Animal Terror

The Animal Liberation Front may not be flying jetliners into skyscrapers or making nuclear weapons, but they are no less fanaticaland hostile to free civilized society than Islamist jihadis:

Animal rights extremists have threatened attacks on nearly 100 companies which donated money to Oxford University. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) gave them a deadline of a week before attacks start on the homes of directors and employees, unless they promise never to give money to the university again.

They made the threat because a medical research laboratory at the university which will do animal-testing is being built. Work resumed on it in December, after a 16-month postponement due to intimidation and threats of violence.

University insiders spoke of a "climate of fear" on campus, students have been warned to step up security, and research scientists said they were bracing themselves for "very nasty activity by the ALF".

The group threatened to "trash" the offices of companies which refused to pull out and to attack the homes of directors, trustees and employees. Home addresses would be posted to other activists on the internet. "Any company who has not made an announcement can now expect full attention from the Animal Liberation Front," it said. "It's not going to be pretty."

ALF's supposed concern for animal welfare has less to do with animals than its hatred for humanity. My Dog or Your Child? By Dr. Steven Best, one of the movement's leading thinkers, is a blunt expression thereof:

Once we make something like personhood the relevant factor to decide questions of ethics and moral worth and abandon speciesist appeals to Homo sapiens, the whole game changes because the rules are now radically different. For when we shift the center of gravity from humans to persons, there will be many cases where nonhumans (such as cats, dogs, dolphins, and chimpanzees) are persons and, conversely, humans (such as infants, the severely brain-impaired, the comatose, and those suffering advanced stages of Alzheimer’s) are non-persons.

....

I would rather that elephants again freely roam the African savannas, that chimpanzees fill the rainforests with playful hoots, that rainforests once again swell majestically, that the rivers and oceans become cleansed and teem with dolphins, whales, and fish. I would rather the regeneration of the earth transpire than have humans continue to devour and destroy the planet with their SUVs, superhighways, urban sprawl, cookie-cutter suburbs, bloated families, fast food addictions, Supersize Me appetites, arrogance and alienation, and grotesque fat asses.

Dr. Best and his fellow-travellers would gladly consign millions of people to death who might otherwise have been saved by humane animal medical experimentation, or who might have few means of sustenance except hunting game.

Like their Islamist counterparts, ALF intends to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, a sinless paradise purged of evil, on the corpses of its victims. The infidel or the "non-person" must die.

And they both have significant support in our academic and cultural elites, or at least, they are able to cow them into silent submission.

Animal rights terrorists and Islamic jihadis are two sides of the same coin. And they'll kill you both just as dead.