cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/إسلام/p/1262928/saudi-arabia-reassures-lgbtq-visitors-ahead-of-2034-world-cup
Saudi Arabia is attempting to reassure LGBTQ+ visitors ahead of hosting the 2034 World Cup, even though homosexuality remains criminalised.
Why do people, especially Americans, talk and behave like they are less violent than Arabs or Muslims? Both liberals and republicans still do that, and it looks really bad, because the truth is, you’re more likely to die in the USA than a place like Saudi Arabia, even if you are gay. It’s so easy to prove it, I don’t understand why are people still falling for Jeffrey Epstein Class propaganda that keeps us divided for nonsensical bullshit.
Can Saudi Arabia sentence someone to death for homosexual acts? Yes.
Do they routinely execute people just for being gay? No. It is not a routine occurrence. The death penalty is more often associated with cases involving additional charges, such as rape or other serious crimes. I am not excusing them, nor justifying them, I think the law and culture need to change, but doing it with bombs and bullets will never work, it makes it worse, actually.
You’re more likely to die in the USA than Saudi Arabia if you compare their homicide rates:
Just to give you an idea, the USA is closer to being like Mexico, Russia or Zimbabwe regarding violence. If you sort them by count, Mexico is top #4 while the USA is top #6 in the entire world. The jump in Count is massive, but still, both countries lose over 20,000+ people to homicides yearly. Compare it to other rich countries like China, Russia, India, Indonesia or the UK for the sake of comparison:
If you wonder about the Middle East, here are some examples (and they’ve been heavily bombed/in war with the USA for decades):
Btw, Zimbabwe has a rate of 6.75. Americans love to make fun of that place and all the others. They call them “shitholes,” and the way they express themselves about them, is always filled with ire or rancor. Truth is, the USA killed millions of Arabs and Muslims throughout history in the name of “prudeness and morality,” but the one who is actually the trashy, violent immoral piece of shit is the USA, not a single Middle Eastern or Asiatic country which are still growing culturally. Even Japan has the same issues a lot of racist assholes criticize the Middle East for, but they don’t criticize Japan like that, because they’re just fucking stupid and mentally ill. They don’t have the capacity to see the hypocrisy and irony.
In summary, it looks really silly and bad whenever you see a post talking about a Middle East country, and then you see most, if not all the comments, most likely Americans and Europeans, saying how dangerous, how violent, how “retarded” or “barbaric” the country is while the fact is, the USA is much worse. This is the type of American Exceptionalism, Blue MAGA behavior that is still so ingrained and present in all Americans and Europeans, no matter if liberal or conservative. They all dehumanized Arabs and Muslims up to the point they automatically reject them no matter what.
If you still talk shit about the Middle East with superficial shit, like criticizing their issues with Child Abuse, something you don’t criticize Japan with the same passion although both are equally significant problems you can’t fix with bombs or bullets, you’re an imbecile racist and also a terrorist, one worse than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. You’re morally inferior and more abhorrent than those orphaned children seeking justice/vengeance for the parents your taxes killed with a bomb. You refuse to understand their anger because you are morally and emotionally too weak to handle such a heavy toll. You instead take the easy shortcut, which is to be a racist.
You can see cultures around the world like children who are still growing up. All of them had their phases, starting in caves, then tribes that participated in sacrifices and rituals, then became more civilized, participated in bloody wars, all of them still have issues regarding identity and tolerance… If you really think killing Arabs and Muslims, conquering them, erasing them all to replace them with Americans and “American values, culture, traditions” you’re just an idiot. You’re a violent child.
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.
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.
It’s also fucking opaque. Much of the Qur’an is written in a highly allusive, poetic way, referencing events and controversies that there’s little to no extra-Quranic historic record of. Often it’s not possible to connect a particular sura to anything at all. There’s a considerable body of personal accounts of the life of the Prophet and the time after him (hadith) with varying degrees of credibility, and a huge amount commentary on the Qur’an and the hadith accumulated over many centuries (tafsir, kind of like the Talmud). Much of the actual practice of Islam is a combination of ancient local practices (e.g., women being fully veiled, which was a pre-Islamic Persian custom not practiced in Arabia), accretions of interpretations of religious texts, and traditions.
Yeah, Saudi Arabia is a corner case. It’s sort of the Arabian equivalent of a US bunch of hillbilly glossolalist snake-juggling bigots, who found themselves sitting on a lake of oil. But in other parts of the MENA, you can find highly sophisticated urban people who make most Americans look like hicks, and ancient communities sustaining millennia of cultural continuity. The diversity of the region is extreme.
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?
I still think it’s more important to deinflate the egos of Americans and Europeans first, because they are causing more harm to the world with their influence than these smaller and oppressed countries like Arab or African ones.
You will always see people that respond like you. “We can do both.” “Both can be true at the same time.” But you never see them believe it, respect it or practice it at all. Just read all the comments in this post. They all treat younger cultures like shit. They rather kill them than let them grow and learn like their own did. They have 0 tolerance.
Yeah. I agree. Start with what’s within your span of control. MENA people want freedom, good government and rule of law as much as anyone does. Reducing foreign interference and no longer propping up corrupt despots would go a long way towards enabling people to be more empowered there. But beyond that, they have to do the work themselves: you can’t bomb people to democracy and human rights.
The level of cognitive dissonance here is astounding
Yeah @PepperoniNipple is dumb as shit.
Tasty name though.