If they could get away with it, and make a buck, i am 100% they would have lots of human skin for sale.

This Schumacher fellow has some videos up on his website, have you seen them? It doesn’t exactly look like peaceful protesting to me. Hooded extremists, faces covered, following people outside the shop, screaming at them, encroaching them, sounds like harrassment to me.

my favorite quote so far: “A fur coat owner a few months ago told me that the fur was carefully clipped off the animal (who no doubt lived freely in an idyllic field in the country); she had no idea the animals slaughtered to make her coat lived miserable, impoverished lives and were killed by having high-voltage probes shoved into their rectums and mouths.”

That just makes me feel so much better about holding signs out in front of TJMaxx or wherever.

Joe, thanks for being that guy.

It’s important to be well versed with the multitude of skewed defending arguments for the AETA.

Vandalism and destruction of property has accompanied every change of power or transition between social paradigms. This is exactly what is happened. Such acts constitute a minority and must not be used to discount the entire movement. This law is doing exactly that.

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy, it is completely essential to it.” - Howard Zinn

Reason is not on the side of the supporters of the AETA. In fact, by punishing people for their politics–that is, for their opinions–they are committing a logical fallacy of “argumentum ad baculam” (argument from a stick). People have a right to believe anything they want. The use of coercion to force people to change their beliefs is unconstitutional.

The Bush administration applies the word “terrorism” to people who are not terrorists at all, such as the ALF, and does not apply it to people like the contras, praised by Reagan as “freedom fighters” although they were, in fact, terrorists by any definition.

Bush has protected known terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. They were responsible for the sabotage of a Cuban airliner blown up over Barbados in 1976, killing 73 passengers and crew members.

If right-wing extremists who really are terrorists are not punished, but protected, while people who are not terrorists at all, such as the ALF, are punished, then the U.S. government is discriminating unjustly and illegally against people for their political views. A more blatant violation of the Constitution can scarcely be conceived.

Justice means fairness and impartiality. If the U.S. had a clear definition of the word “terrorist” and applied it impartially to rightists and leftists, not considering people’s politics, that would at least treat people equally. But the U.S. is targeting leftists and environmentalists, who are not terrorists, and letting rightists, many of whom are terrorists, go unpunished.

The statement that petty vandalism always hurts one’s cause is a very broad generalization, which is sometimes true and sometimes false, depending on the circumstances. The suffragettes in America and Britain committed lots of petty vandalism for the cause of votes for women, and it worked: eventually there were votes for women. The Boston Tea Party involved property destruction (pouring tea into Boston Harbor to protest the Stamp Act by Americans dressed as Indians), but it did not hurt the cause of American independence. We are taught in school to revere the people who did that as patriots. But the so-called Patriot Act would have imprisoned these patriots.

If the suffragettes and the patriots of the Boston Tea Party are admirable, why are the ALF reprehensible? Let the supporters of the AETA explain that, if they can.