Lebanese officials said more than 300 Lebanese nationals were deported by the United Arab Emirates in mid-2009.The Lebanese said the expulsion was part of a crackdown on the Iranian-aligned community in Dubai and Sharjah, where up to 100,000 Lebanese and 500,000 Iranians live.
"We believe the UAE was acting under U.S. pressure," an expelled Shi'ite said.
On Oct. 1, several of those deported held a news conference in Beirut in which they described their treatment in the UAE. The deportees said UAE security agents demanded information on Iran and Hizbullah as well as Lebanese expatriates believed cooperating with Teheran.
"I told them I have been living in the UAE for 33 years," Zuheir Hamdan, a former UAE police officer and one of those deported, said. "How can I have information about Hizbullah?"
Lebanese Hassan Alayan, left, head of the deportees from United Arab Emirates, at a press conference in Beirut, on Oct. 1. AP/Bilal Hussein
The Shi'ites said the UAE has sought to identify and track Iranian and Hizbullah cells around Dubai. They said the UAE crackdown began in wake of Lebanese parliamentary elections on June 7, in which Hizbullah lost to the Saudi-financed Future Movement.
The UAE was also said to be deporting Palestinians who refused to spy on the Hamas presence in the emirates. For its part, the UAE has refused to comment.
"In whose interest is it to ask Lebanese to spy on one another and on the resistance of Lebanon and Palestine?" a statement by the Lebanese Shi'ite committee asked.
In some cases, Lebanese with businesses in the UAE were not allowed to reenter the emirates. Hussein Masoud said he was expelled in July 2009 after he returned from a vacation.
"I have three companies there, $5 million worth of contracts and 85 mainly Sunni employees who rely on me," Masoud said. "I can't believe this is all happening because I am Shi'ite."
Lebanon has sought to stop the UAE deportations. In August 2009, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman sent a military delegation to convince Abu Dhabi that the Lebanese community in the UAE was law-abiding.
"We refuse to believe that the expulsions were motivated by politics, religion, security concerns or any outside pressure," Hizbullah spiritual leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said in a statement.
Fadlallah?
Israel and the Holocaust
In an interview with Al-Manar TV on March 21, 2008 (as translated by the MEMRI), Fadlallah stated that:
"The Hebrew state is preparing to celebrate its 60th anniversary - 60 years since it plundered Palestine - in a festival, which will be attended by the countries of the world, most of which still support the Jewish state and consider the resistance movement to be terrorism. This is what led German Chancellor Merkel to visit that plundering country, which extorted and continues to extort Germany, using as a pretext the German Hitlerist-Nazi past, and the placing of the Jews in a holocaust. Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination. They say there were six million Jews - not six million, not three million, or anything like that... But the world accepted this [figure], and it does not allow anyone to discuss this."
US Foreign Policy
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah opposes US foreign policy: "I say that America, in its policy that aspires to impose hegemony on the world is an evil with no good in it." and "After the tragic slaughter in Karbala and Qadhimiyya [suicide bombings], I said that the CIA, which was in Iraq even during the time of the previous regime, as was Israeli intelligence, the Mossad" In the past he has issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from helping the USA in its occupation of any Muslim country.Also, he has asked for a boycott of American products.
All American and Israeli goods and products should be boycotted in a way that undermines American and Israeli interests so as to act as deterrence to their war against Muslims and Islam that is being waged under the pretense of fighting terrorism.
This boycott should become an overwhelming trend that makes these two states feel that their economies are in a real and actual danger.
In November 2007 Fadlallah accused the United States of trying to sabotage the elections going on in Lebanon. He stated "The insanity of the US president and its administration is reflected in Lebanon by their ambassador pressuring the Lebanese people and preventing them from reaching an agreement over the presidential election."
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