oped: This is why PETA is silent...they are real eco-terrorists..unlike the Bundy Ranch peaceful protest!
There are countless examples on the internet of terrorist activities by PETA/ALF this is just one of many:
Another good site to view: http://www.peta-sucks.com/smf/index.php?topic=22939.0
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
501 Front St
Norfolk, VA 23510
Phone: (757) 622-7382
http://www.peta-online.org
EIN 52-1218336
Founded 1980
Exempt since March 1981
Description: Animal rights group repeatedly using civil disobedience contrary to IRS Revenue Ruling 75-384 and funding eco-terrorists directly by contribution (See PETA's 2001 Form 990 tax return, Page 28, for listing of direct donation to North American Earth Liberation Front, an FBI-declared domestic terrorist organization) or indirectly by paying lawyers for suspects in animal rights crime. Uses unlawful means to persuade others to adopt vegetarian diet and to cease all use of animals.
PETA was involved with arsonist Rodney Coronado of the Animal Liberation Front, who torched a Michigan State University animal research laboratory. Coronado sent PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk two packages, one before the arson, one after the arson. When police searched the premises where Coronado sent the packages, they found false identification for Coronado and for PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco, to be used as part of a burglary to release captive animals, suggesting close relations between PETA leaders and ALF crimes. See the Government Sentencing Memorandum in the case, Pages 8 & 9, for details of PETA's involvement.
The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise has filed a complaint with the IRS Commissioner to strip PETA of its tax exempt status.
(PETA's Form 990 available at guidestar.org)
Revenue and Expenses: Fiscal Year
Ending July 31, 2001
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ingrid Newkirk, Director, Secretary -
Salary $27,307, benefits $2,689
Resides in PETA headquarters facility
Michael Rodman, Chairperson, Treasurer
Jeanne Roush, Director
Key Staff
Jannette Patterson, Executive Director
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
is one of the more rabid and radical—and influential—environmental
groups on the scene today. The Animal Rights Reporter called
PETA "the most influential organization in the animal rights
movement." PETA "has established an impressive track record of
orchestrated events which bring it media attention, movement
respect, and member donations." PETA "has grown in size and scope,
resembling a small corporation more than the cutting edge of a
social movement."1
As an advocate of animal rights philosophy, PETA has
agitated to:
-
eliminate the meat industry ("we’re absolutely opposed to breeding animals for humans");
-
abolish the use of furs from fur farms or wild animals;
-
stop all hunting ("there’s something fundamentally wrong with a person who feels that it’s acceptable to go out into the woods, and for fun, slaughter")
-
and fishing ("fishes suffocate");
-
eliminate the use of animals in entertainment, medical research and military research;
-
prevent the use of all animal products such as wool ("we don’t need wool") and silk ("silkworms can feel pain");
-
and stop the ownership of animals as pets
—all of which is a reflection of its "vegan"
ideology.2
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is profiled in Ron
Arnold and Alan Gottlieb's book,
Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking
America
PETA promotes veganism, an animal rights
philosophy far more radical than vegetarianism. Veganism, as well as
it can be represented accurately, is the ideal that no animal food
be consumed in any way, not even milk or eggs, and that no harm of
any sort be done by humans to any animal because there is no moral
difference between humans and animals. Examples: PETA co-director
Ingrid E. Newkirk asserted about those who eat meat, "I would think
it’s primitive, barbaric, arrogant, unnecessary."3
Production of milk or even honey is immoral since it
involves "exploitation." Newkirk explained, "Most supermarket milk
comes from cows raised in intensive factory farms. They stand on
concrete most of their lives, they are inside most of the time, they
are artificially inseminated, their young are taken away from them
when they are one or two days old, they go on to become veal."4
She agreed with an interviewer that pet ownership is the moral
equivalent of slavery, unless the animal needed shelter to begin
with. The very word "pet" is offensive, since it "connotes a
demeaning attitude of master versus thing."5
The notion of animal rights is something relatively
new, something alien to animal welfare, and brimming with an agenda
of disaster for people.6 This program was explicated by
Australian philosopher Peter Singer in his 1975 book Animal
Liberation, which challenged the notion of human dominance over
other animals and contemptuously reviled animal welfare and humane
treatment as just another form of "speciesism." Singer asserted,
"Human beings have come to realize that they [are] animals
themselves, It can no longer be maintained by anyone but a religious
fanatic that man is the special darling of the whole universe, or
that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we
have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill
them."7
The core of the animal rights philosophy is the
dismissal of differences between people and animals—language,
reason, morality, free will—as ethically irrelevant. Animal rights
asserts equal moral status to all living things based on the ability
to feel pain. In this ethic, all human use of animals, for food,
clothing, sport, companionship, medical research, is "speciesism,"
the moral equivalent of racism.8
It is not clear how vegetables
escape this moral calculus, since they are made of the same DNA as
other life forms.
