German foreign ministry says bloc is considering allowing attacks on Somali pirate bases on the ground.

Update from Vlad:

Two Iranian ships rescued from pirates. 1 by the U.S.A. and one by a Danish NATO ship

• Danish warship frees 14 hostages

EU may expand anti-piracy mission to beaches  (Al Jizz)

Talk is cheap:

Anti-piracy operations currently take place in the Indian Ocean, but in future the forces could be allowed to attack pirates’ arms dumps, boats and bases.Germany’s foreign ministry has said that the European Union is considering giving its anti-piracy forces the go-ahead to attack Somali pirate bases on the ground.

Andreas Peschke, German foreign ministry spokesman, said on Friday that the “limited destruction of piracy logistics on the beach” is under discussion but “no deployment on land”.

He stressed that discussions are ongoing and no decision has been made.

Stefan Paris, German defence ministry spokesman, said an EU committee on December 20 called for the force’s commander to draw up plans for revised rules of engagement.

Meanwhile, British politicians said on Thursday that the UK government must give official guidance on when it is legal to shoot and kill maritime pirates.

Parliament’s foreign affairs committee hailed the government’s decision in October to allow British merchant ships in dangerous waters to carry armed guards to protect them from pirates.

The report said piracy was a “major problem for the UK and the international community” and that more than $300m had been paid in ransoms to Somali pirates over the past four years.

But the committee said the government’s guidance on the use of lethal force remained “very limited” and that ships’ captains needed to know what they could do if they were threatened by pirates.

“The question anyone would ask is that if a private armed guard on board a UK flagged vessel sees an armed skiff approaching at high speed, can the guard open fire?” committee chairman Richard Ottaway said.

“The government must provide clearer direction on what is permissible and what is not.”

Ottaway said it was “unacceptable that 2.6 million square miles (6.7 million square kilometres) of the Indian Ocean has become a no-go area for small vessels, and a dangerous one for commercial shipping”.

Britain is to host an international conference on Somalia in London next month.

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, announced on October 30 that he was relaxing a legal ban so that British-flagged ships could apply for a licence to carry weapons on board in the most dangerous areas.

ALLGOV

Islamic rebels seeking to take control of Somalia have seized a key coastal village used by pirates, leaving the fate of some 360 hostages in doubt. Members of Hizbul-Islam entered Haradhere over the weekend, prompting pirates to flee the area. A BBC News reporter said at least 60 hostages from three vessels were moved up the coast, but that still left another 300 captives unaccounted for.

International fight against piracy … French forces with Somali pirates captured in the Gulf of Aden.

Publicly, Hizbul-Islam fighters, who arrived in Haradhere after themselves being driven out of the port town of Kismayo by another Islamist group, has said it wants to end piracy as part of its goal to establish Sharia law in Somalia. Hizbul-Islam also opposes prostitution, drugs and alcohol, all of which were widespread under pirate rule.

But there are unconfirmed reports that the group tried previously to cut a deal with pirates and share in the ransom money. The New York Times has reported that pirates may have collected as much as $100 million in ransoms, making their work an enticing source of revenue.

• Islamic Militants Vow to Halt Somali Piracy, Free Hostages as Bandits Relocate (by Malkadir Muhamed and Mohaned Olad Hassan, Associated Press)
• Somali Pirates Move Captive Ships as Islamists Advance (BBC News)
• Insurgents’ Seizure of a Pirate Base in Somalia Raises Questions About Its Future (by Jeffrey Gettleman and Mohamed Ibrahim, New York Times)
• Islamists Take Somalian Town Where British Couple are Held (by Matt Brown and Stephen Adams, Telegraph)
• Pirates Currently Hold 260 Hostages (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
• Save the Chandlers

Dutch Marines Board Hijacked Ship/In Dutch

What? Pirates don’t abide by “international law?” How dare they! What have we done to them that they hate us so much? Perhaps we should sent them money and weapons? Resettle them in the UK?

