One of the dumber attempts to deflect away from the uniquely depraved fundamentalism of Hamas and Hezbollah came from New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, who decided to conflate the terrorist organizations with Saudi Arabia.

Tufekci is responding to Hezbollah’s leader reminding “Queers for Palestine” that under the Sharia law shared by both terrorist organizations, the penalty for homosexuality is death. The video she’s responding to isn’t about Saudi Arabia, and the video, which is responding to rioters taking over college campuses in solidarity with Hamas and its allies, isn’t responding to “Queers for Saudi Arabia.” The operational difference of Hamas and friends versus Saudi Arabia is that Tufekci is randomly invoking Saudi Arabia in response to a video that is not about Saudi Arabia, American supporters of Saudi Arabia, or American policy toward Saudi Arabia.

But the merits of Tufekci’s argument are even more false than the fallacy of her logic.

Both the governments of Saudi Arabia and the Gaza Strip, like 60-something other countries on the planet, abhorrently criminalize homosexuality. It’s a problem widespread and pernicious enough that as a part of the Trump administration’s project to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide, the White House once threatened to limit the level of intelligence shared with countries that continued to persecute gay civilians to private and consensual conduct. The Saudi government hasn’t actually enforced the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality in more than 20 years, and de facto ruling Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman welcomed gay tourists to the kingdom in a reversal of previous policy. Still, the state of LGBT rights across the Middle East remains abysmal.

But the status of women’s rights is a markedly different story. While Saudi women remain far from achieving the equal rights they deserve, relative to Hamas rule, the trajectory of Saudi social reform is obviously trending in the right direction and in a welcome way.

In dramatic defiance of the Wahhabist status quo of decades past, the more secularist MBS has eliminated previous laws requiring that women wear abayas and hijabs and relaxed those requiring women to be supervised by male guardians in most public spaces. The crown prince overturned bans barring women from driving and from a plethora of white-collar industries, and women are now welcome to attend public events such as sports games and concerts with men. Since 2017, Saudi Arabia’s female labor force participation has nearly doubled to 35%. The World Bank conceded in 2020 that no country on Earth had made more progress toward gender equality than Saudi Arabia.

Yes, the crown prince is an autocrat who cares not for public opinion, which often abhors the prince’s pivot away from Saudi Arabia’s traditionally theocratic policies, and little for procedural principles such as press freedom or consent of the governed. Like many absolute monarchs of the 18th and 19th centuries, the crown prince is an enlightened despot, a leader who embraces illiberal means to achieve liberal ends, such as women’s equality, a secularizing society, and modern economic growth.

Hamas, by contrast, hails from a tradition reminiscent of the Dark Ages.

Palestinian women are effectively excluded from the Hamas-controlled governance of Gaza, where women’s labor force participation rate of 22% is among the lowest in the world. Sharia law entitles women to just half the inheritance of men, and women are legally barred from traveling without the supervision of a man. The Hamas code of modesty, of course, segregates women from civil society and mandates they wear hijabs at the risk of legal punishment. Abortion is totally criminalized in all circumstances, at any point of gestation in pregnancy, and until 2018, a rapist could avoid punishment by marrying his victim. Whereas MBS banned child marriages, setting the minimum marriage age at 18, a full fifth of all marriages in Gaza involved a bride younger than 18.

None of this is to mention the highly relevant facts that whereas the Saudis are actively trying to strengthen their alliance with us, joining American forces in shooting down Iranian missile strikes into Israel and continuing to push for a defense pact with Washington, Hamas murdered at least 32 Americans on Oct. 7 and is holding at least five Americans hostage, at least one of whom has had his arm blown off, as evidenced by a damning proof of life provided by Hamas.

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In other words, Saudi Arabia is an autocratic but secularizing ally currently embracing American leadership. Hamas and Hezbollah are outright terrorist organizations that murder Americans, a crime we must care about even more than their fundamentalist persecution of their own women, girls, and gay people.

Saudi Arabia is not perfect, but it is nowhere near the same as the backwater warlords of Hamas and Hezbollah.