When I saw the headline "Somali pirates vow revenge." my first thought was: Are you kidding? What's to avenge. The pirates started this. Other people were just defending themselves and now the pirates are the ones who seek revenge.
However, as the saying goes, there are two sides to everything. The pirates' view is, I guess, that since they hadn't killed anyone, then they had no expectation that anyone had any right to kill them in defending themselves from the pirates.
But is that a reasoned argument? Afterall, the pirates did use force in taking their captives. They fired bullets and rocket propelled grenades at the boats. Perhaps they were just lucky that no one had been killed yet. When Capt. Philipps had briefly escaped from them and was swimming away, they didn't just let him go. They made him get back in the boat. What would they have done if he had kept swimming? Would they have let him go or have shot and killed him? It was only the threat of arms that enabled them to accomplish what they did accomplish. It seems to me that it was the pirates who raised the stakes to the lethal level the moment they introduced firearms into the picture. With that introduction, it was inevitable that someone, on one side or the other, was going to be hurt or killed eventually. Now it has happened, and the pirates are the ones who feel the need to seek revenge. Incredible!!
These pirates were ex-fishermen after they've seen the fish decline around the Somali coast they took matters unto their own hands.....what forced them to make this stupid decision....its none other than toxic removal companies that are paid to remove nuclear wastes for the nuclear producing countries ...because Somali hasn't yet got a functioning government these companies have taken advantage using vessels to trespass into our waters.....
every country has a coast guard and if any other country comes in...their ships,boats and vessels will be seized...ask the British what happened to them when they went into Iranian waters
so if you like these rascal fishermen are the untrained coast guards of somalia..ok thats one thing but what about the goods they steal and the ransom money they demand....well what about their fish? that was not only destroyed but stolen off their shores and beyond.......lets all understand why piracy began in the first place rather than to just accept whatever the media says
These pirates were ex-fishermen after they've seen the fish decline around the Somali coast they took matters unto their own hands.....what forced them to make this stupid decision....its none other than toxic removal companies that are paid to remove nuclear wastes for the nuclear producing countries ...because Somali hasn't yet got a functioning government these companies have taken advantage using vessels to trespass into our waters.....
every country has a coast guard and if any other country comes in...their ships,boats and vessels will be seized...ask the British what happened to them when they went into Iranian waters
so if you like these rascal fishermen are the untrained coast guards of somalia..ok thats one thing but what about the goods they steal and the ransom money they demand....well what about their fish? that was not only destroyed but stolen off their shores and beyond.......lets all understand why piracy began in the first place rather than to just accept whatever the media says
erm, that actually makes some sense! MashaAllah!
Had the non-believer known of all the Mercy which is in the Hands of Allah, he would not lose hope of entering Paradise, and had the believer known of all the punishment which is present with Allah, he would not consider himself safe from the Hell-Fire http://www.muftimenk.co.za/Downloads.html
thank you sir.....i just watched the news abit ago and saw the freed captain 'philips' speak.......he repeatedly said the military are the heroes!...the military who sniped teenagers
''WASHINGTON, April 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Monday that three Somali pirates who were killed by the Navy's Seals to end a hostage crisis were "untrained" teenagers.
Addressing an audience at the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Virginia, Gates said that the slain pirates, aged at between 17 to 19, were heavily armed but inexperienced. ''
They were pirates all right! Don't matter how old or untrained.
Of course I don't support shooting anyone.
I do support it in this case.
Of course there are social and political reasons why piracy is on the rise in the area, but that does not mean it isn't a crime and it shouldn't be dealt with.
These people were armed, attacked a vessel, took its crew hostage, kidnapped the captain. It was completely right to take out these pirates.
You cannot commit such acts of piracy and expect authorities to not respond with force. IMHO they even have an obligation to act and prudently use force if necessary.
