"SOS as pirate motherships take to the high seas seeking cargo and hostages," from the Sunday Herald, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
Global piracy is now one of the biggest threats to world shipping, far eclipsing the risk from terrorism, and Somalia – a war-torn realm in almost complete anarchy – has fast become one of the world’s pirate hot spots. Since March 15 this year, there have been 32 attacks off Somalia. In 2004, there were just two attacks, in 2003, three, and in 2002, six. In the first nine months of 2005, there were 205 pirate attacks worldwide. Murders by pirates are also rising. In 2004, 30 crew members were killed. In 2003, the figure was 21....Another former British military intelligence officer who has travelled the world advising shipping lines on anti-piracy security measures said that the attacks off Somalia were not believed to be linked to terrorists. “Where there is an overlap between terrorism and piracy, it is in southeast Asia,” he said. He pinpointed the Mallaca Straits – the main shipping route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean – as the key hot spot for acts of piracy linked to Islamist terrorists. “There’s an absolute double-up there,” he said. “Pirates and terrorists are getting into bed together in this part of the world in the same way that the IRA climbed into bed with criminals in Northern Ireland.”
Ahoy, Vikrant!
This is the perfect opportunity for the Indian Navy to step up and take its place alongside the United States Navy and the Royal Navy.
In much the same way that the United States maintains the freedom of the Internet, the USN and R(A,NZ,C)N have for generations guaranteed the freedom of the seas.
Should it so choose, India could dispatch its surface fleet and smash piracy--and a prong of the Jihad--in the Indian Ocean.
To facilitate operations in the Straits, I bet Singapore would even lend India some of those deep-dredged berths intended for US naval shipping in the coming decades.
Sincerely,
Mad Jack
Ahoy, mates. Arrrr. (or, Er--see below) With part of my family being of maritime southern Chinese heritage, I'm connected to piratical stock myself.
The rise of piracy along the Horn of Africa (since erstwhile Somalia is dividing into Somalia, Somaliland, and Puntland) shows what happens when nobody shoulders the burden of policing the seas. That task was carried out in the 19th and part of the 20th by the UK; and by the USA today.
We will probably see a rise in piracy as the Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, and Indonesia destabilize and collapse. It is likely that Islamic radicalism will provide justifications for many engaging in it, since the regions most likely to be affected are Muslim; however, other cultures are prone to similar behavior when conditions permit.
Is today talk like a pirate day at JihadWatch? Muhammad was a pirate according to the profit of doom website. First time I ever heard this word used to describe this exemplar for the Muhammadans
Back to the days of Thomas Jefferson....
For centuries Muslim raiders went up and down the coasts of Europe, even as far as Ireland, and in one famous instance, Iceland. Rape and plunder were the intent. And the greatest wealth were the people themselves, the ones left alive after the raids and who were taken back to North Africa. There they were enslaved, set to work for their Muslim masters. A recent book, "White Gold," by Giles Milton, in telling the story of one Thomas Pellow of Cornwall, reminds us of the one million people from Western Europe seized over the centuries by Muslim raiders. No doubt with modern tools, those skilled in the analysis of DNA, were they allowed to test populations in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim countries, could find genetic markers for distant origins.
In eastern and central Europe, and in present-day Russia, men were seized as slaves (and then forcibly converted) and in certain areas, the kidnapping of women, especially Circassian and Georgian and other women from the Caucasus region, helped fill the harems not only of the rulers, but of ordinary Muslims.
