Where the Ship Hijacked by “Pirates” Was Headed, Mercy Mission: A Lost Story

I’ve recently been trying to understand how the MSM covers religious issues and people. I find, reading the religious news feeds rather ‘religiously’ daily, that many stories are buried by media before they find daylight.

There is one here, at National Catholic Reporter online:

Food aid for Catholic Relief Services programs in Rwanda is part of the cargo on the Maersk Alabama, the scene of a recent pirate hostage standoff and hijacking.

CRS, the U.S. bishops’ overseas aid and development agency, said in a statement April 9 that the U.S.-flagged, Danish-owned container ship, which was hijacked off the coast of Somalia by Somali pirates April 8, was holding a six-month supply of wheat for poor Rwandans.

The longer the ship is detained for debriefing and interviews with sailors without its cargo being taken off and reloaded on another ship, the longer poor people in Rwanda wait. And wait.

It will be interesting in future days to see around and underneath what news media focus on so narrowly… to see exactly what else the terrorist hijackers of Somalia have been preventing in good will and critical necessities from being delivered to the starving and poor and others in need… as the Somalian ‘pirates’ go about extracting ransons in the millions of dollars… which also never reach nor help the vast majority of their own poor and needy Somalians, either.

The romanticizing and excusing of ‘pirates’ for being poor, does not ring just right… for as we see, not only precious human cargo can be lost at sea, and blood money squirreled away by the few… but the hungry hopes of others far away, who are literally without sustenance, are left to moulder both in spirit and in flesh.