In 75 BC, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by Cilician pirates and held prisoner in the Dodecanese islet of Pharmacusa. The pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents of gold, but Caesar confidently insisted he was worth at least fifty, and so the pirates increased their demand to fifty. The ransom was paid and Caesar was released. He then raised a fleet, captured the pirates, and executed them.
Somalis have been parasites on world commerce for many years. Up until recently, they were like bed bugs: disgusting, blood-sucking, stupid, and useless, but generally not a threat to human health outside the borders of their domain. Now Somalis have graduated to a much more dangerous form of parasitism, i.e. piracy. Somalia today is the best example of anarchy in the world today, however, tea baggers and libertarians never seem to want to live there even though they profess to believe in the barest minimum of government.
Somalia is also the home of al-Shabab, one of the most militant Islamist groups in the world today. This is logical because the people of Somalia in general are some of the most Islamist people in the world. Lennox Samuels, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, reported on Somalia's bloody civil war. He watched a power bloc begin to rise from Somalia's sharia, aka Islamic, court system in the mid-1990s. Al-Shabab's stated aim is to overthrow the government and impose its strict version of Islam via country-wide sharia law. It has declared war on the U.N. and on Western non-governmental organizations. Mohamed Mohamud, the Christmas Tree Bomber, is Somali.
Lefties often proclaim that Islamists and other dangerous people became that way because of their upbringing, i.e. not enough money, love, and/or food. These geniuses need to explain why Haiti, with its African heritage, manages to be one of the poorest countries in the world, yet its citizens never develop into suicide bombers or pirates.
Lefties also believe in multiculturalism, even though three Western Europe leaders -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and now French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- have declared that it has been a dismal failure in every respect. Australia’s ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also joined the legion of politicians willing to declare that multiculturalism has been a total failure. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama, with his feet firmly planted in the Islamic world, still carries a torch for multiculturalism.
Throughout history, but especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, pirates were usually executed in summary fashion, often by hanging or beheading. Given the fact that Somalis are among the world's most fanatical Islamists, beheading would be the most ironic and suitable form of execution.
At first, Somali pirates launched their small boats directly from shore. Then when their prey stopped sailing so close to shore, the pirates developed the concept of mother ships. These mother ships were larger craft, often beat-up merchant vessels, carrying the smaller boats used for boarding tankers and cargo ships; when the mother ship approached the prey, the pirates would launch the smaller boats and attack. Now the pirates have started using some of the larger and more modern merchant vessels they hijacked as mother ships, along with the crews they kidnapped. The crews then become slaves of the pirates, a development lefties do not seem terribly worried about. Now the pirates can attack almost around the clock, in almost any kind of weather, and hundreds of miles away from the shore of Somalia. At least twenty mother ships are in use today.
Both BBC News and the Christian Science Monitor published recent articles involving the same source material. Wing Commander Paddy O'Kennedy, the spokesman for Navfor, the European Union Naval Force Somalia, said: "At the moment our policy is that the safety of the hostages comes first. When you use the military, people get hurt, that's a fact."
He implied that hostages often are wounded and that was true in the case of the Samho Jewellery, a South Korean ship hijacked by Somali pirates and subsequently retaken by South Korean commandos. The captain of the ship was shot in the stomach, but his wounds were not life-threatening. The entire crew was rescued, with five of the eight pirates being killed.
However, O'Kennedy's implication that we should do nothing because hostages might be hurt is pure political nonsense. The crew of the Samho Jewellery told of frequent beatings by their captors, and their lives were often threatened. The Telegraph UK reported that pirates have recently tied hostages upside down and dragged them in the sea, locked them in freezers, beaten them and used plastic ties around their genitals. On January 26th, Somali pirates murdered two Filipino crew members of another ship, with a third man jumping overboard and drowning. Currently, at least thirty ships are being held by Somali pirates, along with 500-700 hostages, depending upon the media source.