And then there was, to fill in the gaps -- the trade in black African slaves. Some were simply seized for the usual purposes -- work, sexual slaves. But the young black Africans taken by the millions had a special role to fill -- that of the eunuchs who attended to, and guarded, the women in the harems of any Muslim who could afford it. Most people appear to believe that the "harem" was enjoyed only by the most powerful, the harem was not merely, as so many believe, something to be found among the rulers, or the padishahin, but ordinary Muslim men would, if they could afford it, have their harem. of whom only 10% survived the trek by slave coffle, or the sea-trip by Arab dhow, to the Islamic slave-markets, had a special They had a special role to fill -- the role of eunuchs. The word "harem" is often associated in the Western world only with the ruler -- the famous "hareem" of the Ottoman rulers, the Padishahin, the "hareem" of this or that local potentate. But there were "hareems" everywhere in the Muslim lands. Any male slave who might come near such women, much less guard or attend to them, should be free from any sexual urges, that is should be castrated. In Jan Hogedoorn's scholarly study of the economics of this "hideous trade" (as he titles his article), he explains why the Arab slave-traders would castrate the kidnapped black African boys on site, in the bush, and then march them northwards or eastwards by slave coffle all the way to the slave-markets of Egypt and North Africa, or to the coast where they were then taken by dhow to Arab slave-markets in Arabia, in Riyadh and Baghdad and Damascus and Cairo, and Constaninople and Smyrna, and in all the smaller slave markets -- Islamic civilization had slave-soldiers, sex-slaves in the harems, slaves in the houses, for after all, slavery was part of 7th century Arabia, is recognized in the Qur'an, and by Muhammad, and thus, whatever banning of slavery took place in the Muslim world, took place under pressure from the non-Muslim world. It was the British (see J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880) who managed to ban the Arab slave trade in African slaves -- much to the chagrin of the local Arabs. Slavery was "officially" abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. Arab enslavement of black Africans, however, continues wherever -- wherever it can be continued. In the southern Sudan, black Africans have been seized by Arab slavers, and as is now well known, Western NGOs have managed to buy the freedom, from their Arab masters, of some of those enslaved. Black Africans are enslaved in Mali and Mauritania. And in Saudi newspapers one can find advertisements that read suspiciously. One that was brought to my attention a few years ago was an offer to swap a late-model American car for an Asian -- i.e. Indian or Sri Lankan or Thai -- female.
As the Western world grew in power, the Muslim raiding parties that once went up and down the coasts of Europe concentrated more and more on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. In the Western world, these raiders -- who were not working on their own, but carefully had to register in advance with, for example, the beylerbey of Algiers, their intended Christian targets -- made much of the Mediterranean unsafe, just as the pirates described in the article above may be making shipping unsafe. Everyone knows about the Barbary Pirates. Americans like to tell the story of how at long last the robust response of the American Republic under Jefferson accomplished what those tribute-paying fearful Europeans could not accomplish. But the pride is slightly misplaced, for in the end the Barbary Pirates renewed their attacks here and there, and it was only the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 that put a definitive end to the war conducted from North Africa by Muslims on the Christian shipping.
Muslim pirates today, in and around Malaysia and Indonesia, and off the coast of Somalia, are of course introduced in gain, like pirates always and everywhere. But Islam adds a different dimension, and justifies, even elevates the enterprise.
That is why, for example, what some attempt to describe what has been happening in France as mere hooliganism and anti-social activity of a sort that one can find among non-Muslim rioters misses a point. That behavior, that hatred, even where it is not in every case the direct result of the promptings of Islam, is provided a justification by Islam and the tenets it inculcates of permanent hostility toward all non-Muslims. And the actions, the rage, the hatred are not merely justified, but intensified, given a quality that makes them essentially inassuagable, implacable, and any attempts to buy one's way out of that hatred by the payment of jizyah (more housing, even more benefits beyond free medical care and free education and so many free things that Americans would hardly believe it), will not work. Islam is to dominate, Muslims are to rule. If they are not yet in their rightful positions, that is unjust. And whatever system exists will be unjust until Islam dominates, until the Infidel society has itself adjuected completely, and so transformed itself as to be accomodate every Muslim demand, which is to say -- to give up what distinguishes a non-Muslim people, culture, civilization, from a Muslmi one. And this is what Tariq Ramadan and others of his ilk like to talk about: that Islam is "European" (no it isn't), that Islam is "here to stay in Europe and no one can do anything about it" (not so fast) and that's just "the way it's going to be." (not necessarily, not at all -- Europe has powers of recuperation, and it only requires enough people coming to their senses, through educating themselves, in time).
