Let the Declarations of Support for the Pirates Begin!
Here we go again.. the increasingly boiling Somali Pirate crisis wouldn’t be complete unless someone stepped out to lionize the criminals!
The best gem I’ve found so far is Johann Hari’s You Are Being Lied to About Pirates:
Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.
“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.
Johann, here’s where you and the pirates that you defend are wrong: they are not attacking Toxic Waste ships and demanding the world look at the problem. They are attacking vessels passing through, including Captain Phillips’ ship recently, which was delivering food aid to Africans, and demanding MONEY.
What pirate has boarded a toxic waste ship and declared “We will stop attacking these boats when they stop dumping waste in our waters!” None.
The arguments you use are similar to the ones that have been used to defend extreme Islamist insurgents. But here is what you guys always miss: Pirates, instead of seeking to change the problem they describe, attack innocent people in the interest of money, while ignoring those that are doing them wrong. Their message of being a victim is lost to their greed and their willingness to create more victims. Insurgents are the same, they start out claiming to be victims of foreign invaders, but then lose their message by killing innocent men, women and children, including their own people. When someone sites a problem to justify greed or lustful killing, the problem they site shows itself for what it truly is: a way to rationalize committing atrocities.
Heroic insurgents, like the American Revolutionaries, attacked and defeated the occupying army of a much stronger nation. They didn’t win the war by gunning down and blowing up other Americans. How stupid would that have been? Then, in 1812, when the British were harassing them at sea, the Americans did not respond by pirating random merchants and aid ships. They went straight for and defeated the aggressors without seeking to create more victims by attacking people completely unrelated to the situation. Sitting Bull fought against the aggression of the Americans, and he didn’t do it by planting bombs to blow up his own people or invading Canada. You see the difference?
The rhetoric and logic you use to defend these criminals would mean nothing if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in front of one of their AK-47s. You would face the same fate as all the other victims; all because someone else is occupying Israel or dumping toxic waste.
This pirate/insurgent attitude of “You victimize us so we will victimize them” is foolishness at its best, trumped only by the foolishness of well-educated men who think reason and logic should be used to reinforce the backwards, radical and barbaric philosophies of kidnappers and murderers.