“Our threshold is quite low when we talk about extremism,” the Emirati foreign minister told Fox News a month after the 2017 panel discussion in Riyadh. “We cannot accept incitement or funding. For many countries, the definition of terror is that you have to carry a weapon or terrorize people. For us, it’s far beyond that.”
Such campaigns by Arab governments go beyond an effort to simply explain the precise threats posed by Islamists—which do indeed exist. Instead, they often involve scare tactics to play up the threat and create an atmosphere in which an alternative to these regimes becomes unthinkable from a Western policy standpoint. Such an environment also enables these regimes to clamp down on dissent at home with impunity. Terrorism becomes a catchall term to justify repression. In Saudi Arabia, even atheists are defined as terrorists under existing anti-terrorism laws.
These patterns played out for more than a decade but intensified in recent years, and they proved to be effective instruments to win friends and influence enemies.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/29/arab-regimes-are-the-worlds-most-powerful-islamophobes/
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