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| International |
| Fortuyn murderer said to be an animal rights nut |
| 2002-05-07 |
| The suspected killer of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is a vegan animal rights activist who declares on the Internet that "protecting animals is civilising people", a source close to Fortuyn's party said on Tuesday. He civilized the poor man by ventilating him? Are we missing something? A 32-year-old man from the staunchly religious central Dutch town of Harderwijk is being held for Monday's shooting, and justice officials said bullets and environmentalist material were found during a search of his home. "Staunchly religious central Dutch town", huh? Well, that sounds significant. Prob'ly them Christians. And he had bullets, too... The man, in custody but not identified by police, says on the Internet he is a member of a small, little-known animal welfare group fighting to stop the expansion of factory farming in a country which boasts a big intensive agriculture industry. So he killed somebody? Another one who writes bad poetry... And still more... The man was allegedly well known to authorities, but had never been arrested. Hofstee said police discovered material in the suspect's house allegedly indicating he was involved in environmental activism. A spokesman from the Vereniging Milieu-offensief (Environment Offensive Association) in Wageningen confirmed that the suspect, Volkert van der Graaf, was an employee of the organisation. The spokesman was quick to distance the organisation from the suspect and the assassination of Fortuyn. "Uh, no... We don't do assassinations. We're into urine-soaked cream pies..." Van der Graaf wrote in his Internet-published biography that he had studied in Wageningen, near Arnhem, and was focused primarily on fighting intensive cattle breeding and the fur trade. That's what he studied? He had a degree in protest? The suspect wrote that he waged his campaign by fighting permit procedures and that he was opposed to the morality of the bio-industry in regards its treatment of animals. He claimed to have initiated many successful protest actions in 2000 and was primarily concerned about fighting the most serious environmental breaches and causes of animal sorrow. And that was what he did for a living. Wotta contribution to society. His Mom must be so proud... In a possible link to his assassination, Fortuyn had recently announced that if he won power he would not be in favour of placing a ban on using animals for the production of fur. Since there's no other way to get fur, that makes sense. It's a hell of a thing to get killed over, though. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #3 The first post I made on the second day of my blog concerned how the tactics of radical enviros/animal rights activists would eventually evolve to murder. And that they would find a way to justify it. The "cause" is much more important than any person, especially an infidel. |
| Posted by: CH 2002-05-07 20:52:00 |
| #2 The "moral equivalence" is envisioned as bringing animals up to the same level as human. Instead it puts humans into the same category as animals. It's a lot easier to kill an animal than it is to kill another person. |
| Posted by: Fred 2002-05-07 20:43:11 |
| #1 I might say, Fred, that this is the logical culmination of radical environmentalism. Ever since Ingrid Newkirk's infamous declaration "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy", animal-rights extremists have been engaging in a particularly poisonous species of moral equivalence that even goes so far as to place the lives of non-sentient animals ahead of human beings. I'm sure you're familiar with the case of Earth First out in the Northwest, and the radicals who endangered the lives of loggers by hammering metal spikes into trees in such a position that they would splinter into shrapnel when the loggers did their jobs. Not to mention, of course, the notorious incidents in which laboratories conducting medical experiments with animals - often very delicate and critical experiments, sometimes experiments in which it's _dangerous_ to let microorganisms or chemicals out into the general population - have been raided by animal-rights types who are intent on the "liberation" of the experimental subjects. If there's any surprise at all to this tragedy, it's not that it happened, but that it hasn't happened before. The danger is that a deadly precedent has been set. For example, _any_ fashion designer who works in fur or leather must now really look over his shoulder, because there might be a PETA freak with a gun coming for him. |
| Posted by: Joe 2002-05-07 17:18:15 |