On 10/10/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
If you believe Egypt truly is significantly bad for visiting LGBT tourists, there should be ample evidence thereof available. In spite of my friends' and aquaintences personal ancedotal safe trips, I went looking for some evidence of risk when this thread started. I have not found anything of the sort. There's more documented foreign tourist gay bashing in San Francisco (fairly low actual rate, and abhored by the local population as a whole, but there's a persistent low-rate problem from homophobic fringeists) than I can find for Egypt.
If you use official records, there's zero gay bashing in Iran. I wouldn't consider Egypt's records on GLBT issues accurate, either.
That's the quandary with record-keeping. The places with the most problems often have the worst records. Never mistake bad record keeping with the absence of a problem.
Where did I mention official records?
I want you to point to western sources, *anything* that has actual "this happened to someone in Egypt" statements that justify your claim that there's a legit problem for LGBT visitors in Egypt.
There are myriad gay travel websites and blogs. As far as I can tell they have no specific warnings about Egypt. A number of them report on visits there... and nobody reports anything other than being a little wary of the situation.
If there's a legit threat you should be able to point me to someone out there in the west who has documented it. If there's a legit threat, I would expect to have found it already.
I believe you (and the documented reports, and stuff I've heard about and read about going back a number of years) about internal moderate oppression of LGBT in Egypt.
I do not believe you, *because you have provided zero documentation and I have found none elsewhere in my searches*, that Egypt's government or law enforcement present a general or specific threat to health and safety of LGBT visitors.