Friday, May 28, 2010

A Hoped-For Hook Up

In the grand tradition of The Three Stooges Meet the Monsters, how about The Gaza Flotilla Meets the Somali Pirates?  

Now, there's an encounter I'd be willing to plunk down good money to see.

Update: Speaking of "pirates," Rizwan Jabbar explains in a letter to the National Post that the yo ho ho-ers in question take to the high seas because they have no other option:
Re: They're Terrorists, Not Pirates, letter to the editor, May 26; What Do You Do With A Captured Pirate, Anne Applebaum, May 25.

The letter writer and Anne Applebaum fail to provide insight into why piracy started in the first place in the Horn of Africa. Somalia has about 3,330 kilometres of coastline that has been pillaged by foreign vessels. The United Nations noted in 2006 that Somalian waters have fleets from around the world that have illegally plundered Somali fish stocks, depriving Somali fisherman of their livelihood. The waters also became a dumping ground for waste products as there was no enforcement around this largest coastline in Africa.

And now these impoverished Somalis living by the sea have been forced to become pirates; plundering the same vessels and the nations that exploited them out of their livelihood. And I do agree with your letter-writer that we should prosecute the nations that took advantage of Somalia's waters and resources illegally; I bet most of them were not Muslim.
Touché, Rizwan. Of course, there's another, more obvious explanation. They turned to piracy for the same reason that Willie Sutton purportedly gave for turning to bank-robbery: because that's where the money is.

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