I haven't read the thread, but I used to live in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Obviously, the UAE is not the only country which is a dictatorship, has at best a dubious human rights record, a corrupt police force, and a heavily censored press, is an environmental disaster, openly treats the lower echelons of its migrant workforce appallingly (and I defy anyone who has been out to the labour camps in the desert and seen the filthy, overcrowded, flea-ridden conditions to say, 'oh, but they'd have been poor at home too!'), to mention only some things. The combination of tax free income to expat workers, the linkage of residency visas to and heavily subsidised lives to its own citizens - and brutal crackdowns on any dissent - keeps a lid on any trouble.
It is also not the only country where female genital mutilation is legal. There was a particularly horrible case while I lived there where a foreign woman who had divorced an Emirati man let their young daughter visit him after the split. When the child returned to her mother, she had been genitally mutilated. The mother went to the police, but all the father had to do was to produce documents to show the procedure had been carried out 'properly', in a clinic, under anaesthetic. He had done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law.
The point is that it not of course the only country to practise such abuses, but it is a country which is heavily dependent on marketing a sunny, unproblematic version of itself to attract Western tourists to replace the oil income when that dries up. People tend not to think twice about going there for some sun and shopping, so this campaign is alarmingly successful.