I lived and worked in Dubai for a time, too. Hadn't heard Teribus's fascinating story before, but my impression was that they would certainly have made a lot of money from smuggling or ABSOLUTELY anything else that they could think of - it's probably the most intensely capitalist place I've ever been. This is maybe because it hadn't much wealth at all till the oil boom.

It's no more or less morally suspect as any place where unfettered capitalism is allowed. While I was there, a fire in a factory highlighted the horrors of migrant workers (many from Sri Lanka and the Philippines) being locked in their place of work overnight - those who survived suffered terrible burns and were housed in cramped quarters with no air conditioning and almost no nursing care. Horrible, horrible. But, then, no different to a lot of other places that the West routinely does business with (or for that matter, the West itself during rapid industrialization a couple of centuries ago). Forget the fact that these are Emirates, or in the middle east, or Muslim - the main driving force is the almighty power of money. And, guess what? That's exactly why we'll go on trading with them and exactly why we need to question our own values.