When the word "terrorist" loses all meaning...

For those of you who think that Canada is a much more open-minded place than its mighty neighbour to the south, think again.

From the Montreal Gazette:

OTTAWA — A government agency responsible for tracking financial transactions to ensure they aren't used for illicit purposes has identified animal rights activists and "environmental extremists" as terrorist groups on a website rife with references to al-Qaida.

The page is part of an online terrorism-financing tutorial hosted by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre.

The government established FINTRAC in 2000 to detect and prevent money laundering and other illegal financial transactions by terrorists and organized crime groups.

The story goes on to say that animal rights activists are "single issue" terrorists who resort to violence to achieve their goals, and they deserve to be lumped together with other extremists and zealots, including Al Qaeda.

If being horrified by the systematic murder of 59 billion land animals a year makes me a terrorist, then I'm a terrorist.

If hating the violence that goes into the commodification of living, sentient beings puts me in the same league as Osama Bin Laden, then scoot over Comrade Bin Laden. You've got a new sidekick.

If believing that sentient beings on land and in the sea have rights and that human beings have NO right to breed them, rip them apart from their loved ones, put them in dark places for their short lives and then sever their veins and eat their flesh and other excretions makes me a kindred spirit to the maniacs who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, then this blog has officially become a "Jihadist Zone."

I'm a terrorist because I hate mass murder. I'm a terrorist because the very thought of putting flesh in my mouth sickens me. I'm a terrorist because I can't look the other way when seals are clubbed, whales are harpooned, fish are gutted while they're still flopping, lobsters are thrown into boiling water alive.

I'm a terrorist because I lay awake at night, haunted by the thought that the average calf who is turned into veal has a shorter lifespan than a housefly.

Never mind the institutions and people that murder billions of sentient beings. They are simply fulfilling "demand" in the glorious "free market" system upon which our civilization is built.

A world where the murderers are the virtuous and the compassionate are terrorists is absolutely unthinkable. And, yet, here we are. We're in it. This is the reality we must confront.

I will let my lifelong hero Mario Savio have the last word in this case:

"There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop, And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all."

More Insane Destruction of Pigs, Courtesy of - you guessed it - that "Humane" Species Known As Human Beings

As if the mass slaughter of pigs by the factory farm system around the world and the burying of pigs under avalanches in Austria weren't bad enough, now there is another deplorable way that pigs are being destroyed.

In jolly old England, military scientists are blowing up pigs (wrapped in Kelvar blankets) to test the effects of terrorist bomb attacks. So far, 18 unlucky pigs have been blown up. They were chosen because their skin is similar to that of human beings.

Here's something else the scientists should remember: Pigs also have minds that are similar in intelligence to three-year-old children.

The pigs are being blown up in tests that are designed to replicate the horrific London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005, which killed 56 people in the morning rush hour.

To the poor pigs who have died so horrifically, the terrorists are not al-Qaeda or the Taliban or any of the other bogeymen that we have been so heavily exposed to over the past decade. Hell, Muslims don't even eat pork, so pigs are safe among those groups.

To the pigs, the real terrorists are the British government's teams of "experts" who are blowing them up.

Why the hell is the scientific community in England doing this??? Good question. As the British Telegram newspaper explained:

Scientists wanted to find out how long the animals survived when more than a third of their blood had drained from their bodies.

Medics hope the experiments will help British soldiers in Afghanistan as well as casualties of terror attacks like the July 2005 bombing of the London Underground and a double-decker bus.

In particular these results should help them understand how to control haemorrhaging in bomb blast victims.

Needless to say, no pigs made it out of the tests alive.

How does one even begin to address such insanity? If there is anything positive to be gotten out of this sad story, it is this: At least the animal rights community has strongly condemned the brutality. So did Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP, who told the press:

These are revolting and unnecessary experiments. Sadly, we are too familiar with the effects of terrorism. It is perfectly possible to find out things we don’t know without blowing up pigs to find out.

What's next? Crashing remote-controlled drone airplanes with chimpanzees inside to test what happens to passengers when a terrorist flies an airplane into a building?

Human beings. You gotta love 'em, baby!