@KimIversen When it comes to Saudi Arabia, your comments have repeatedly been inaccurate if not false, and last night’s statement was no different. You said that “the Saudi monarchy would not exist if it weren’t for Israel allowing it to exist”. Respectfully, that reduces a deeply rooted, historically complex system into a caricature.

It ignores a whole structure of factors that allows monarchies in this region to exist and continue: deep historical roots, broad public acceptance, internal stability, economic strength, oil wealth, strategic alliances, and continuity of governance that many citizens see as legitimate because it actually works in lived reality. That complexity disappears when everything is reduced to an Americanised geopolitical slogan.

The majority of citizens don’t view the monarchy as some alien force imposed on them. They see it as part of the country’s structure and identity. For many people, this system works. It provides safety, stability, social and financial security, and a high standard of living that outsiders don’t realise or even know exists here.
That lived reality includes things such as free healthcare, free education/higher education, student stipends and benefits, housing and land support/land grants, no income tax, and other forms of assistance that many people in the so called “democracies” of the West are still fighting for. This is why you don’t see many immigrants in the West from the Gulf countries. So it’s always a little ironic to hear Saudi Arabia described as if people here need to be “freed,” when many of the things these so called democracies lack we have long had and benefited from.

And what makes these narratives so frustrating is that many (if not all) of the people who repeat them have never stepped foot in Saudi Arabia, nor even know a person who’s from here. Yet nearly every Westerner I’ve met who’s actually come here has expressed how surprised they are by the quality of life, how much they enjoy living here, and how different the country feels once seen from the inside rather than imagined from the outside.

It’s interesting that in the same episode, before introducing your guest, you said that “one of the best way to get information is to talk to people who know what is going on in this country”. I agree. And if that principle were applied consistently, Saudi Arabia would be understood through the people who actually live here, not through outside narratives and assumptions projected onto it.