Wall Street Journal
Friday, February 22, 2002
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Animal House
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,4286,SB1014343102940230040-peta,00.html
Remember the "Got Prostate Cancer" billboard of Rudy Giuliani sporting a
milk mustache, part of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals'
campaign against dairy products? And then there was the billboard it wanted
to put up after eight-year-old Jesse Arbogast was mauled by a shark: "Would
you give your right arm to know why sharks attack? Could it be revenge?"
Well, today the PETA folks find themselves on the other side of an
advertising campaign. It comes from the Center for Consumer Freedom, which
is backed by a coalition of food companies ranging from restaurant chains
to meat and dairy producers. Under the slogan "PETA : Not as warm and
cuddly as you think," the center has been running its own ads, featuring a
pretty inflammatory weapon: PETA's own words.
In the ad reprinted nearby, for example, PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich
dreams about a world in which fast-food restaurants, animal labs and the
banks that support them are blown up. When confronted with these words on
Court TV, in a debate with the center's John Doyle, Mr. Friedrich suggested
that they were taken out of context. So in a follow-up debate on a Chicago
radio station, Mr. Doyle invited listeners to "Take the PETA Challenge" by
going to the center's Web site (www.consumerfreedom.com),
clicking on the
flashing logo, listening to Mr. Friedrich's entire speech and then deciding
for themselves.
If that were all there was, this might all just be jolly good fun. But what
lends PETA's actions a more sinister cast are its IRS Forms 990, which show
links with two groups that an FBI spokesman told Congress this month are
the "most active" U.S.-based terror organizations: the Earth Liberation
Front and the Animal Liberation Front.
Last April, PETA donated $1,500 to ELF "to support their program
activities." A look at ELF's Web page leaves little doubt what those
activities are, with a press release taking credit for a fire at a
University of Minnesota biotech lab. A sidebar features handy items such as
"Setting Fires with Electrical Timers: An Earth Liberation Front Guide" and
"If an Agent Knocks: Federal Investigators and Your Rights." In previous
years, PETA has used its tax-free dollars to support other advocates of
violence, such as the $45,200 contribution it gave to the "support
committee" of Rodney Coronado, an arsonist who pleaded guilty to setting
fire to a Michigan State University lab.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk says that these are tiny items in
multimillion-dollar annual budgets, that the ELF donation was for a
publication (and not its illegal activities), and that Mr. Coronado is a
"very nice" and "idealistic" young man. Besides, she says, "there's a
difference between violence to property and violence to persons."
You might try telling that to a fireman.