Somali Pirates

I read about pirates from the Mill & Boons and Harlequin romance paper packs. Sons of English lords and Ottoman sultans, they were the outcasts of society. Undeniably handsome, dangerously irresistible and as the story unfolded, they possessed golden hearts like Robin Hood. They usually ravished the heroines and ended up seducing them and lived happily ever after. So sentimental, so touching, just stories, woven by romantic writers to steer us from reality.

Still equally exciting are the pirates from the movies “Pirates of the Caribbean ” and not forgetting the comical & hateful pirates from “Hook”. When I leave all these fantasies behind and drifted back to the real world, I now have the Somalis pirates to fill my mind. What a bad dream to wake up from.

Their faces shining charcoal-dark. You can’t figure out their features near or far. They look all alike. They are no rakish individuals with flowing cloaks and flashy swords. In their mercenary uniforms with those evil machine guns, they are threatening.

Coming from a world with no meals menu, a glass of milk is probably a luxury. Fasting is a daily ritual and killing for survival is their daily agenda.

My paperpacks pirates would be delighted with every cargo they seized. They enjoyed them, they used them and they sold them. But not these Somalis. They have a difficult time finding a buyer for the goods they hijacked. So they only captured ships that carried commodities they can exploit like weapons, oil & humans. These they further apply to extort money from the victims’ home-country.

Did the Bible tell us that suicide killers and pirates are part of our end-time tormentors? Who’s next?