Stranded "Danes" in Lebanon...

In the last couple of days many Danes have been astonished about the fact that Lebanon apparently have been one of the most popular places for ?Danish? tourists. When hostilities broke out almost two weeks ago -- many believed that there would only be a handful of Danes in Lebanon... The usual diplomats and staff, business people and a few tourists, but to everybody's surprise, upwards of 10,000 ?Danes? apparently were on vacation in Lebanon, using their Danish passports to flee the country in the ongoing evacuation. The Danish Foreign Ministry have already paid for 5,000 of these to be evacuated back to Denmark.

The funny thing is that most of these people fled Lebanon once and were granted residence permission or Danish citizenship in the first place, in order for them to have a place where they could be secure from oppression, persecution, torture, assassination and other bad things that allegedly would happen to them if they stayed in their country of origin. So the humanitarian right thing to do would be to grant them asylum! But apparently no asylum was needed for these people, who voluntarily travelled back to their home country for extended vacations, with welfare checks coming in each month courtesy of the Danish tax payers -- so that they can live on that in the country that they supposedly cannot live in!

When Søren Espersen (Danish People's Party) suggested that when these so-called Danish tourists returns to Denmark, they should be checked against public records, to see whether they we're on welfare and not really available to the job-market (as required by the law) or otherwise engaged in social fraud... an outcry was heard from the social system, and large groups of politicians ranging from the far left and into the government.... why pick on people who have just been in a really bad situation!

Why indeed? Well, for starters because it is required by law that people on welfare gets checked if it is suspected that any type of fraud is going on! Secondly because it is mighty suspicious that people spend extended vacations in a country that they supposedly have fled to save their life, while being on welfare.

Now that the suspicions have been raised, wouldn't it be in everybody's best interest to clear the matter, of whether there have been social fraud going on or not, irregardless of what the people have just been through?

But apparently some of the returned Danes are being checked, according to the daily newspaper B.T. at least one person only managed to get onto Danish soil before getting arrested! The 38 year old man had travelled to Lebanon in May with his two year old daughter, even though the mother had the custody of the child. The police issued an international arrest order, but couldn't do anything further, due to lack of coorporation in these kind of matters from Islamic countries. The man had contacted the Danish authorities to get evacuated, which he was and arrested as soon as he was back in Denmark. The daughter reunited with the mother in the airport and the man now faces up to 4 years prison for the kidnapping.