“Our nonviolent tactics are not as effective. We ask nicely for years and get nothing. Someone makes a threat, and it works.”
So says PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk in this week’s U.S. News and World Report article “Terrorize People, Save Animals,” commenting on the activities of SHAC, a violent animal rights group that, in U.S. News‘s words, “published the names and addresses” of employees of a targeted research firm on the Internet, “and detailed measures ‘used by animal-rights extremists campaigning against HLS and similar companies.’
“These ranged from legal demonstrations to death threats, firebombings, and assaults… [One executive] was badly beaten outside his home by three masked thugs swinging baseball bats… Others received packages filled with feces and dead rodents or booby-trapped with razor blades. Property was vandalized, a senior manager was sprayed in the face with a caustic substance, and 11 cars were firebombed — two parked adjacent to homes where children slept.”
PETA is closer to SHAC and other violent extremists than Newkirk would like you to think. Through the PETA-controlled Foundation to Support Animal Protection, PETA has funneled over $400,000 to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an anti-meat, anti-dairy front group, that has worked on a letter-writing campaign with Kevin Jonas of SHAC.
SHAC has also teamed up with the FBI-certified terrorist group the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which has burned down restaurants, and which also has ties to PETA. PETA has given $5,000 to the “Josh Harper Support Committee” to assist an ALF-affiliated criminal arrested numerous times and convicted for assaulting a police officer, and served as the de facto spokesgroup for ALF in the late 1980’s, holding press conferences to praise ALF criminals and field media questions just hours after laboratories were destroyed or buildings burned down. In 1995, PETA even gave $45,200 to the “support committee” of Rodney Coronado, a convicted arsonist who firebombed a research facility at Michigan State University, and also “loaned” $25,000 to Coronado’s father. (He never paid it back, and PETA never complained.)
Last summer, PETA’s Bruce Friedrich said “it would be great if all the fast-food outlets, slaughterhouses, these laboratories and the banks who fund them exploded tomorrow… Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it.” It turns out “the people who are willing to do it” are directly tied to PETA.