O'Kennedy continued with: "When you get close to ships that have been pirated they say to us 'stay away or we'll kill the hostages'. They put the crew on deck, they will put a gun against their head, and that's a pretty strong message for us to stay away." O'Kennedy seems to be saying that we cannot stop further hijackings -- and the enslavement of those new crews -- because we might endanger the crews already forced into slavery.
India was able to capture two mother ships. The first was surrendered by the pirates after a brief skirmish. The second was abandoned by both pirates and hostages after Indian forces set it afire. The Navy is touting its early successes, saying that piracy fell 75% around the Lakshadweep Islands since December, one month after stepping up patrols there.
A Malaysian Navy patrol ship opened fire on pirates who had boarded the MV Bunga Laurei off the Comoros. The pirates surrendered after a brief firefight.
Kenya's navy patrol craft covertly operate a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners policy. The Tanzanian Navy almost certainly operates under the same rules of engagement.
Last year, ten Somali pirates "probably died" when Russian forces set them out in their small boats after foiling their piracy attempt. Given the history of the Soviet Union, where terrorists usually did not screw with Soviet diplomats because the Soviets would simply kill the terrorists, it is likely that the Russian forces allowed the pirates to board their small boats before firing a few shots into the boats to sink them (watch video here of the immediate aftermath of the incident ending with the destruction of the mother ship).
In contrast, a British Ministry of Defense directive has forbidden Royal Navy captains to confront or arrest pirates "for fear of breaching their human rights."
If South Korea, India, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Russia can best the pirates with very low casualties, perhaps O'Kennedy and the rest of Navfor should step aside and allow those less girly to execute the mission at hand.
NATO has now captured a mother ship, freeing two Yemeni hostages. Sixteen pirates were taken prisoner and a weapons cache seized. All they had to do was fire warning shots at the mother ship.
As the Christian Science Monitor noted, the recent hijacking of two oil tankers in two days, the Greek MV Irene SL supertanker and the Italian MV Savina Caylyn, together containing $260 million worth of oil, $200 million of which was destined for the USA, are putting oil supply routes at risk. Estimates for the total economic cost of piracy range from a few billion to almost twenty billion dollars, and 2010 was the worst year yet in terms of financial loss.
"We could very quickly be reaching a point where we're going to have to call for seafarers to refuse to sail into this area. Now what will that mean for the world economy? Well that means ships can't go into the area, that means we have an oil shortage again, maybe then people would take notice, maybe when the supermarket shelves start to empty, when there is no petrol in the forecourt, then people will realize how critical the shipping industry is," said Mike Dickenson, from the seafarers' union Nautilus.
Considering the location of Somalia - covering the chokepoint of the Gulf of Aden, possibly the world's busiest oil transportation seaway -- this would result in yet another financial crash, something we cannot afford even in good economic times.
The Spirit-of-Adventure, a cruise liner carrying hundreds of passengers, was almost hijacked by pirates in January. The cost of the ransom for these people would be astronomical and cruise liner business might not survive the bad press. It is only a matter of time before two pirate mother ships working in tandem, one in front and one behind, successfully hijack a passenger liner.
One of the self-imposed restrictions to eliminating Somali piracy is bringing them to trial. The international community has failed to come to an agreement on just what to do with international outlaws. Some of them have actually been released back to Somalia because the capturing military did not have a structure set-up to prosecute pirates, especially considering that the pirates hail from an anarchical state.
"One of the major problems we face is the fact that you need sufficient evidence to bring these people to trial and justice. We all know they are pirates but proving they are is another thing," said Joel Morgan, who heads the Seychelles government's anti-piracy drive.
Why bother with trials? If pirates are captured with the usual weapons, e.g. hand-held missile launchers, hand-held grenade launchers, automatic weapons, etc, and they are associated with a mother ship carrying many small boats, it can be safely assumed they are pirates.
To handle the common case where the pirates throw their weapons into the sea and then claim to be simple fisherman, drones can be employed to first capture visual evidence. A drone can circle a suspected pirate vessel, keeping the boat in continual surveillance. If weapons are seen to be dumped overboard as a patrol ship approaches, it can be safely assumed that they are pirates deserving of no quarter.