The movement’s theoretician, Tom Regan, clearly
recognized one place the philosophy is taking us: to the crippling
of medical science. He wrote in his 1983 book, The Case for
Animal Rights, "Even granting that we face greater harm than
laboratory animals presently endure if research on these animals is
stopped, the rights view will not be satisfied with anything less
than total abolition. The practice remains wrong because unjust.
"If abandoning animal research means that there are
some things we cannot learn, then so be it.... We have no basic
right...not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to."9
PETA is even against dissection in medical schools.10
The Washington Post, which gives money to environmental
groups, became alarmed and wrote an editorial worrying that
hard-line animal activists will completely outlaw anatomy
instruction with animal specimens in schools.11 It sounds
to us like PETA leaders have had brain surgery by doctors trained in
PETA medical schools.12
PETA activists have developed highly sophisticated
attacks on industry. They use slick media campaigns and rock stars,
they peddle T-shirts, sports watches and videos. They generally try
to give the animal rights movement a degree of hipness that appeals
to the youth market. In one campaign, Canadian singer k.d. lang made
a beef-against-beef television spot in an effort to destroy the meat
and animal husbandry industry.13
This animal rights group thrusts their views on big names
in the fashion industry. PETA has pressured modeling agencies,
photographers, and stylists to refuse to work with furs. PETA
protesters staged a nasty demonstration at a 1991 Oscar de la Renta
fur show.14 Three major fashion designers stopped
using furs: Bill Blass, Georgio Armani, and Norma Komali, but denied PETA had anything to do with it.15 PETA pressure probably
did, however, if Merv Griffin Enterprises’ example is instructive:
They sent PETA a letter stating that fur coats will no longer be
given as prizes on television’s "Wheel of Fortune." The syndicated
show had a policy of using only ranch-raised furs, but Griffin
Enterprises President Robert Murphy told PETA that all fur gifts had
been eliminated.16 The pressure against wearing fur was
so intense it sparked a near-violent backlash at a Hollywood fund
raiser for animal rights.17
Fortune magazine flippantly described
British-born PETA co-director Ingrid Newkirk as "the Mother Teresa
of rabbits," but acknowledged that she has imposed PETA’s ethics on
companies such as Benetton and Noxell "the same way trains impose
themselves on stalled sedans." Running over industry roughshod is a
favorite pastime of environmentalists. Companies are like trees in
the sense which John Muir once complained that "trees cannot run
away; any fool can destroy them." The same is true of companies.
