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Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange
06:47
19
Q: Does Saudi Arabia have 100,000 air-conditioned tents sitting empty in the desert?

Mohammad Sakib ArifinThis video by Rebel Media claims at 4.10: Saudi Arabia has 100,000 air-conditioned tents sitting empty in the desert. They can hold half a million people ... Is it true?

saudi-arabia
Oddthinking
Oddthinking
Of all the nonsense in that video, why choose this particular claim?
Mohammad Sakib Arifin
Mohammad Sakib Arifin
@Oddthinking Cause I wasn't sure if this claim was nonsense or not. It showed a picture that seemed quite convincing.
Michael
Michael
500,000 people / 100,000 tents = 5 people/tent
vsz
vsz
@Oddthinking : And, as it turned out, it was not a complete nonsense.
Oddthinking
Oddthinking
@vsz: My concern is the picking out of this one, easily-Googleable fact from a propaganda video containing plenty of mistruths is giving the rest of the video an aura of accuracy.
smci
smci
06:47
The wording of this question is unclear and problematic, as @Oddthinking said. "air-conditioned tent sitting empty" is the present participle, implies it is both currently a) empty and b) air-conditioned. Not "empty tent used one week a year which has air-conditioning [when it's occupied]".
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali
@Oddthinking can you please tell me what are these all the nonsense in that video?
Oddthinking
Oddthinking
07:15
Much of the video is praising Trump, Trump's zinger tweets and saying he prefers a Trump presidency to a Clinton one. It is opinionated commentary. I have no problem with that. (Such political commentary wouldn't belong in an answer on Skeptics.SE, but having it on a YouTube channel? Go for it.)

However, he strays from mere opinion into misrepresentations.

* He misrepresents donations to the Clinton Foundation as bribes.

* He speculates about additional email servers, and the actions of a Saudi prince that he has no idea about.
 
1 hour later…
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali
08:21
@Oddthinking thank you very much for the explanation. Any justifications why you think that he He misrepresents the availability of the tents for living in? Based on your answer the tents are empty almost all the year so based on my definition of availability for living they are available for living.
 
3 hours later…
Steve Ives
Steve Ives
10:59
There's also a lot of 'spin' in the video - I stopped watching after he said that Saudi Arabia sponsored terrorism as the majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi citizens. You could also say that the US itself sponsors terrorism as the 9/11 terrorist pilots were trained in the US and use US flights.
Oddthinking
Oddthinking
11:34
@SalvadorDali I do not have any reference for this. This is my supposition: Every year, around 1.5m pilgrims take part in the Hajj, causing major crowd control problems, and serious numbers of deaths. I don't believe Saudi Arabia could stop people coming, if they tried. So they need resources to handle that peak. If they fill those tents with 500,000 refugees, what are they supposed to do each year, when they need to suddenly get rid of them to make room.
Having a large, fixed population brings different problems and needs different solutions that temporary ones. Imagine if people argued that there was room for 135,000 refugees in Glastonbury or 50,000 in the Black Rock desert, just because they fit during the Glastonbury Festival or Burning Man.
I am not arguing that there is no way that Saudi Arabia could take more displaced people from Syria (or Glastonbury or Nevada), I am just saying that it is misleading to point to tents available 51 weeks per year and declare the problem solved.

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