A BRITISH man kidnapped by Somali pirates was today allowed to speak via phone link from the ship where he is being kept prisoner.

The Sun/ thanks to DP111

Gordon Brown called on the pirates to release the British couple immediately.

The PM said at a press conference: “Piracy and the taking of hostages is unacceptable in any circumstances.

“We call on those people who have taken the British citizens hostage to release them as soon as possible.

“They should abide by international law.   They should release the hostages and the piracy should be brought to an end.”

* If wishes were horses,  beggars would ride….

SOMALI pirates have seized a Singapore-flagged container ship in the Indian Ocean near the Seychelles. The distance from Somalia to the Seychelles is roughly 1500 km’s, or  935 miles.

Hey, not to worry:  they’re only protecting the Somali coast from over fishing, these poor impoverished people.  Its all our fault that they’re  doing it tough, they  have no other choice, right?

• Al Sharpton Calls Somalia Pirates ‘Voluntary Coast Guard’ on Radio …

Agence France-Presse

“The Singapore flagged and owned boxship Kota Wajar was seized around 550km north the Seychelles,” said Andrew Mwangura, who heads the Kenyan chapter of East African Seafarers Assistance Program.

Other maritime sources in the region confirmed the information.

A maritime source in the area, who did not wish to be identified, said that the attack took place early today, 44km from the site of recent attacks on French tuna-fishing boats.

He also said that the attack was only 330km from the Seychelles, inside the archipelago’s exclusive economic zone.

The maritime security centre of the European Union, which has an anti-piracy naval force patrolling waters affected by Somali piracy, also confirmed the hijacking.

“During the early morning of October 15, 2009, a Singapore-flagged container ship KOTA WAJAR was hijacked in the Indian Ocean by pirates some 300 nautical miles (550km) north of the Seychelles,” a statement said.

“An EU NAVFOR maritime patrol aircraft was tasked to investigate the situation,” it said, without providing further details.

The latest hijacking brings to at least six the number of vessels in the hands of Somali pirates.

The others include a Spanish trawler, a Taiwanese fishing vessel and Ukrainian, German and Turkish freighters.

According to non-governmental observers Ecoterra International, at least 163 attacks have been carried out by Somali pirates since the start of 2009 alone, 47 of them successful hijackings.

A flotilla of foreign warships has since last year been patrolling the Gulf of Aden, one of the busiest maritime trade routes on the globe, prompting pirates to hunt down their prey far out in the Indian Ocean.

Experts had warned in recent days that dropping winds near the Seychelles had attracted pirates, who generally launch attacks from so-called “mother ships” with tiny skiffs.

• Looks like we need to hang the lawyers along with the pirates:

The Legal Left Comes to Pirate’s Defense 
By: John Perazzo / Frontpage

“Movement lawyer” Ron Kuby has found another pawn for his anti-American crusade

In the aftermath of the recent hijacking of the U.S. ship Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates—a crisis that ended with three dead pirates and a fourth in American custody—the lone pirate survivor, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, is set to face justice. That is, unless the legal Left, led by so-called “civil rights” attorney Ron Kuby, succeeds in blaming the United States for the attack on its own ship.

Kuby already has deployed the tactic that has been the defining emblem of his professional career—portraying a morally bankrupt defendant as a victim whose actions were compelled by a set of unfortunate external circumstances, and essentially condemning the United States for attempting to prosecute an individual who committed a grave and potentially deadly offense against American interests.

There are clear indications that as this case unfolds during the coming weeks, Kuby and his cohorts will put the respective crews of the Maersk Alabama and the USS Bainbridge (the Navy ship that came to aid the Maersk) on trial instead of the hijacker, second-guessing every action taken by the ship commanders and by the U.S. Navy SEALS who ultimately brought the crisis to a close.

