In The Middle East: Hospitality Before Democracy

In Fear-Mongering at Yale, about a book on cartoons of Mohammed that won't include the cartoons themselves, Noah Pollak writes about the priorities some on the left seem to have when writing about the Middle East:

What saddens me, by contrast, is how important it is for leftist world travelers to be treated as royalty by their hosts, and how they respond to Potemkin Village–style tours of repressive and dysfunctional countries with hoary tropes about the nobility of the Orient. Because she was treated as an “honoured guest in every setting” in Iran, the fact that the regime promotes war and terrorism around the globe is irrelevant; the fact that it strings up homosexuals from cranes in downtown Tehran doesn’t matter; the fact that it brutally tortures its own dissenters is barely of any concern and neither is the prison rape of young girls before their executions.

Roger Cohen seems to have come around on this issue, writing

I’ve also argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.

Pollak notes the writings of a Yale professor who has not:

I recently returned from a trip to Lebanon, the UAE and Iran—what most Americans would consider a journey into the heart of darkness, a veritable “axis of evil”. In fact, the trip was far from perilous, and I was treated as an honoured guest in every setting. . .

What strikes me is that although Islamists tend to make excellent hosts, in Europe they have tended to make poor guests.

Middle East, Iran