From: David Strauss
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.
When people asking for evidence, you said the evidence might not be accurate so you don't trust them.
Maybe the number is not accurate, but I believe it does represent the situation in Egypt.
I have many friends and colleagues travelled to Egypt for tourism and returned to Taiwan safely. Some of them are LGBT and they all have a good time in Egypt and wish to visit there again (although the travel expense might be a little high). I don't really see there is a problem.
From my understanding, the Egypt government is serious on the safety of foreign people because the Egypt economy is based on tourism. If any foreign people were been threatened or feel unsafe in their country, it would affect their economy a lot. Maybe what I know is wrong, but that's what I learnt from the Taiwan singer issue in Egypt this May.
Ted (Hsiang-Tai)