PETA, Glass Houses, and the KKK

Largely for shock value, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) likes to make outrageous comparisons between the worth of humans and animals. Their sickening “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit is perhaps the best known example, but there’s also their complaints about the chickens used in the Iraq war to detect chemical weapons, their insulting statement that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s late vegetarian conversion “groups him with some of the world’s greatest visionaries,” and on and on. Trying to fit in at this week’s World Social Forum (a kind of counter-meeting to the World Economic Forum in Davos), PETA’s Bruce Friedrich complained that allowing restaurants to serve meat at the event is “like letting the World Bank or the Ku Klux Klan open up a booth here.”

Friedrich’s comparison of the World Bank to the KKK is all the more galling considering the striking similarity between the tactics PETA has supported and those of the racist Klan. PETA funds and supports militants who cover their faces, set fires, and terrorize law-abiding citizens they happen to dislike. Their goals may be different, but the KKK and the PETA-supported Animal Liberation Front use many of the same brutal tactics. Friedrich himself intones:

Of course we’re going to be, as a movement, blowing things up and smashing windows … I think it’s a great way to bring about animal liberation … I think it would be great if all of the fast-food outlets, slaughterhouses, these laboratories, and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, best known for its fight against white supremacist groups, singled out this Friedrich quote in a recent report condemning animal rights and eco-terrorism.

One firefighter recently wrote to us to explain the horrifying consequences of PETA’s unconscionable behavior:

The crime of arson by PETA is abhorrent but you are missing one very, very important part of the equation! These fires put firefighters at risk. Every time we leave the firehouse in response to an emergency we put our lives on the line. If we encounter an actual fire (“working fire” in our lingo) we go all out. We assume humans are in danger and perform an aggressive interior attack. Interior attacks put us in extreme jeopardy. I would hate to think that one of our brothers or sisters would die in the line of duty as a result of an arson fire perpetrated by one of these lunatics.

If this burns you up, please join the more than 5,000 people who have already signed our anti-PETA petition this week.