They cannot run away either, and any fool can destroy them with a
little persistence. PETA has the persistence.18
PETA’s protests against animal testing of cosmetics,
applying cosmetics to animals’ eyes or skin to test for toxicity and
safety, caused Avon so much distress that the company announced in
June 1990 it would suspend the tests—with no reliable alternative to
determine the safety of their products to their customers.19
PETA also constrained Tonka to stop safety testing Play-Doh on
rabbits. Other companies that have stopped safety tests because of
PETA demands include Revlon, Faberge, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Amway,
Mattel Toys, and Hasbro. Even though each of these companies denies
that PETA agitation had anything to do with their decision to stop
safety testing, there was no other reason for them to stop.20
In addition, a PETA Catalog offers a video of product testing on
rabbits at Biosearch, a Philadelphia laboratory, claiming the exposé
by "one of our undercover investigators" to have been "instrumental
in the banning of these cruel tests by major companies including
Avon, Revlon, Benetton, and Estee Lauder."21 The National
Institutes of Health and the American Medical Association have
expressed concern over what PETA and other animal rights groups are
doing to public health and safety.22
Zoological societies are also under attack by PETA,
which seems to want all zoos shut down.23
To PETA, homo sapiens seems to be the only
species that may be abused. Ingrid Newkirk said about people, "We’re
the biggest blight on the face of the earth," and in the same
interview volunteered the macabre thought, "Human euthanasia would
be a great step if there were no abuses."24 Medical
research to save children’s lives is improper, since "you have no
right."25 PETA certainly deserves honorary membership in
Wild Earth’s Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: PETA’s
Newkirk declared in a now-famous 1986 interview the oft-reprinted
quote, "I don’t believe human beings have the ‘right to life.’
That’s a supremacist perversion. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
Even the truculent environmentalist Audubon magazine panned
Newkirk for such virulent misanthropy.26
Again, it's not clear how
vegetables can be eaten by such sensitive lovers of all life forms.
Perhaps PETA fails to hear their pitiful screams of pain as they
slide down human throats.
It hardly needs saying, but devaluing human life and
deifying animals is a dangerous development in a society into which,
as P.T. Barnum once observed, "There’s a sucker born every minute."
Self-loathing is a time-honored indoor sport among us human beings.
The trouble is, when reduced to a plan of action in a gullible
society, the game of self-loathing usually divides into two camps,
loathors and loathees, one of which staffs the ovens while the other
goes up in smoke. Our most recent animal rights regime was run by
one Heinrich Himmler, whose immortal thoughts on Jews, Gypsies,
Blacks and homosexuals echo down to us through the years: "We
Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent
attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude toward
these human animals." The audience applauded.
It couldn’t happen here? It is happening
here. PETA is happening here. As the human advocacy group
Putting People First said in court records about PETA: "In their
eyes, those who do not share their philosophy—animal trainers,
hunters, fishermen, cattlemen, grocers, and indeed all
non-vegetarians—are the moral equivalent of cannibals, slaveowners,
and death-camp guards, and must be dealt with accordingly."27
Barnum was right. To the Egress.28
Most PETA supporters do not know about the group’s
vegan agenda and follow the group because they believe it is
effective in pushing the cause of humanity to animals. Here we see a
pattern common to American environmental groups: The leaders have a
radical agenda, but the followers do not, yet help them with money
and memberships anyway.29 As H. L. Mencken said, "No one
ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
public."
Critics, however, have a way of making things clear:
Ted Nugent, rock star and bowhunter, was quoted by the Texas
Wildlife Association as saying, "These animal rights freaks are to
wildlife what Jim and Tammy Bakker were to religion."30
PETA was the brainchild of doctor’s-son Alex
Pacheco -- he has now moved on from PETA to head
an animal rights fundraising organization -- who was raised from infancy in Mexico and grew up in Ohio,
where he graduated from high school and entered Ohio State
University, planning to become a Catholic priest. Pacheco says that
his interest in animal rights originated during a 1978 stay with a
friend in Toronto during which he visited a slaughterhouse, a visit
which traumatized him so much he became a vegetarian on the spot.
His visit was followed by indoctrination by "two brilliant
activists," one a founder of American Vegetarians and the other an
"artist, feminist, and animals rights activist."31 He got
a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. The die was cast.
Pacheco quickly founded a campus animal rights group and hasn’t
stopped since.32
EXTREMELY LONG ARTICLE CONTINUE READING : http://www.undueinfluence.com/peta.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment