...

This post was really about the irony that a word mis-used suddenly becomes relevant again.




They occasionally capture pirates (real such), keep them in luxury rooms on war ships for a few days, and then return them to Somalia.

The German Green party have used the opportunity for a racist insult of Kenia when the German government suggested handing over suspected pirates (i.e. people who have been found firing at merchant ships on the high seas) to Kenian courts. The Greens said that we cannot know whether Kenia can be trusted to respect the human rights of the pirates. (You never know with those Africans...)

I have no reason to assume that it cannot be.

And all the Green party knew about Kenya was that it was an African country. Kenya is not internationally known for human rights violations or anything like that. In fact if you ask random people about Kenya, they can probably tell you but two things: it's a country in Africa and the home of Obama's father.




You don't differentiate between having reasons and not having reasons, do you?

I would say that Kenya can be trusted based on what I know about Kenya (it is a functioning if poor country not known for its aggressive racism) and that Hamas cannot be trusted based on what I know about them (they fire rockets at civilians and schools and are proud anti-Semites).

Calling a random African government untrustwowrthy when one wouldn't do the same with, say, a European government is racist.

But then there are people in the German Green party who'd rather trust Nazis or terrorists than Africans.

I realise that for some not trusting blacks and not trusting known terrorists and murderers is the same sort of thing, but for me there is a difference.

Kenya does have question marks over its treatment of criminals and other human rights issues.  

I have no sympathy for anti-semitism or inate distrust with Africans, nor did I compare Hamas to Kenya.  I compared calling an anti-Keyans statement racist because it is African to an anti Hamas statment anti-Arab.

Facts I know about Kenia: Lots of tourisms and safaris (I see the adds in the papers from time to time), former british colony, pretty stable - otherwise there wouldn't be so much tourism, they have really fast runners, had some political uprisings due to an election about a year ago or more which I didn't really follow that much because it IS in africa and far away and doesn't really concern my daily life.

You take some things too seriously, and also automatically assume that nobody knows anything anyway when it comes to the world. Piracy means that you steal something that doesn't belong to you and sell it on yourself or use it yourself. That is what traditional pirates did in the old times.

one could argue if the semantic use of piracy in regard to illegal copying of protected material under copyright law should be called piracy, but it has established itself as such. You can be like the french and make up a new term for it but I doubt that the world would readyl adopt your coinage. It's like the naming of the continent America. One cartographer from Freiburg simply called the continent that after Americo Vespuci while he was drawing a map because he didn't know what else to call it (new world was a bit of a mouthful) and because it is also custom to call places after people and so he simply wrote America on the map. Vespuci didn't want it, but the map had already been duplicated so many times and everybody called the new world america that his protest didn't have any effect. Once something takes hold its hard to get rid of.

well I heard a different anecdote, but I guess nobody really knows for sure. Your version is nice as well.

Amen.

Or to put in in a way that even the most bleeding-heart liberal will understand: Every child in Africa that dies because we, the west, decided to spend money on feeding pirates instead, is one too many.