Danger! Loss of Perspective! Danger!
Via Q&O comes this charming story of PETA asking Sri Lankan terrorists to go back to murdering humans and leave the animals out of it:
An international animal rights group called on Sri Lanka's separatist
Tamil Tigers to "leave animals out" of the armed conflict, two weeks
after a grenade attack blamed on rebels at the island's main zoo.People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said in a letter dated
Feb. 15 to Velupillai Prabhakaran, the reclusive rebel leader, that
"the explosive device that was set off near the zoo's bird enclosures
terrified many animals at the zoo."PETA president Ingrid E. Newkirk pleaded with the rebel leader "to leave animals out of this conflict," the letter said.
Newkirk added that the group has been inundated by messages from people saddened by the attack.
There was no immediate comment from rebels to the PETA's letter.
It is an amazing loss of perspective when scaring zoo animals (not even killing them!) gets an organization worked up enough to send out such a letter when just merely killing people did not.
Bearster:
Not an accidental loss of perspective, but a deliberate attempt to destroy the distinction between murder of people vs. property damage--and then to rewrite the concepts so that animals are elevated above humans.
February 27, 2008, 10:20 amDave Moelling:
It was the same think with "Nuclear Winter". The prime assumuption was that the Soviet Union and the West shot off their entire nuclear arsenal at once. Somehow the idea of every major city in the northern hemisphere destroyed with consequent fall out and chaos was not chastening enought, we had to then create a climate catastrophe.
Implicitly the assumption was that humanity had it coming to us, but it was unfair to involve deer and chipmunks. The green version of original sin pervades most of this type of thinking.
February 27, 2008, 12:32 pmCraig:
To liberals, terrorism is just another form of warfare, and in conflicts like the one in Sri Lanka, the two sides are morally equivalent.
February 27, 2008, 1:28 pmhappyjuggler0:
Hey, this isn't right. People are animals too!
February 27, 2008, 3:28 pmJens Fiederer:
Actually, this one doesn't strike me as THAT bad.
The killing of the humans is an INTENTIONAL effort.
The scaring of the animals may have been UNINTENTIONAL.
There is some chance terrorists might be willing to listen to an appeal on the latter topic.
Multiplying the likelihood of a request to spare the humans (pretty much zero) with the value of lives (no matter how high that is) spared might VERY well generate a lower value than the likelihood of not scaring little birdies multiplied with the value of calm birds.
February 28, 2008, 3:12 pm