Hello to you too! I've been on iotd for years now and finally got around to creating an account...
I am American and have just been living and working as an expat in the UAE for the last two years. I am not Muslim.
The UAE is nothing like Saudi Arabia or other strict Islamic countries. Yes, Islam is still the national religion, but there are a lot of differences between here and places like Saudi Arabia: you are allowed to practice other religions here as long as you don't try to push your views on others (wish they had that rule in the States), women can drive as long as they have permission from their sponser to get a license(like in most countries), you can buy pork and alcohol, you can go out to night clubs and get drunk, you can wear bikinis on the beach, you can wear pretty much anything you could wear in the States in public (obviously the more revealing the more stares you are going to get)... The list goes on and on.
As far as killing your daughter for flirting or having premarital sex, that's not how it is here (though of course very strict Muslims could still kill their kids for anything in their own homes I'm sure, but I've never heard of that happening here, not to say it doesn't.). If we are talking about Emirati's, the actual locals here, they are WAY different than what you would expect. If a local gets pregnant via premarital sex, they can get an abortion. It is done in a hospital and everything is kept hush-hush, but they can. If anyone else gets pregnant via premarital sex, they are sent back to their host nation.
I've done a lot of research on rapes in this country after a teenage boy got taken to the desert and raped a few months ago. They don't kill you for stuff like that here. They try to have a more liberal view on things. I'm going to attach two links... One about the rape, and one about what you can and cannot do here. Hopefully that helps answer some of your questions.
And if it wasn't clear, I wholeheartedly agree with you about what absolute [!!??!?!!] it is the way a lot of these strict Muslims act... Did you hear about the beauty pagent woman that got prego, wasn't married, and was sent to be stoned after she finished nursing her baby? I forget where that was... Somewhere in Africa I think. She still told people not to boycott the pagent.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/gngaller.../10227399.html
http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Polic.../10203733.html