News from London, News from Home

The AP reported today on a horrific double murder in London, in which two French students were murdered in an apartment rented by one of them in New Cross. One was stabbed more than 100 times, the other 50, and then the apartment was set ablaze. The French press and the London tabloids, of course, are having a field day. The French papers are running stories about how London has become a city of gangs, drugs, crime, and murder, while the tabloids are labeling these "the Tarentino Murders," not because anybody named Terentino was involved, but becuase somewhere along the line someone remarked "it looks like something out of a Quentin Tarentino movie." Now this is grossly unfair to Quintin. If they had referenced Saw I could have understood it, but Quintin's movies, while violent, are not really that gory by comparison. In Jackie Brown for instance, all the violence takes place just out of the frame. In Pulp Fiction the one truly gorey part, when they shoot Marvin in the head, is done for black comedy and not as a piece of slasher-porn. Even in his most violent film, Kill Bill, I can't recall a frenzied knife attack (the most violent parts of Kill Bill, the fight scenes, are highly styalized comic-book violence). There's no reason to drag Quintin into this other than to sensationalize it more.

One thing worth noting: the wire article mentions that London is undergoing a great deal of soul searching lately because of a steep rise in knife murders. This throws some fuel on the fire of the 2nd Amendment debate. Britain is often hailed by gun-control advocates as the example of how a society should deal with guns--outlawing all handguns and severely restricting long guns. But if all that happens in that case is that people start killing each other with knives, then the availability of handguns in itself is not the problem. Oh, and Britain's answer to this? A proposal a few years ago to outlaw knivse with points on them. Talk about your nanny state! London, not New York or Berkeley, is the true bastion of liberalism gone too far (says this liberal here).

Speaking of Berkeley, however, they go too far sometiems as well. Or at least because of Berkeley's mythic stature as the birthplace of contemporary lefty resistance, it attracts the most weirdos and wackos. I know. I used to be a Berkeley liberal myself, though a mild ne by comparison. The AP had a story yesterday about the upsurge in violent protests against scientists who perform experiments on animals. Apparently, animal rights activists in Berkeley and elsewhere have switched from targeting labs and releasing animals to confronting scientists at their homes. Occasionally these confrontations lead to vandalism and violence. As the AP put it, "Borrowing the kind of tactics used by anti-abortion demonstrators, animal rights activists are increasingly taking their rage straight to scientists' front doors."

Well finally! I've been saying for years that there is essentially no difference between anti-abortion activists and animal-rights activists, and it's good to know somebody else has seen the connection. Right-to-lifers, whether protecting fetuses or lab mice, they are all a bunch of radical idealists trying to cram their version of morality down everybody else's throats. The only thing that differs between them is what type of life they are trying to protect. They are just as insane, just as radical, and they use the same tactics. And both foster and promote terrorism. A spokesman for the Animal Liberation front was quoted as saying, "if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable." The exact same language has come out of right to life groups. These groups are terrorists. The FBI cetrtainly thinks so. The FBI unit responding to the Berkeley attacks is the domestic counter-terrorism squad out of Oakland: "We call it terrorism because it is a violent act violating federal criminal laws that has a political or social motivation to it."

I and others have been arguing for years not only that these activists are misguided but that they foster terrorism. The FBI has understood it for a long time. It's time the rest of America understood it too. In my mind, domestic terrorists, whether anti-government types like Timothy McVeigh, animal rights groups like The Animal Liberation Front, or right to life groups like Operation Rescue, are a greater threat to America than Al Queda. Yes, Al Queda killed 2800 people in a single attack and they continue to plot against us, but domestic terrorists are more insidious. Not only are they among us but they are *of* us. And their goal is not to force us out of the Middle East. The animal rights terrorists and the right-to-life terrorists: *they* are the ones who truly hate our freedoms, hate the American way of life and want to destroy it.

And it's good to see the dots being connected in something like the Associated Press and not just out here in the crazy blogosphere.