I came on to see if the various indignant criticisms of Pep’s stance on the yellow ribbon (vis-a-vis our ownership and the UAE political state) currently coming back in to media fold had yet been mentioned on this thread. And, of course, they have.
I agree with
@SWP's back,
@aguero93:20,
@Prestwich_Blue, and others: although the regimes are different (and the argument could be made UAE is much more authoritarian) you could easily make the same or similar arguments about UK, US, Israeli, and many other politic states and ownerships. That is not whataboutism, it is a reasoned critique of the seeming focus on the regime our owners operate within and ignorance to the other regimes the other ownerships operate in. The criticisms also ignore the political trends within the UAE (actually positive) and the fact that you cannot make wholesale changes to political, economic, and social systems over night (without some fairly unsavoury consequences, anyway—we and the Americans have plenty of experience with that, after all). Not to mention that ownership of this type helps to disseminate democratic, open market values/policies and further marginalise extremist elements within regimes—you will never effect positive change by walling off the rest of the world you do not agree with.
Take it from someone who works fairly closely with large conglomerates based in the UK, US, Spain, France, Germany, and Israel: they manipulate and capitalise on their own regimes and could have plenty to answer for if we called upon that element of their operations (and some are being challenged on just that right now, actually).
Willful ignorance is more dangerous than stupidity.