Lebanese who won’t spy on Hezbollah, deported from UAE

The Lebanese living in the United Arab Emirates are starting to pay a high price for harking from the same country as the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Not so much because they’re being profiled as terrorists but allegedly because they have refused to spy on Hezbollah activities for the UAE and are thus being deported by the hundreds.

Hassan Alayan, a Lebanese businessman speaking in Beirut today at a press conference, said that more than 300 Lebanese inhabitants of the UAE have been forced to leave their country of residence over the past three months.

The United Arab Emirates, a largely Sunni Muslim state, is said to be growing increasingly worried over the influence Shi’ite Muslims have in the Middle East. Shi’ite Muslims have traditionally been more violent and many Shi’ite states/insurgencies espouse the passage of Sharia, the strict code of Islamic law, which imposes the burqa and extreme limitations on women and still approves the use of public amputations, beatings and executions as an acceptable form of punishment.

Many of the Lebanese who have been recently deported have lived in the UAE for decades. The traffic cop Zuhair Hamdan, for example, has called the UAE home for 33 years – since he was 2 years old!

Officially, the targeted Lebanese are said to have been singled out for security reasons, indeed some articles coming out of the Middle East have reported that the deportees were sending financial aid to Hezbollah from the UAE. This has been denied by several of the deportees, as well as by the committee representing them now in Lebanon.

According to Alayan, there are Palestinian UAE residents who have been deported for refusing to spy on Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the roost in the Gaza.

The fact that Lebanese President Michel Suleiman sent Lebanese officials to the UAE five weeks ago to resolve the issue has not seemed to help the case of the deportees, nor do we think has the fact that Hezbollah jumped to their defense. Of course, just because Hezbollah’s calling the situation a “clear injustice” and urging the UAE to stop the reportedly baseless deportation of Lebanese families, does not mean the deportees are Hezbollah-affiliated. Hezbollah’s appeal to ‘justice’ however, is somewhat laughable, given the fact that the group is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization, which by definition commits not only clear injustices, but violent ones, regularly.