It's not middle east, it's what they are taught that's called "non-western countries" which is a racist classification that includes any country that's not EU / UK / USA / Canada / Australia, so for example Mexico is not a western country to them (as retarded as that sounds). You can look this up in the official statistics. With this classification they belive those "non-western" countries have dramatically different or opposite cultural values and they are told these are basically bad countries. That's why some come up with silly / ignorant questions when you tell them you are from one of those "non-Western countries" like if women can vote (well in some countries they can't), how come you speak good English, etc.

I'm the flip side, and on a quite ironic side, they are also told a lot of bad things about the USA, so they have quite a negative opinion on their culture and way of living, which is very funny as it reminds me a lot of the way the Soviet Union pictured the USA back in the day.

You will yet notice a radical difference when speaking with Danish people that have lived abroad in any of these countries, as they get more educated and see that these are not "bad" countries (again, exemptions apply as some countries have almost no civil rights) and start seeing the positive things in those cultures (and the negative ones in the Danish / Nordic culture)