The charges facing Muse are serious indeed: piracy; conspiracy to seize a ship by force; discharging a firearm in a conspiracy to seize a ship; conspiracy to commit hostage taking; and brandishing a firearm during a conspiracy to commit hostage taking. U.S. law plainly dictates that “whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life.”

In an effort to evade such an unhappy prospect, Muse’s mother first asked President Obama to pardon her son, depicting him as nothing more than a confused youngster who had been recruited into piracy by a coterie of persuasive “gangsters with money.” The father echoed her story, explaining that his boy had never previously hijacked a ship in the Indian Ocean.

Next, the parents sought to secure legal representation for their pirate son. Toward that end, they contacted Omar Jamal, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center. Jamal is a sort of “Somali Al Sharpton,” having made a career out of depicting his constituency – fellow Somalis living in the U.S. – as victims of American injustice and bigotry.

Jamal and Ron Kuby quickly found one another, and Kuby soon began putting together a legal team to defend the pirate. “I think in this particular case, there’s a grave question as to whether America was in violation of principles of truce in warfare on the high seas,” said Kuby. “This man [Muse] seemed to come onto the Bainbridge under a flag of truce to negotiate. He was then captured. There is a question whether he is lawfully in American custody and serious questions as to whether he can be prosecuted because of his age.”

Your eyes do not deceive you. Kuby is indeed contending that the USS Bainbridge crew deceptively lured, and then unjustifiably “captured,” an individual who was seeking only to negotiate, in good faith, a peaceful “truce”—as though he, and not the American ship, had come under unprovoked assault. Moreover, adds Kuby, this poor Somali captive is only a youngster who could not possibly have understood the grievous nature of the crime he was committing.

A closer look at the facts makes a mockery of Kuby’s claims. For one thing, it seems that Muse is not nearly as young and innocent as his family and Kuby have claimed. His father told authorities a host of wildly inconsistent tales, stating variously that the boy was 15, 16, 18, and 26 years of age. Muse’s brother places the figure at 18. U.S. authorities believe he is at least that old.

Moreover, it turns out that during the hijacking of the American ship, Muse conducted himself not as a frightened, confused dupe but rather as the ringleader of the entire operation. Indeed it was he, and not any of his confederates, who succeeded in forcing Captain Phillips to stop the Maersk Alabama in the first place. According to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

“Prosecutors say Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse was not shy about making his presence known on the Maersk Alabama, brazenly tearing through the ship in a way that belied his young age and skinny, 5-foot-2 frame. He was the first to board the ship, he fired a shot at the captain, he helped steal $30,000 in cash from a safe, and he bragged about hijacking ships in the past, authorities said.”

This doesn’t sound like the shrinking wallflower described by Muse’s parents, or the conciliatory negotiator described by Ron Kuby. But then again, Kuby is not a particularly credibly source.

An avowed Marxist and a disciple of the late radical attorney William Kunstler, Kuby describes himself as a “movement lawyer.” He candidly told the The New York Times in 2002, “Movement lawyers live vicariously through their clients. Movement lawyers identify especially with the people they represent.” And the clients Kuby has represented reveal a great deal about his “movement.”

One of Kuby’s prize clients was El Sayyid Nosair, who murdered the controversial leader of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane, in 1990. Nosair also was later convicted on nine counts of conspiracy and murder for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Kuby also defended Colin Ferguson, a black gunman who—on December 7, 1993—walked up the aisle of a crowded Long Island, New York railroad car, shooting white and Asian passengers, killing six and wounding nineteen. In his courtroom defense of Ferguson, Kuby attempted to convince the jury that his client’s judgment had been severely impaired by years of having lived in a supposedly racist and oppressive society, and that Ferguson therefore was more of a victim than a perpetrator. “White people have to learn to understand how bitter some black people are about their treatment in this society—and the fruit of white racism is hatred,” Kuby explained. Notably, Ferguson was adamantly opposed to having Kuby defend him, preferring instead to represent himself. Yet the persistent Kuby nonetheless injected himself into the case, knowing that it would provide him with a highly visible platform from which he could give voice to the notion that American racism was so extreme that poor Colin Ferguson had literally been driven to the point of homicidal madness.