And they should be executed posthaste.
Somalis have been parasites on world commerce for many years. Up until recently, they were like bed bugs: disgusting, blood-sucking, stupid, and useless, but generally not a threat to human health outside the borders of their domain. Now Somalis have graduated to a much more dangerous form of parasitism, i.e. piracy. Somalia today is the best example of anarchy in the world today, however, tea baggers and libertarians never seem to want to live there even though they profess to believe in the barest minimum of government.
Somalia is also the home of al-Shabab, one of the most militant Islamist groups in the world today. This is logical because the people of Somalia in general are some of the most Islamist people in the world. Lennox Samuels, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, reported on Somalia's bloody civil war. He watched a power bloc begin to rise from Somalia's sharia, aka Islamic, court system in the mid-1990s. Al-Shabab's stated aim is to overthrow the government and impose its strict version of Islam via country-wide sharia law. It has declared war on the U.N. and on Western non-governmental organizations. Mohamed Mohamud, the Christmas Tree Bomber, is Somali.
Lefties often proclaim that Islamists and other dangerous people became that way because of their upbringing, i.e. not enough money, love, and/or food. These geniuses need to explain why Haiti, with its African heritage, manages to be one of the poorest countries in the world, yet its citizens never develop into suicide bombers or pirates.
Lefties also believe in multiculturalism, even though three Western Europe leaders -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and now French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- have declared that it has been a dismal failure in every respect. Australia’s ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also joined the legion of politicians willing to declare that multiculturalism has been a total failure. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama, with his feet firmly planted in the Islamic world, still carries a torch for multiculturalism.
Throughout history, but especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, pirates were usually executed in summary fashion, often by hanging or beheading. Given the fact that Somalis are among the world's most fanatical Islamists, beheading would be the most ironic and suitable form of execution.
At first, Somali pirates launched their small boats directly from shore. Then when their prey stopped sailing so close to shore, the pirates developed the concept of mother ships. These mother ships were larger craft, often beat-up merchant vessels, carrying the smaller boats used for boarding tankers and cargo ships; when the mother ship approached the prey, the pirates would launch the smaller boats and attack. Now the pirates have started using some of the larger and more modern merchant vessels they hijacked as mother ships, along with the crews they kidnapped. The crews then become slaves of the pirates, a development lefties do not seem terribly worried about. Now the pirates can attack almost around the clock, in almost any kind of weather, and hundreds of miles away from the shore of Somalia. At least twenty mother ships are in use today.
Both BBC News and the Christian Science Monitor published recent articles involving the same source material. Wing Commander Paddy O'Kennedy, the spokesman for Navfor, the European Union Naval Force Somalia, said: "At the moment our policy is that the safety of the hostages comes first. When you use the military, people get hurt, that's a fact."
He implied that hostages often are wounded and that was true in the case of the Samho Jewellery, a South Korean ship hijacked by Somali pirates and subsequently retaken by South Korean commandos. The captain of the ship was shot in the stomach, but his wounds were not life-threatening. The entire crew was rescued, with five of the eight pirates being killed.
However, O'Kennedy's implication that we should do nothing because hostages might be hurt is pure political nonsense. The crew of the Samho Jewellery told of frequent beatings by their captors, and their lives were often threatened. The Telegraph UK reported that pirates have recently tied hostages upside down and dragged them in the sea, locked them in freezers, beaten them and used plastic ties around their genitals. On January 26th, Somali pirates murdered two Filipino crew members of another ship, with a third man jumping overboard and drowning. Currently, at least thirty ships are being held by Somali pirates, along with 500-700 hostages, depending upon the media source.
O'Kennedy continued with: "When you get close to ships that have been pirated they say to us 'stay away or we'll kill the hostages'. They put the crew on deck, they will put a gun against their head, and that's a pretty strong message for us to stay away." O'Kennedy seems to be saying that we cannot stop further hijackings -- and the enslavement of those new crews -- because we might endanger the crews already forced into slavery.
