Syria Tourism and Terrorism

Posted by Hugh Taylor Jan 17, 2007

I had an email yesterday from someone who had read my blog on tourism in Syria and had then gone on to read my review of the excellent Bradt Guide to Syria.

“How can you promote tourism to a terrorist country” she wrote “let alone recommend that any sane person should go there on holiday.” She went on at length getting more extreme but none of is suitable for repeating here.

She made me very angry. My first reaction was to write an offensive reply but after I had calmed down I just replied referring her to my earlier article on Middle East Tourism and Terrorism.

I am getting heartily sick of the World’s media demonising people in the Middle Eastand of people like the woman who emailed me blindly accepting the rubbish she reads.

I suppose she thinks that I should be telling people to go to nice safe places like New Zealand or Australia where just the odd tourist happens to get raped and murdered now and again. Or even here to Scotland where last year a woman walking through a pleasant Highland wood was stabbed to death by a local nutter. None of these countries are considered dangerous nor should they be. An odd isolated incident does not mean that every tourist thereafter is under threat. Australia, New Zealand and Scotland are very, very safe countries to visit.

But let me tell you this. Syria is even safer.

You have more chance of getting run over by a demented crazy frog riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle than you have of coming to grief in Syria.

You don’t believe be? Well check what Diana Darke wrote in her introduction to the Bradt Syria Guide. And bear in mind she’s been travelling there for thirty years and has bought a house in the Old City of Damascus

“No foreigner has ever been kidnapped, raped or assaulted here, not even a Dane.”

Which given the furore in the Muslim world last year after a Danish newspaper published derogatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is truly remarkable.