In May of 2000, Kuby joined members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in signing a letter supporting protests and civil disobedience on behalf of the convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, depicting the black Marxist defendant as a wrongly prosecuted victim of a racist American criminal-justice system.

Perhaps Kuby’s most notorious client was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Sheikh Omar would have tried, I think, to prevent the World Trade Center bombing if he had known it was coming,” Kuby said in a 2000 interview. Kuby suggested that it was actually the FBI that had built and detonated the bomb, as a pretext for imprisoning innocent Muslims. “The ‘mastermind’ [of the bombing] is the government of the United States,” said Kuby. “It was a phony, government-engineered ‘conspiracy’ to begin with. It would never have amounted to anything had the government not planned it.” According to Kuby, Rahman’s legendary, hateful tirades against the perceived enemies of Islam could not rightfully be interpreted as calls for violence against those enemies. To make this point, Kuby posed the following analogy: “Why wasn’t the Pope taken into custody when he visited Denver? He is the spiritual leader of abortion-clinic bombers and doctor killers.”

In 2003 Kuby defended another Islamic terrorist—the Washington, DC-area sniper John Allen Muhammed, who, along with an accomplice, murdered ten innocent people in 2002. Muhammad’s objective was simple: he wanted to carry out a jihad, or “holy war,” whereby he would recruit multitudes of fellow killers to carry out mass shootings in cities across the United States.

The Somali bandit currently in U.S. custody is only the latest in a long line of enemies of America who has found an eager ally in Ron Kuby. In a perversion of justice that has become his trademark, Kuby has chosen to defend the pirate flag under the false flag of “civil rights.”

Israeli Guards Repel Jihadi Pirates Off Somali Coast…

• Actually, NOT “Somali Coast”: these pirates were way out in the open, about 325 kilometers north of the Seychelles, and about 800 kilometers east of Somalia. 
• Wonder what Al Sharpton has to say about that!

• With pistols they defended 1500 people  against marauding jihadis

• Somalia: Land of jihad, piracy, and Christian persecution
• Pirates seize tourist yacht near Seychelles, troops deployed
  

 Appropriate that the Associated ‘with terrorists’ Press bring us this news. Keep repeating: we’re not at war with Islam. Give him a Koran and halal food while in prison, that’s his inviolable human right, or is it?

Remember: its an old tradition in the US to do everything we can to make our enemies like us. German soldiers captured during WW II were given copies of Mein Kampf, Sauerkraut and Schnitzel, right?

From Creeping Sharia

NEW YORK (AP) — The wound on Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse’s slim hand, where he was stabbed by a crew member during his pirate attack on a U.S. cargo ship, has been redressed. He’s been given painkillers and antibiotics for his injuries and a Quran to use in prayer.

• Muse, who is Muslim, has been given a special diet. So far he’s been eatinglots of salads and vegetables.

“Imagine yourself in Somalia,” court-appointed attorney Philip Weinstein said Friday. “Imagine how overwhelmed you’d be by everything.”

Phil, imagine yourself in Somalia. What do you suppose they’d do under sharia law when they saw the name Weinstein and ‘United States’ on your passport? Hand you a copy of the Torah or Bible? Fix you a special diet?

• Muhammad and the Pirates  (WSJ)

The real reason why the global Muslim community doesn’t get upset over Somali pirates? It’s a family tradition.

• Update from Ban Ki Moonbat: We need to support the Pirate State of Somalia

Continue reading “Fitzgerald: “Islam Is Not Monolithic” and Divisions Within the Camp of Islam”

• Jihad leader returns to Somalia
• From MEMRI TV: Al-Arabiya TV Interviews Somali Pirates and Displays Their Mode of Operation
• How to tackle Islamic piracy
• MANAMA: The US Fifth Fleet announced on Friday it is transferring command of the counter-piracy international naval force CTF 151 to the Turkish Navy on May 3. 
  

