An Asinine Plea

Thu, Feb 6, 2003 at 11:34:09 am PST

PETA has written a letter to Yasser Arafat begging him to stop the killing.

Of donkeys.

Here’s a wonderfully acerbic column from Kerry Dougherty that gets it exactly right: Arafat gets asinine plea from PETA on intefadeh. (Thanks to all who emailed about this.)

Determined to make Hampton Roads look like a breeding ground for wackos to the rest of the world, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk this week fired off a fax to Yasser Arafat.

She began the letter with a polite salutation: “Your Excellency.”

I can think of lots of titles for Arafat. Excellency isn't among them.

But I digress.

“. . . We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing . . . in which a live donkey, laden with explosives, was intentionally blown up.

“All nations behave abominably in many ways when they are fighting their enemies, and animals are always caught in the crossfire. The U.S. Army abandoned thousands of loyal service dogs in Vietnam. (Odd. No mention of our dead soldiers, MIAs, POWs or even loyal South Vietnamese allies who were left behind, but again, I digress.)

“Al-Qaeda and the British government have both used animals in hideously cruel biological weaponry tests.”

Brace yourselves. It gets worse.

“We watched on television as stray cats in your own compound fled as best they could from Israeli bulldozers”

Fleeing cats! PETA confronts the horror of war.

UPDATE: I forgot, I need to label things like this. This is not a joke.