Of course, in the end this problem can only fundamentally be dealt with by stabilizing Somalia, but that does not mean these thugs need not be dealt with by navies worldwide.
thank you sir.....i just watched the news abit ago and saw the freed captain 'philips' speak.......he repeatedly said the military are the heroes!...the military who sniped teenagers
These pirates were ex-fishermen after they've seen the fish decline around the Somali coast they took matters unto their own hands.....what forced them to make this stupid decision....its none other than toxic removal companies that are paid to remove nuclear wastes for the nuclear producing countries ...because Somali hasn't yet got a functioning government these companies have taken advantage using vessels to trespass into our waters.....
every country has a coast guard and if any other country comes in...their ships,boats and vessels will be seized...ask the British what happened to them when they went into Iranian waters
so if you like these rascal fishermen are the untrained coast guards of somalia..ok thats one thing but what about the goods they steal and the ransom money they demand....well what about their fish? that was not only destroyed but stolen off their shores and beyond.......lets all understand why piracy began in the first place rather than to just accept whatever the media says
What a load of complete and utter deluded rubbish. 'Untrained coast guards? Since when have Somali waters extended 350 miles offshore? Since when have coast-guards held hostages for ransom? What do food aid ships have to do with 'toxic removal'? These 'rascal fishermen' are guilty of piracy on the high seas, are criminals, and should be treated accordingly. They drag the name of Somalia into the dirt.
What a load of complete and utter deluded rubbish. 'Untrained coast guards? Since when have Somali waters extended 350 miles offshore? Since when have coast-guards held hostages for ransom? What do food aid ships have to do with 'toxic removal'? These 'rascal fishermen' are guilty of piracy on the high seas, are criminals, and should be treated accordingly. They drag the name of Somalia into the dirt.
keep your hair on mate.........im might be deluded but here....i can help you enlighten yourself abit and maybe you could do the same for me another time
Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling
Monday, 5 January 2009
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.
If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century".
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. 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".
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "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.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?
And does Allah make allowance for piracy if one does it for a "good" reason? I know there are difference punishments for thieves who steal bread to feed their family and thieves who steal gold to line their purses, so maybe there are different punishments for different kinds of piracy, too. But which is it that these Somali pirates are really doing?
I understand that they aren't exactly playing Robin Hood and stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but are spending the money on new homes and cars and other luxuries for themselves, not so much for their neighbors. Also, they aren't targeting those who have actually taken their fish nor polluted their waters with dumping. They are going after those with the most money to pay ransoms. And now they have even begun to attack the vessels that are loaded with relief supplies for their neighbors while out on the high seas hundreds of miles from Somalian waters.
They may be 16/17 years of age, but the people they are attacking are in just as much jeopardy as if they were 36 or 47. If they didn't mean anyone harm, they wouldn't need guns and RPGs to do what they do would they? I just think it is crazy that it is the criminals who now claim that they are the ones justified in seeking revenge.
I'm saying this one on the top of my head, but I know that new muslims that left mecca, after the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, attacked and looted the caravans from mecca. The people of mecca confiscated the muslims goods and did harm to them as well. Prophet Mohammed didn't have these attacks stopped until mecca tribes asked for another agreement.
Based on that, I could say, if you are being plundered, you are permitted to plunder back. Without going overboard.
Come, let's all be fellows, make life easy on ourselves
let us love, and be loved, no one will have the world for themselves.
I'm saying this one on the top of my head, but I know that new muslims that left mecca, after the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, attacked and looted the caravans from mecca. The people of mecca confiscated the muslims goods and did harm to them as well. Prophet Mohammed didn't have these attacks stopped until mecca tribes asked for another agreement.
Based on that, I could say, if you are being plundered, you are permitted to plunder back. Without going overboard.
And in what ways did a ship bringing supplies to Kenyan and Somalian refugees represent those who the fisherman of Somali had a grievance against?
(The only recompense of those who make war against Allâh and His Messenger and who strive hard to create disordr in the land, is (according to the nature of the crime) that they be executed or crucified to death, or that their hands and feet be cut off on account of their opposition, or their (free) movement in the land be banned (by exile or imprisonment). This would mean ignominy for them in this world and there awaits them in the Hereafter a severe punishment). (translation of surat alma`eda aya 33).
The punishment of piracy is one of the mentioned punishments,the a authorities have to choose one of them according to the nature of the crime.
It's irrelevant. I'm just answering the question about piracy in Islam.
Don't act like I'm the somalian pirates.
I don't think you, or anyone else here, is a Somalian pirate. I'm just trying to figure out how what you said about piracy in Islam would be applied to the piracy taking place in Somalia? I don't see them as being similar situations, do you?
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