Why We Don’t Condemn Our Pirates - (how the left offers a soapbox to the Islamic pirates and blames us infidels for the global jihad)

Liberalism is a mental disorder. Here’s more proof (as if we needed it!)

As the first pirate attack of a U.S. ship in 200 years comes to a climax, I’m re-posting an essay I solicited and received several weeks ago from K’naan, a Somali-Canadian singer and activist. A video of a performance by K’naan that I filmed at the All Points West music festival last summer appears below. – Michael Vazquez

Why We Don’t Condemn Our Pirates
by K’naan

Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Outside of sea bandits, and young girls fantasizing of Johnny Depp, would anyone with an honest regard for good human conduct really say that they are in support of Sea Robbery?

Well, in Somalia, the answer is: it’s complicated.

The news media these days has been covering piracy in the Somali coast with such 
lop-sided journalism, that it’s lucky they’re not on a ship themselves. It’s true that the constant hijacking of vessels in the Gulf of Aden is a major threat to the vibrant trade route between Asia and Europe. It is also true that for most of the pirates operating in this vast shoreline, money is the primary objective.

Related Links:

•  Bleeding hearts to the front: Somali pirate’s smile turns to tears; charged with crimes that could send him to jail for life
•  Pirates seize Belgian ship; NATO finds ‘mother ship’ and frees 20 hostages
•  Give merchant seamen fighting chance, with guns
• How to beat the pirates
• Fear pirates? Fuhgeddaboudit
• Somali pirate arrives in N.Y. for trial

But according to so many Somalis, the disruption of Europe’s darling of a trade route, is just Karma biting a perpetrator in the butt. And if you don’t believe in Karma, maybe you believe in recent history. Here is why we Somalis find ourselves slightly shy of condemning our pirates.

• Police and FBI agents escort the Somali pirate suspect U.S. officials identified as Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse into FBI headquarters in New York on Monday.

Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And although its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, sprung from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.

After the overthrow of Siyad Barre, our charmless dictator of twenty-some-odd years, two major forces of the Hawiye Clan came to power. At the time, Ali Mahdi, and General Mohamed Farah Aidid, the two leaders of the Hawiye rebels, were largely considered liberators. But the unity of the two men and their respective sub-clans was very short-lived. It’s as if they were dumbstruck at the advent of ousting the dictator, or that they just forgot to discuss who will be the leader of the country once they defeated their common foe.

A disagreement of who will upgrade from militia leader to Mr. President broke up their honeymoon. It’s because of this disagreement that we’ve seen one of the most decomposing wars in Somalia’s history, leading to millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead.

But war is expensive and militias need food for their families, and Jaad (an amphetamine-based stimulant) to stay awake for the fighting. Therefore, a good clan -based Warlord must look out for his own fighters. Aidid’s men turned to robbing aid trucks carrying food to the starving masses, and re-selling it to continue their war. But Ali Mahdi had his sights set on a larger and more unexploited resource, namely: the Indian Ocean.

Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.

But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Achair Parterns, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.

In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including “Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, Cadmium, Mercury and chemical waste.” But this wasn’t just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia’s aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation’s death trap.

Now Somalia has upped the world’s pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Blackwater and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in. But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters. The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.

It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice.

As is apparent these days, one man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.

Atlas provides a more realistic view:

In the continuing fatal folly, aka the Obama presidency, we have brought the jihad pirates to New jack City for a little judicial loving care.

This is today’s Muslim jihadist.

Omar Jamal headed to New York to help Somali pirate / Refugee Resettlement Watch

To devoted readers who predicted this in the last couple of days, you nailed it!  Omar Jamal is going to help the Somali pirate to assure he gets justice!   Thanks to all who sent it!   From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

A Twin Cities Somali community activist said he is on his way to New York this morning on a mission to ensure that an accused pirate is treated justly in a court appearance this afternoon.

Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, said he spoke Monday with the parents of Abdiwali Abduhl Wali-i-Musi, the sole surviving Somali pirate from the hostage-taking of an American ship captain.

Jamal said he intends to be in court today with Wali-i-Musi and carrying a letter from his parents in Somalia explaining that Jamal has permission to arrange for Wali-i-Musi’s defense.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.   Omar Jamal is either a narcissistic news hound or something much more complex, sinister?   We have been writing about him for a year and a half.  At first he was only defending Somali rapists, then he hit the big time when he got into the middle of the Somali cyanide death case in Denver last summer.  I call him the Somali Jesse Jackson!    In that case, the M.O. was the same as the one reported here in the Star Tribune,  he contacted the Canadian family of the Somali who died with enough cyanide to kill hundreds in advance of the Democratic National Convention and convinced the media that the guy was no terrorist, just a nut.

Most recently Jamal has been the go-to guy for the media on the missing Somali (former refugee) youths story.   In between he is into every issue involving Somalis from Somali gangs to ’no child left behind,’ even the Coleman/Franken Senate race. Check out the three pages of posts in which we have mentioned him.  Needless to say, the Somalis are always thevictims when Jamal gets involved.

And, hey big media, do us all a favor and find out how he got out of his immigration fraud conviction.  We are dying to know!

And to readers who have told us there is no connection between Somali immigrants in the US and piracy, guess you are WRONG!   Amazing how Jamal so swiftly found the mommy and daddy of the pirate.

Andy Bostom has the definitive piece on jihad piracy:

Three years ago I published a review essay on jihad piracy which focused on the then newly released, “Victory in Tripoli,” a masterful analysis of the Barbary jihadists, and the US experience of this scourge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by Joshua London. Timeless insights on the phenomenon of jihad piracy are reproduced here from that essay in light of Bob Spencer’s cogent analysis of the jihadism of the Somali pirates wreaking similar havoc off the coast of East Africa—but as Bob might put it, we are of course to understand, “this has nothing to do with Islam.” Alas, that is not the opinion of serious scholars of the phenomenon writing in an era before the present day, and the prevailing intellectual and moral idiocy of political correctness which a priori precludes (and vilifies) such important analyses. Hence Bob’s piece is as rare as it is invaluable.

Barbary jihad piracy was merely a 16th through 19th century manifestation of the naval razzias characteristic of Islamic imperialism since its emergence (pp.41-43) in the 7th and 8th centuries. For example, although the Abbasid state (750-1250) “orientalized” the Caliphate, and lacked naval power of any importance, in the west, Muslim forces (i.e., decentralized, “organic formations”), continued the Islamic expansion by maritime warfare. Throughout the 9th and 10th centuries, Berbers and Arabs from Spain and North Africa launched raids along the coastal regions of France, Italy, Sicily, and in the Greek archipelago.

Read it all, and Spencer’s analysis of the jihadism of the Somali pirates.

UPDATE: How sick is the left in the West?  Finnish Film Crew in ABC 20/20 Documentary Direct Jihadi Pirate in Finnish…….

 

 

Thanks to Mike

By WAYNE LONG / NYT:   Gang Up on Pirates

• “Nato Foils Somali Pirates’ Attack”
• Cry your heart out: Sept. 11 planner waterboarded 183 times: report (Reuters)
• El Baradei and the ‘root causes’: ”There is no other solution apart from dialogue,”

In 1995,  the water supply for Mogadishu, the capital, was shut off by the United Nations humanitarian agencies until a hostage who worked for another aid organization was released. On the first day of the shutoff, the women who collected water from public distribution points yelled at the kidnappers; on the second day they stoned them; on the third day they shot at them; on the fourth day, the hostage was released.

