Month: October 2001

Eloquent Commentary on Animal Rights Terrorism

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, animal rights activists and Animal Liberation Front defenders argue that their brand of terrorism isn’t comparable to what happened at the World Trade Center the Pentagon. Certainly the two are not comparable in terms of scale and loss of life, but they are united by the simple fact that the goal is to terrorize people in an effort to change their behavior. When activists set a researcher’s home on fire or fire bomb a laboratory, they are not attempting to make a reasoned argument about the role of animals in medical research, but rather are sending a pretty clear message — stop this or else.

Gillian Reynolds, writing in the London’s Daily Telegraph, did an excellent job of puncturing the notion that there is any real difference in aims among terrorists. Reynolds wrote about a broadcast in Great Britain about the terrorism faced by Colin Blakemore, who has been targeted by animal rights activists largely because he is willing to publicly defend himself and debunk many of the activist claims. Reynolds wrote,

How can people who profess to care for animals be so vile to fellow human beings? …

A bomb was sent [to Blakemore] through the post, packed into the kind of cardboard tube that usually carries posters. His children had picked it up, looked at it. Had they opened it, at least one of them might have died, the others showered with HIV infected needles with which the explosive was also said to be packed. A letter arrived, razor blades attached to the top, lacerating the hand of the secretary who opened it. Gangs of screaming people invaded the Blakemore garden, tried to break down the front door. On police advice, they put in security gates and cameras, had panic buttons installed. The protesters came on Christmas Day, on Easter Sunday.

This is, in its most literal form, terrorist behavior. Blakemore and his family have suffered through it.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Source:

Conscience and the call to arms. Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph (London), October 23, 2001.

Animal Liberation Front Claims Responsibility for $1 Million Coulston Fire

On October 11, 2001, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for a September 20 fire at a Coulston Foundation facility that caused an estimated $1 million in damages.

An incendiary device was detonated at a building at The Coulston Foundation’s White Sands Research Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Coulston spokesman Don McKinney called the fire an act of terrorism, but police say their investigation has not yet determined a particular group responsible for the fire.

The building was a maintenance facility where no animals were housed, and no one was injured in the blaze.

In a press release, the ALF terrorists wrote, “We intend for this act of nonviolent economic sabotage to bring an end to this truly evil institution.

McKinney had other words for this violent act of terrorism,

This has been an assault on Alamogordo, an assault on New Mexico and an assault on the United States, and it has been done by a citizen of the U.S. right at the time that our nation is under attack. I find that considerably less than acceptable.

Sources:

Animal rights group claims responsibility for fire at primate lab. The Alamogordo Daily News (New Mexico), October 12, 2001.

A.L.F. claims responsibility for Coulston Federation Fire. Frontline Information Service, Press Release, October 11, 2001.

It’s Nice to Be Noticed

This has happened to me more than few times, but it still kind of floors me when I’m searching on Google or visiting a site for information on some topic and end up running across someone in turn citing something I’ve written.

Back in May, for example, I caught journalist Robert Scheer in a little lie about the Bush administration’s policies toward Afghanistan. I actually took time to rewrite the article and pitched it to a number of right wing sites I thought might find the topic interesting, but back in May the response was basically “Afghani-where?”

Suddenly, though, everyone’s interested in Afghanistan and the folks at SpinSanity expanded on my highlights of the problem with Scheer’s reporting and ran with it back in June. I had no idea anyone cared until I ran across a link to a SpinSanity story on the FrontPageMag site. (The weird thing, by the way, is that Scheer still bizarrely maintains that aid relief given to the UN to prevent starvation in Afghanistan represented a “signal” to the Taliban that the U.S. supports its sheltering of bin Laden).

The moral of the story is not that everybody should read my sites (though, obviously, they should), but rather that small, independent web sites run by critical thinkers really are fulfilling the promise of the Internet, despite all the carping about how Time Warner and other large media conglomerates now dominate.

Look at SpinSanity — basically two guys with a web sites and some very sharp minds skewering the excessive spin that is so common on both the Left and Right these days. That’s my kind of web site.

PETA Ridiculed in MAD Magazine

Massachusetts-area animal rights activist Lorraine Nicotera recently posted a message to an animal rights e-mail list pushing a parody of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in this month’s Mad Magazine as some sort of publicity victory.

The actual Mad feature is a spread called “Only a true PETA nut…” which then has various endings to that sentence stem such as “…will try to reason with a mosquito,” accompanied by humorous graphics.

Rather than see this for the ridicule it is, Nicotera thinks the piece “shows that PETA and Animal Rights Activists and other organizations have gone so far into mainstream, we are even in MAD Magazine!”

Talk about wishful thinking — although I do hope that Mad continues to poke fun at the insanity that is the animal rights movement.

Source:

Only a True PETA nut . . . MAD mag. Lorraine Nicotera, e-mail communication, September 18, 2001.