Of course there are hooligans and a criminal class everywhere. But that does not mean that there is nothing specifically Islamic about what has been happening in France. The French government spends more on public housing than any other country in Western Europe. It spends more on education than any other country in Western Europe. The Muslims, chiefly North Africans, who live in France know perfectly well what life is like in the countries that they or their parents or in a few cases grandparents came from. They know French and they know Arabic. They could be sent back. They have no claim on France, none. Geographic happenstance means nothing. The French can stop paying the quite unecessary guilt-tak-cum-tribute more than 40 years after the French had left Algeria, where they had left a legacy, an interval, of civilization, and Morocco and Tunisia, where after a mere 40 years (some "colonialism") they had left similar legacies, and allowed at least some of the most intelligent members of those societies to begin, after a thousand years of mental enslavement, the space to think.
Islam tells people that they should not integrate -- how, really, can many Believer be expected to integrate into, to accept, the laws, manners, customs, ways, and above all the domninant position, of Infidels? It makes no sense. It is against Allah, against the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. Islam is "to dominate and not to be dominated." Of course it is okay to rape "Brigite," whether "Brigitte" is a real gang-raped French girl, or France itself. It is okay to vandalize, or steal, the property of Infidels -- it's not really theirs in the first place. The world belongs to Allah, and to the Believers. Why should not Muslims act on this belief? Why are we so unfeeling, and unthinking, as to deny the self-evident superiority of Musliim ways, and Muslim laws, and Muslims themselves? If we Infidels, in France or elsewhere, insist on being stubborn, then we deserve what we get. And in the end, the Westeern world, it is felt, will not exhibit the neceesary determination, and even gratitude to those who left the legacy that was inherited and is now being abandoned, in a colossal act of collective self-immolation.
A religion for and by pirates! Booty...where do we see that word besides the qur'an? In pirate stories and movies. 1.3 billion people follow a pirate.
oh yeah, one other place we see booty...rap videos. Has a slightly different meaning, but still applies to muhammad, who liked that kind of booty too, if it was young enough.
Hugh: I won't assimilate into a God-mocking, libertine society, either. I want my sons to marry Christian women; and I want the ACLU put under court injunction. Sure, my religion teaches neither Jew nor Greek (and by extension black, white, and yellow), but it does have its standards, too.
At least one part of this problem is easliy solved. The British, U.S. or possibly the Indian navies must have submarines in the general neighbourhood off the coast of Somalia. This "mothership" would make good target practice and a submarine would create a situation of plausible deniability.
johnb...
subs unfortunately will not work, no deck guns any more. BUT during WWII there were Q-ships used by both sides. Nice fat targets until you got well within range, THEN down came the sides and out came the 75mm's and 40mm's and down went the enemy ship.
Kepha by God Mocking Libertine I assume you mean the French, but pray tell how a "God mocking libertine" would be able to distinguish between you and a Muslim. (leaving aside the strawmen about beheading etc).
You see Muslims have a fierce hatred for "God mocking libertines" just like you, they leave such only two choices death or Shahada, with peoples of the book, such as yourself, you have a third, to worship your god and submit to second class citizenry.
Don't be too harsh on the ACLU, you will be accused of being antisemitic (again you have strange befellows, the KKK and NAZI's hate them as well, they also have an abiding hatred of political correctness and multiculturalism -which incidentally they see as an invention of Jews, and besides that the day might come when you will need them.
The politics of ignorance and fear make strange bedfellows.
Nariz, have you found the location of the illuminati / reconstructionist / Heaven's Gate nexus yet? Keep that foil hat tight!
Carolyn2:
Sick, but true.
WLF:
I had also thought of Q ships but my reference to submarines included the use of a torpedo or two on the mother ship. I'm assuming the "mother ship" is a large enough target.
Q-ships? So when they open up with the guns suddenly pushing forward and firing, before recoiling, could that action be called a Q-ship thrust?
Estate and trust lawyers all over the country want to know.
Could this be a ship from bin Laden's own navy?