[quote]loppar wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
Second, are you speaking from experience, I.E. you have spent time in Saudi Arabia and Tehran and you witnessed and experienced the life and culture first hand? Certainly, witnessing it is better than reading about it.
All I want to know is how you are making your determinations.[/quote]
I have worked for an Euro based multinational company and have traveled extensively on business in the region, so I am speaking from direct experience.
Your apocalyptic warnings in this thread are correct, with a small caveat - they should be applied to Saudi Arabia and an existing nuclear power that is virulently anti-American - Pakistan.
If there’s something you should fear from the muslim world, that is Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Chechens.
Saudi Arabia is a horrible place, words simply cannot describe it.
Your run-of-the-mill middle class Saudi is completely ignorant about everything, hates the West with a passion, despises and abuses his slaves (the PC phrase is “domestic servants”, usually from the Philippines) and admires ISIS. After all, they adhere to the purest form of islam, as the most recent opinion poll in SA. A tribal mentality from the 7th century pervades.
Saudi men saunter around in western designed shopping malls, drive around town in their brand new western designed SUVs (there’s nothing else to do in Saudi Arabia except maybe hunt with falcons) and spew hatred against anything “decadent” from the West.
Also, many believe Jews have horns. Seriously. Do a youtube search on a Saudi preacher questioning the Earth’s rotation .
Even long periods of sojourn in the West do not dampen their fervor. I’ve met Saudis who went to MIT or Caltech and still rant about “immoral Western whores” and “godless consumerism”. Of course, that doesn’t stop them flying to Dubai to visit illegal brothels, drink and do coke.
They absolve these sins by supporting terrorists, at least verbally although on supporting islamic terrorism by all means there is an unspoken consensus among the governing elite and the rest of the population.
Qatar is no different, although with an elaborate facade that covers up the role of their “charities”.
Iran (who is an oppressive dictatorship, let’s not forget) seems more like Las Vegas after spending a week in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve written before about the drastically different role that women play in Iran. Even the hardline pro-government conservatives are somehow more, I dunno, “saner”. This is mainly to the more flexible doctrinal nature of shia islam as well as the surprisingly resilient Persian culture.
Besides the young middle-class urbanites, a lot of people are simply going through the motions by following the regime line in public discourse “Yes, yes, death to America, I have to go now, my cousins from Pasadena are arriving tonight and I have to go pick them up” is an actual line I’ve heard.
People are very, very, very hospitable, cool and are simply tired of living in a dictatorship - they want to travel abroad, download music from itunes, watch non-bootlegged movies and go to hip hop concerts that are being held outside and not in someone’s living room as is now the case.
And the dictatorship has to adapt to survive - it simply cannot go constantly against the wishes of their population, especially the young who are clamoring for a change. They do try, make no mistake about it - imprison, torture and murder people as an “example to others” yet the change simply cannot be stopped. Although, as I’ve written in other posts, Iranian leaders are behaving much more reasonably that ruling elites running Gulf theocracies.
And as I’ve said it before, they are the most pro-American of the ME countries.
A Saudi will spew nasty shit how the Kurds or Yazids “deserved” extermination by the hands of ISIS while boringly flipping through his smartphone, while the average middle-class Iranian is more often than not genuinely upset that the US does not want them as allies.
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Well, that’s pretty cool. I appreciate your insight. Being there is vastly different than ‘reading and article’ about it.
Your insight about Saudi Arabia seems about right in line with my stereotypes about them. The coolness of the people of Iran not withstanding, I am still genuinely concerned about lifting the conventional weapons embargo. The people may be cool, but the regime is not and I do not trust them not to reek havoc with their increased capabilities. Granted I do not want them to have a nuclear weapon, but having one is virtually useless since it’s a near guarantee of mutually assured destruction. They can do much worse with conventional weapons.
I agree with your insights on Pakistan and Saudi, not our friends. Neither is China or Russia.