Didn’t take too long to realise how correct you are… Americans and people with a perception of Saudi from over a decade ago.

“Hello, I am from Israel and this is my comment”

Are you taking next worldcup or current?

also woman cant do certain things, like show too much skin.

So ironic you gave yourself the username Georgwell

America did 9/11 to itself. If they didn’t kill thousands of civilians and innocent people in the name of profit, it’d not have happened.

Who said anything about Israel?

I lived there for several years a couple of decades ago. It was an extraordinarily safe place, compared to the US, despite the occasional terrorist attack. I never had trouble with the locals, even the religious whackjobs. They’re generally kind-hearted people.

Gay colleagues had a great time there: it was on the DL but very low-risk. What happened in private homes stayed private. For various cultural reasons, quite a number of Saudi men would have sex with men-- especially foreigners, who they believed were less prone to gossiping than other Saudi guys were.

Something to keep in mind in places like KSA with draconian laws is that it’s all about hypocrisy, turning a blind eye, and sporadic, performative selective enforcement. Another example is that I often heard Saudis tell me that, despite the many restrictions on life there, at least they didn’t have drug problems like the US or Europe. But in the local newspapers, every few weeks, there’d be a photo of some minor prince doing a ribbon-cutting at a new rehab clinic.

A local proverb, attributed to the Prophet, is: “A sin that is hidden is half-forgiven.” The rationale is that, if you do it publicly, it encourages others. But the Saudi police were actually far more respectful of entering people’s homes than US or European police are (unless you get on a powerful person’s shit list).

It’s a good idea to learn a little about a place before you decide to visit. I’ve been all over the world, and Saudi Arabia is culturally one of the places that is most different from anything you’d encounter in the US.

Yeah, unfortunately lots of willing morons travelling to the fascist shithole of the US for a world cup. I am not having high hopes of them developing a discerning sense of morality before 2034.

This entire region should have organized one world cup, instead of the farce that was Qatar.
Saudi Arabia + Qatar + Kuwait + UAE and maybe Bahrain. The rule about hosts automatically qualifying would have to go, but together it would make some sense, and they would actually have enough different cities for a proper world cup.

Me countries basically have been buying up sports leagues and orgs to stave off thier own economic problems, also to sportswash.

Wow it’s almost as if you remove two cities from the US you get MAJOR changes in homicides. You also aren’t comparing the population differences.

Sure the US has a higher rate, it is also a huge land mass with 300,000,000 people. Middle Eastern countries are only larger than some US states. Drop New York, California and Chicago and again the rates free fall.

America is so safe our biggest threat is too much food.

The Middle East (and North Africa) is a huge place, and there’s wide variation in risk as you go from country to country and within countries. There are plenty of places there where I’d think twice before going down a dark alley. But there are even more of those places in the US, and the risk of getting killed there is even greater.

Blue MAGA behavior that is still so ingrained and present in all Americans and Europeans, no matter if liberal or conservative.

You’re exaggerating, but sadly, not all that much. I have a different perspective because I’ve been married to someone from the region for a very long time, speak, read and write Arabic serviceably, and have travelled a lot in the region over an extended period. But I still occasionally find baggage I’m carrying that gets in the way of seeing people as they are, instead of trying to force them to conform to preconceived notions. At least, unlike far too many Americans, the people in the region are generally sophisticated enough to distinguish individuals from their governments.

It’s wild to me that you’d call countries in the Middle East “young”, given that the Middle East has, throughout human history, been one of the primary hotspots of human development, all the way back to the time of early human migration from Africa. The Middle East is the very opposite of young. See: Persia and Egypt

Like, many of the things that you can be executed for in Saudi Arabia are such because of a literalist interpretation of the Quran combined with significant latitude afforded to judges because of a lack of prescribed punishment in doctrine (Tazir). Consequentially, Saudi Arabia sits in third place worldwide after China and Iran for number of executions at 356 people executed in 2025. A staggering number when you remember the fact that it has a population of only ~35,000,000 people.

Indeed, there are differing beliefs within Islam about how literally to interpret the Quran in the first place, as well as how harshly (if at all) one should punish such transgressions, because the document is fucking old. The cultural development you speak of did happen; the culture isn’t young. Saudi Arabia just so happens to be an absolute monarchy with a particularly strict interpretation of religious and legal doctrine.

Just so we’re clear: the point I’m making isn’t that Saudia Arabia or the Middle East more broadly are somehow culturally inferior or less developed relative to any other nation or region. I am well aware, for example, that the US has the exact same problem with religious fundamentalism (something which I also loudly decry) but in both cases it represents a resurgence of fundamentalism within already developed cultures, not a linear progression from “barbaric” to “civilized” or whatever that nonsense about tribes and caves was.

Stop giving the absolute monarchy that regularly executes dissidents, journalists, and queer people the benefit of the doubt via whataboutism and false equivalencies between Saudi Arabia and the Middle East as a whole. You’re either being played a fool, or you’re actively excusing something monstrous in exactly the same way that anyone who ignores the United States’ (many) atrocities is.

I gave you an upvote. The West is on such a high horse acting like women’s rights and lgbtq rights aren’t an ongoing conversation in our societies. It wasn’t that long ago that sexual minorities and women had less rights. Societies views on different topics is constantly in flux. People change their opinions over time. Especially if they’ve had had enough money to fund a decent education system for decades.

Muslim countries aren’t inherently sexist and homophobic, at least not more so than Western societies. They have had their economies devastated for decades and so that leads to lack of education and resources which leads to the same things that happen in impoverished parts of the West, religiosity, homophobia and patriarchy.

If the West wanted to do women favors in the middle east, they would stop starting wars and funding fascists. But no, of course, these societies are inherently evil and need to wiped off the map.

Are you aware that two things can be true at the same time?