India was able to capture two mother ships. The first was surrendered by the pirates after a brief skirmish. The second was abandoned by both pirates and hostages after Indian forces set it afire. The Navy is touting its early successes, saying that piracy fell 75% around the Lakshadweep Islands since December, one month after stepping up patrols there.
A Malaysian Navy patrol ship opened fire on pirates who had boarded the MV Bunga Laurei off the Comoros. The pirates surrendered after a brief firefight.
Kenya's navy patrol craft covertly operate a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners policy. The Tanzanian Navy almost certainly operates under the same rules of engagement.
Last year, ten Somali pirates "probably died" when Russian forces set them out in their small boats after foiling their piracy attempt. Given the history of the Soviet Union, where terrorists usually did not screw with Soviet diplomats because the Soviets would simply kill the terrorists, it is likely that the Russian forces allowed the pirates to board their small boats before firing a few shots into the boats to sink them (watch video here of the immediate aftermath of the incident ending with the destruction of the mother ship).
In contrast, a British Ministry of Defense directive has forbidden Royal Navy captains to confront or arrest pirates "for fear of breaching their human rights."
If South Korea, India, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Russia can best the pirates with very low casualties, perhaps O'Kennedy and the rest of Navfor should step aside and allow those less girly to execute the mission at hand.
NATO has now captured a mother ship, freeing two Yemeni hostages. Sixteen pirates were taken prisoner and a weapons cache seized. All they had to do was fire warning shots at the mother ship.
As the Christian Science Monitor noted, the recent hijacking of two oil tankers in two days, the Greek MV Irene SL supertanker and the Italian MV Savina Caylyn, together containing $260 million worth of oil, $200 million of which was destined for the USA, are putting oil supply routes at risk. Estimates for the total economic cost of piracy range from a few billion to almost twenty billion dollars, and 2010 was the worst year yet in terms of financial loss.
"We could very quickly be reaching a point where we're going to have to call for seafarers to refuse to sail into this area. Now what will that mean for the world economy? Well that means ships can't go into the area, that means we have an oil shortage again, maybe then people would take notice, maybe when the supermarket shelves start to empty, when there is no petrol in the forecourt, then people will realize how critical the shipping industry is," said Mike Dickenson, from the seafarers' union Nautilus.
Considering the location of Somalia - covering the chokepoint of the Gulf of Aden, possibly the world's busiest oil transportation seaway -- this would result in yet another financial crash, something we cannot afford even in good economic times.
The Spirit-of-Adventure, a cruise liner carrying hundreds of passengers, was almost hijacked by pirates in January. The cost of the ransom for these people would be astronomical and cruise liner business might not survive the bad press. It is only a matter of time before two pirate mother ships working in tandem, one in front and one behind, successfully hijack a passenger liner.
One of the self-imposed restrictions to eliminating Somali piracy is bringing them to trial. The international community has failed to come to an agreement on just what to do with international outlaws. Some of them have actually been released back to Somalia because the capturing military did not have a structure set-up to prosecute pirates, especially considering that the pirates hail from an anarchical state.
"One of the major problems we face is the fact that you need sufficient evidence to bring these people to trial and justice. We all know they are pirates but proving they are is another thing," said Joel Morgan, who heads the Seychelles government's anti-piracy drive.
Why bother with trials? If pirates are captured with the usual weapons, e.g. hand-held missile launchers, hand-held grenade launchers, automatic weapons, etc, and they are associated with a mother ship carrying many small boats, it can be safely assumed they are pirates.
To handle the common case where the pirates throw their weapons into the sea and then claim to be simple fisherman, drones can be employed to first capture visual evidence. A drone can circle a suspected pirate vessel, keeping the boat in continual surveillance. If weapons are seen to be dumped overboard as a patrol ship approaches, it can be safely assumed that they are pirates deserving of no quarter.
And they should be executed posthaste.
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