You know the inmates have taken over the asylum when you’re turning to PETA as the voice of reason! These are the animal rights extremists who compared eating chicken to the Holocaust, compared the murdering cannibal Jeffery Daumer to butchering hogs, and once proclaimed that it would be great if Foot and Mouth Disease infected animals in the U.S.

A sidebar to the Vancouver Winter Olympics was the saga of an American skater named Johnny Weir who wore fur during his skating routine. According to his agent, he was harassed, received hate mail and death threats from animal rights activists. The “animal rights groups” including PETA and Friends of Animals denied complicity, although they said they were pleased with the result. Where were the Canadian Mounties? Did the Olympic Committee condemn the threats? Did our President defend their countryman’s right to wear fur? If the Aryan Nation had threatened him because of his race or Al Qaida had threatened him because of his religion, do you think there would have been an outrage on both sides of the border? But animal rights terrorists threatened to kill an athlete because he wears fur. In Canada, no less! After they kill the fur wearers in Vancouver, is the next step to move north and start killing Eskimos?

Picture an American skater being attacked by lunatic animal rights extremists and nobody raising a finger to help. Picture the lone peasant in Tiananmen Square facing the Communist Chinese Army tank. Picture the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard surrounding an Iranian protester. Picture Johnny Weir.

My question is “how did we let something like this happen?” Canada and the U.S. are the bastions of freedom in the world. They are the bright lights that beckon people to come and achieve their dreams. If this Olympic incident had happened in Columbia and the Cocaine Mafia had threatened an athlete, we would not be shocked. If the sons of Saddam had attacked a visiting soccer player for displaying an American flag, we would not be surprised. If North Korea had kidnapped American tourists … wait a minute … they did. And if some penny-ante animal-rights thugs had threatened to kill a contestant if he wore fur …? The animal rights people had a party. They think they won. But we as a country, both Canada and the U.S., as a people sit here uncomfortable in our shame. We allowed our skater, a free man, to be verbally attacked and coerced and threatened and we stood by, hoping it would go away.

To our credit as a nation we are finally seeing public figures stand up to the animal rights intimidation. Mike Rowe – star of Dirty Jobs; Dean Koontz – a popular novel author; and the Zac Brown Band – 2010 Best New Country Artist winners, have told the looneys to “take a hike.” We learned after 9/11 that the animal rights contention that “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”’ is goofy. And those who preach that philosophy that human life has no more value than the life of an animal, have a screw loose.

Regarding Johnny Weir and the Olympics, does anyone really take seriously that a group of quasi-religious ideologues would really kill him for wearing fur? Remember September 5, 1972? Five terrorists climbed the fence surrounding the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, attacked and killed 11 Israeli athletes. Why? Because they did not believe the same thing the killers did. PD