Belligerati

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April 23, 2009

Big problems with this line of reasoning

There are hundreds of young men just like him all along the Somali coastline, calling themselves "coast guards" who protect Somali waters and "tax" foreign shipping to compensate for the fact that foreign fishing fleets, unmolested by any Somali state authority, annually plunder hundreds of millions of dollars of fish from Somali waters — and also for the fact that unscrupulous foreigners have used the coast to dump toxic waste. None of this excuses piracy, of course, and many of these claims are spurious, since the prime beneficiaries of booty extracted by pirates are land-based warlords, many of them associated with the now deposed U.S.-backed government. Still, the plight of Somalia's coastline certainly helps explain why the phenomenon is so widespread — and why the pirates are viewed by many Somalis as folk heroes.

Utter nonsense.
1) That terrorists are folk heroes in many places, that doesn't mean we should avoid killing as many of them as possible when they threaten us.

2) This is just banditry, not defending the homeland or the earth. The ships that the pirates are robbing, kidnapping, and murdering upon are not the same ships that are fishing and dumping in Somali water. Who would rob a ship full of toxic waste? Who would try to get a ransom from a small Chinese fishing boat? No, they rob ships prepared to pay ransoms, which are mostly big commercial freight ships.

Posted by OneEyedMan at April 23, 2009 9:31 AM

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Posted by: Monk at April 23, 2009 1:26 PM

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