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)