soft power.”

In the case of the UAE, Dubai chocolate is just one aspect of a comprehensive media strategy to promote the nation—and Dubai in particular—as a luxurious destination for tourists, rather than a horrible dictatorship. Among other strategies, the Emirates offer generous rebates to movie studios that want to film there, conditional on the filmmakers “featuring the UAE’s national history, culture and identity in the productions’ storylines.” Dubai has a dedicated film commission, and has enticed Tom Cruise to film himself climbing the Burj Khalifa for Mission Impossible, essentially creating a giant “product placement” for the skyscraper. More recently, Dubai has also been cultivating online content creators, setting up a $40 million “influencer academy” where young people fly in for training on “photography and cinematography, editing and color grading, sound effects, [and] AI tools” —all so they can “support Dubai’s unparalleled vision for the future of tourism.” In 2023, journalists with the environmental blog DeSmog found that several Instagram influencers who’d promoted visiting Dubai during the COP28 climate summit were paid to do so by the conference organizers. And because there’s very little regulation on online influencing as an industry, you can never be sure if the smiling faces telling you how delicious Dubai chocolate is are on the Emirati payroll too.  

All of these different forms of propaganda “washing” work the same way: by promoting something nice, and covering up something atrocious. Lockheed Martin wants you to think about its cheery rainbow Pride parade banner, rather than its killer drones and missiles. Saudi Arabia wants you to think about Phil Mickelson hitting a long drive down the fairway at a golf tournament, rather than Jamaal Khashoggi being murdered and hacked to bits with a bone saw. And the sheikhs in Dubai, Hamdan and his father, want very much for you to think about Dubai chocolate, rather than any of the skeletons in their capacious closets. 

It’s not just that the United Arab Emirates is a dictatorship, although that’s bad enough. It also has one of the worst human rights records of any nation on Earth today, up to and including complicity in genocide. According to the nonprofit Walk Free Foundation, the UAE has the seventh highest rate of modern-day slavery of any country, with an estimated 132,000 people living in conditions of functional enslavement. The majority of these are migrant workers, who come to the UAE seeking job opportunities, only to have their passports confiscated by their bosses. They’re then forced to work long hours in extreme heat and other dangerous conditions, and to live in cramped and unsanitary housing, often for little or no pay. Dubai, with its many skyscrapers and other construction projects, is a particular center for that kind of abuse. The Middle East and North Africa Rights Group also reports that arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture are “widespread” in the UAE, despite the country being a signatory to the United Nations convention against those practices since 2012. In one case from 2022, a British tourist named Ali Ahmed reports that he was arrested simply for wearing a Qatar football jersey, then “beaten, electrocuted, stabbed and interrogated days and nights, denied food or water, and was not able to contact anyone” until he was released, just as suddenly and arbitrarily, a month later. 

For women in the UAE, the situation is dire. True, there have been some reforms—women can now drive and vote in the sham elections, for what that’s worth—but the bar is still on the floor. As Human Rights Watch reports, the nation still has male guardianship laws that restrict women’s movement, with many state universities requiring their female students to “show they have male guardian permission before they can go on field trips or stay at or leave campus accommodations or grounds.” Nonmarital sex is also illegal, and if people who aren’t married end up having a child, both parents can face two years in prison—although, as HRW points out, it’s mainly women who are actually prosecuted, since only men can file the complaints. So while people like Sarah Hamoud and Maria Vehera might be relatively well-treated in Dubai, they should know better than to provide media cover for a government that still doesn’t see women as fully human. (Meanwhile, it shouldn’t be surprising in the slightest that the vile misogynist influencer Andrew Tate loves Dubai and has a home there.)

And that’s for heterosexual people. The picture for LGBTQ rights is even more dire, as there really aren’t any. Homosexuality between men is illegal in the UAE, carrying a minimum prison sentence of six months. There’s also an array of more vague laws against “any flagrant indecent act,” which in practice means anything even vaguely non-heterosexual involving any gender. Gay clubs and bars exist in Dubai, as Dr. Ryan Centner has written, but they’re secretive, as they used to be in much of the United States. From his own visit, Centner describes a “constant sense of your hair standing on end and having to be cautious about who’s listening, who’s at the door, who’s invited, or what might be said and passed along, that could get us in trouble.” There’s also no legal recognition for transgender people in the Emirates—something the Thai model Rachaya Noppakaroon discovered when she was “unceremoniously stopped at immigration and interrogated at the airport for nine hours” in Dubai, then deported back to Thailand, all because her gender identity didn’t match the sex printed on her passport. 

The United Arab Emirates is also one of the key international players obstructing any meaningful action on climate change. Like several other Gulf dictatorships, it’s a petrostate, with the bulk of its national income coming from its rich oil reserves, and its leaders have actively sabotaged opportunities for climate reform in the past. Most notably, when the United Nations made the colossally stupid decision to hold the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, the Emirati government immediately appointed Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who runs the country’s state-run oil company, as conference president. As climate scientist Peter Kalmus said at the time, the event Al Jaber created was a “sick joke.” From documents leaked to the BBC, we know that Emirati officials used COP28 as an opportunity to have closed-door meetings with their counterparts from “20 countries, including the UK, United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kenya,” all with the goal of making fossil fuel deals and worsening the very climate problem they were supposed to be solving. The whole thing was like hosting a conference on animal rights at Outback Steakhouse. 

And then there’s the genocide. It’s a sign of how bleak things are today that, when you mention a genocidal regime in the Middle East, you have to specify which one—but today it’s the United Arab Emirates we’re talking about, not Israel or Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, the government of Sudan brought genocide charges against the UAE to the International Court of Justice, and although they were dismissed on a technicality about jurisdiction, Sudan had a strong case. Although the UAE officially denies it, there’s significant evidence that it supplies weapons to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, one of the two sides in Sudan’s lethal civil war. This has been documented extensively in journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and by Amnesty International. Multiple U.S. legislators, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, also say they’ve been briefed about the arms shipments. The RSF, in turn, has been using those weapons to carry out horrifying massacres against non-Muslim ethnic groups in Sudan, especially the Masalit people in Darfur, seemingly with the goal of wiping them out entirely. Just as it is with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United States is deeply complicit in all this. Last year, the Biden administration declared the UAE a “Major Defense Partner” and agreed to sell its leaders (along with Saudi Arabia’s) up to $2.2 billion worth of U.S. weapons, some of which may well have ended up in the RSF’s hands. Not for the first time, they have blood on their hands. But so does anyone helping to polish the UAE’s image with a cheery, green-tinted chocolate bar. 

All of this brings us to another trend that’s popular on social media today: calling things “propaganda I’m not falling for.” Usually this is pretty tongue-in-cheek, with posters calling innocuous things like whole milk or Benson Boone’s music “propaganda”—the joke is that they’re just the poster’s personal dislikes. But Dubai chocolate really is propaganda, and people really shouldn’t fall for it. The candy bars are being pushed onto store shelves, and onto your TikTok feed, by the hereditary rulers of a kingdom that enslaves thousands of people, tortures prisoners, systematically denies human rights to women and LGBTQ people, peddles world-killing fossil fuels, and bankrolls the bombs and bullets that rain devastation on Sudan. So there’s no way anybody should want anything to do with Dubai chocolate, or anything else with the word “Dubai” attached. The candy may taste nice, but knowing that you’re helping to drum up positive PR for a gang of murderous dictators is bitter.