We’ve had a lot of people asking why we would run this article from the New York Times on Somalia. Well, we’re not ones to crush news, and quotes like this:
Omar Hussein Ahmed, an olive oil exporter in Mogadishu, the capital, said he and a group of fellow traders recently bought some missiles to shoot at government soldiers.
“Taxes are annoying,†he explained.
are news.
Jeffrey Gettleman’s slimy, repulsive smear-style writing doesn’t need a rebuttal (here’s one anyway) — you all figured it out yourselves, and that’s why you wrote, outraged. When this brazen propaganda popped onto the internet yesterday, we were all laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of this piece. We thought we’d share it with you.
I don’t need to school anyone on the priorities of world bureaucrats. They want a state in Somalia — the idea of millions of people making their own choices and their own connections scares the crap out of them. How are they supposed to, say, get the loans they lent the Somali dictator in the 80s back if there is no way to tax his victims? They consider a sitting government in Mogadishu to be the definition of “peace.” It doesn’t matter that hundreds are dying and hundreds of thousands are fleeing. They at least now have one guy to call when they want to hear someone grovel. And that makes international types very happy.