Hornpost
Hargeisa (Horn post) The surge of hostility directed at Somaliland following Israel’s decision to recognize it reveals a recurring moral failure: the temptation to punish a person not for what they have done, but for who has acknowledged them.
It is a pattern as old as political life itself, one in which anger—however justified in its original cause—spills beyond its proper object and settles upon the nearest available proxy. What results are not ethical scrutiny, but moral displacement.
Classical philosophy has long warned against this error. Seneca the Younger cautioned that
Judgment collapses the moment an argument is assessed by the identity of its messenger
rather than the merit of its substance. Aristotle, more exacting still, insisted that justice
requires particularity: each case must be judged on its own facts, its own causes, its own
moral record. To condemn Somaliland because of the actions or reputations of
others—whether Israel or the United States—is therefore not moral seriousness but
convenience masquerading as principle.
This convenience has consequences, not least because it erases history. Somaliland’s political
story did not begin with a diplomatic announcement on 26th December 2025. It is rooted in a
disastrous union entered in 1960 with hope and exited, in practice, through repression
and catastrophe. By the mid-1980s, that union had produced mass violence against civilians,
the bombardment of cities, and the destruction of livelihoods. These events are not matters of
polemic: they are matters of record.
Since 1990, Somaliland has pursued international legitimacy through means the international
community routinely claims to value internal reconciliation, constitutional referenda,
competitive elections, and the patient reconstruction of civic institutions. For thirty-five
years, this project has endured without foreign military enforcement, without ideological
export, and without regional destabilization. If such a record is to count for nothing, one must
ask what, precisely, the world believes legitimacy to mean.
The resentment provoked by recognition is therefore not simply legal or diplomatic; it is
psychological. Tacitus observed that societies often resent those they have injured once those
victims survive, rebuild, and insist upon acknowledgment. Suffering, it seems, is tolerated
most easily when it remains invisible. A victim who persists—and who is finally
recognized—disturbs the moral comfort of those accustomed to their silence.
Language, too, has been carelessly handled. Confucius warned that injustice begins when
words lose their proper meaning. To conflate recognition with complicity, or celebration with
endorsement of unrelated suffering, is to drain language of precision. Joy at long delayed
acknowledgment is not approval of distant atrocities. To pretend otherwise is to replace
ethical reasoning with emotional inference.
Eastern moral thought reinforces this point. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that moral duty lies
in right action, not in the management of others’ reactions. A person may be required to act
justly, they cannot be required to postpone their legitimate aspirations indefinitely because
The world is in pain.
Somaliland’s quest for international legitimacy cannot be postponed till the humanitarian catastrophe is resolved as the two have no relations.
Islamic moral philosophy offers an equally clear rebuke to the logic of collective blame. In
the akhlaq tradition, ethical worth is anchored in intention, moral agency, and restraint from
injustice, not in symbolic association.
The Qur’anic maxim that no soul bears the burden of another, articulated in the Qur’an, was understood by classical Muslim thinkers as a foundational moral posture against the transference of guilt. Philosophers such as Al-Ghazali warned that judgment corrodes when driven by hawā—unexamined impulse or crowd emotions rather than by justice and moral balance. To hold Somaliland answerable for the conduct of others is, within this tradition, not solidarity but injustice: the substitution of indignation for discernment.
None of this diminishes the gravity of Gaza’s catastrophes or the moral urgency they demand.
But ethical seriousness requires discrimination. Compassion does not license misattributed
blame, nor does grief entitle us to abandon reason. The demand now being placed upon
Somaliland—that it remains morally acceptable only if it stays unrecognized, uncelebrated,
and unseen—is an impossible one, and one rarely imposed with such severity elsewhere.
If Somaliland’s claim to statehood is to be rejected, let it be rejected honestly—on the basis
of law, history, and consistent principles. But to punish people for the identity of those who
recognize them is to repeat an ancient injustice in modern form.
The classics are unambiguous:
Truth does not become false because it arrives by an inconvenient hand, and Justice is not served by redistributing blame to those least able to bear it.
At the very least, Somaliland deserves what moral philosophy has demanded for centuries to be judged as itself, and not as a proxy for the world’s unresolved anger.
Opinion Article author Dr. Faisal Kenadid
Hargeisa, Somaliland