THE Navy’s heroic rescue of the sea captain Richard Phillips from his captors has left the rest of the world trying to figure out how to safely free the 200 or so seamen being held hostage by pirates in the Indian Ocean.

There are generally two approaches to hostage situations. One is to negotiate with the kidnappers to gain a conditional release of the hostages. The other is to stage a violent rescue in which kidnappers, hostages and rescuers alike all run the risk of losing their lives.

I have been involved in both hostage negotiations and in hostage rescues. In the case of pirates off eastern Africa, it would appear that having many hostages of different nationalities, spread over a large area, favors the first approach. And yet the Navy’s rescue of Capt. Phillips, and the universal condemnation of piracy, suggests that negotiation and the payment of ransom might not be a good idea.

But there might be another way — an approach that could be run through the United Nations and that would be available both to governmental and nongovernmental authorities acting for the interned seamen.

During my 10 years as the chief security adviser for the United Nations in Somalia, my team and I negotiated releases in more than a dozen hostage cases, several of which involved piracy. Some of the hostages were United Nations personnel, and some were not.

In the situations that did not involve United Nations workers, our team was asked by the concerned embassies in Nairobi to pursue cases on their behalf. These countries, whose citizens had been taken hostage, had no presence in fractious Somalia — and we did.

Figuring out how to be of help wasn’t easy. Eventually, after long and heated internal discussion, the United Nations security team persuaded the United Nations country team that the most effective approach would be to use humanitarian aid and assistance as a lever to gain release of hostages.

Somalia is pretty much a stateless state. Humanitarian aid and clan association are major centers of gravity. In fact, clan leaders stay in power in part by controlling the distribution of aid. Our strategy was therefore simple: United Nations assistance was withheld from the Somali clan or region by which or in which hostages were being held until those hostages were released. In every case there was a release, and in no case were hostages harmed or ransom paid. (On the downside, no pirates were brought to trial or punished in any way.)

In 1995, for example, the water supply for Mogadishu, the capital, was shut off by the United Nations humanitarian agencies until a hostage who worked for another aid organization was released. On the first day of the shutoff, the women who collected water from public distribution points yelled at the kidnappers; on the second day they stoned them; on the third day they shot at them; on the fourth day, the hostage was released.

On another occasion, in 2000, two French yachtsmen were taken by pirates in their 40-foot sloop off Somalia as they made passage from Djibouti to Zanzibar. The French Embassy in Nairobi asked the United Nations team to help, and I entered into face-to-face negotiations in the remote port of Bossaso.

After demonstrating that the hostages were alive, the pirates demanded $1 million in ransom. I responded that the United Nations would suspend all civic improvement in the region — education, animal husbandry, vaccination, water projects. The aid would resume when the hostages were released.

This drove a wedge between the pirates and their home clan, the Darod. Clan elders put pressure on the pirates. After several weeks, the Frenchmen were released to me in return for resumption of all United Nations humanitarian aid. (I was unable to negotiate the release of the yacht.)

Although this tactic sometimes took longer to get results than the hostages’ home countries liked, the divisions that arose in hostage takers’ clans when aid was suspended were extremely effective in creating the conditions for release.

It’s worth noting, too, that though pirates are at sea, their families and clans are not. If life can be made uncomfortable in their communities, there’s a good chance that pirates can be persuaded to give up their hostages. (This negotiation equation could change if the Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group that has become increasingly powerful in Somalia, gets in the kidnapping business.)

The Obama administration has indicated that it sees piracy as a global threat and that it will therefore reach out to international partners to fight the problem. A partnership with the United Nations is probably not the best course for aggressive suppression of the pirates. But when it comes to the hostages being held, the targeted application of United Nations leverage just might result in the release of innocent people who have been held hostage for far too long.

Wayne Long, a former Army colonel, was the United Nations’ chief security officer in Somalia from 1993 to 2003.