| by Captain Paul Watson This old man has a harpoon gun,He murders Fin whales one by one,With a knick-knack paddywhack,Send Loftsson a drone,Send the old whaler rolling home. Iceland has an old man problem.An otherwise reputable nation of intelligent and compassionate people, with exceptional geography and a rich Nordic culture, has been perversely tainted by a sadistic, ecologically destructive modern-day self-proclaimed Captain Ahab who has cast a dark shadow over the entire nation.His name is Kristján Loftsson, the wealthiest man in Iceland. He has overseen the massacre of tens of thousands of whales, especially endangered fin whales, since he took over his father’s whaling company in 1974.Loftsson is a bitter, very rich old man (83) who has a seemingly pathological hatred for creatures far more intelligent and noble than himself.He claims simply to be a businessman, yet there has been no profit for his whaling business for decades. He kills whales because he likes to kill whales. It is a subsidized hobby and his way of flipping off the anti-whaling movement that has plagued him for decades.If he is a simple businessman, as he claims, he is no different from Al Capone, who described himself as a businessman as a guise for his criminal activities.Because like Capone, Kristján Loftsson is also a criminal. Since 1986, he has flagrantly and arrogantly slaughtered whales in violation of the Global Moratorium on Commercial Whaling. His targets are endangered Fin whales.Loftsson also hates me, a fact that pleases me very much because, since 1986, I have taken pleasure in being his nemesis.The year 1974, when he took control of the Hvalur hf. Company, was the very same year that Robert Hunter, Paul Spong, and I organized the first high seas anti-whaling campaigns for Greenpeace. Loftsson’s dark passion for murdering whales coincided with my passion for protecting them. It was inevitable that we would clash, and in 1985, we did.That summer, I arrived with my ship Sea Shepherd II in Reykjavik, where I delivered a warning. I told Loftsson that the Global Moratorium on Commercial Whaling would take effect the following year, in 1986. If he violated the moratorium, we would return and sink his ships.Loftsson ignored the moratorium and killed 120 fin whales in 1986. A few months later, I sent a team to Iceland led by Rod Coronado with a mission that successfully sabotaged the Icelandic whaling fleet. The ships Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 were sunk dockside in Reykjavik harbor, and the whale processing plant at Hvalfjordur was significantly damaged. With just two ships left, Loftsson’s plan to kill 500 whales between 1987 and 1989 was cut in half.I openly admitted responsibility for sinking the two whaling ships in 1986, yet Iceland did not file charges. In January 1988, I flew to Iceland to demand that charges be laid against us. We wanted a trial and the opportunity to expose Loftsson’s illegal whaling operations.I was amusingly interrogated and happily confessed that I was responsible for sinking the two ships. I was expelled from Iceland without charges. The Icelandic Foreign Minister, Halldór Ásgrímsson, said, “Who does he think he is, coming to Iceland and demanding to be arrested? Get him out of here.”Neither my crew nor I were charged. There was no trial; thus, we did not commit a criminal act. The fact that I was not charged was an admission by Iceland that they knew they were in violation of international conservation law.Whaling was on again and off again year after year as Loftsson stubbornly pushed to kill more whales in the face of international opposition. In 2018, Rob Read initiated Operation Mjolnir to document every whale killed and landed at Loftsson’s whaling station, where he also documented the illegal killing of two blue fin hybrid whales. In 2019, I sent my ship, the Brigitte Bardot, to Iceland to oppose the slaughter, and upon arrival, whaling was shut down.In 2022, Icelandic whaling resumed again, with 148 whales killed. We had established Operation Northern Exposure and chartered a vessel to intervene, but we could not effectively intervene with a ship we did not own.Finally, in 2023, having secured the ship John Paul DeJoria, I returned to Icelandic waters with a plan to permanently shut down Icelandic whaling. The very day that we arrived off Reykjavik, in Iceland, the Icelandic government announced that whaling would be canceled for the summer. It was resumed in mid-September for two weeks, when they were able to kill 24 whales. We were unable to return to Iceland due to our flag being stricken by Jamaica because of our interventions against the killing of pilot whales in the Danish Faroe Islands in August 2023.We were reflagged and ready to return in 2024 when we left from Ireland to once again intervene against Icelandic whaling. Once again, Icelandic whaling was canceled. We then carried on toward the Northwest Passage, with the intention of transiting to the Pacific to oppose illegal Japanese whaling. That was when I was arrested in Greenland under a Japanese Interpol Red Notice extradition request and had to spend five months in a Greenlandic prison, successfully fighting the extradition and using my situation to focus international attention on illegal whaling by Japan and Denmark. I was able to return to Europe, where Interpol dismissed the Red Notice as politically motivated. In 2025, we were once again ready to depart from Dublin, Ireland, to return to Iceland, when once again Iceland canceled whaling for the summer.It appeared that all we had to do was announce our intention to intervene to force a cancellation.For three years now, we have been able to shut down whaling in Iceland every summer since 2023 with just 24 whales killed during that time. I say “just’ but 24 whales killed was 24 whales too many. Once again, Loftsson has announced his intention to resume whaling for the summer of 2026, and this time he appears to finally have the political support in Iceland to do so. He has invested a lot of money upgrading his two ships and has contracted crews. The government has issued him a permit, and all signs point to his intent to return to sea to murder 116 endangered fin whales.We are ready. Our ship is undergoing final preparations for departure for what we are calling Operation 86, in recognition of the 40th anniversary of our sinking of half the Icelandic whaling fleet in November 1986.And Iceland has another old man problem: namely, me. I’m not as old as Loftsson, but I’ve been saving whales for as long as Loftsson has been killing them. As relentless as he is in killing, I am just as passionately relentless in protecting whales.I stand for life and Loftsson stands for death. I am determined that this summer life defeats death in the Denmark Strait or the Greenland Sea.Loftsson, the sadistic serial whale killing criminal needs to be stopped. We’ve stopped him before and we intend to stop him once again this summer.Icelandic whaling must be 86’ed for good. |
Exposing the Big Game 