25 October 2005

Further Ferdin Fooferah and some local connections

A simple google search for Pam Ferdin reveals some really interesting links to accounts of her terrorist activities.

Take this link, for example, to a Los Angeles blog that notes municipal employees in LA will be getting security protection at city expense, thanks to threats from Ferdin's Animal Defence League. Seems a someone set off a smoke grenade in the apartment building of one city animal control director.

One union official had her car firebombed by the nutjobs Ferdin leads. Follow the links back to Ferdin's site, as the link suggests, track the account of the protest and you can see some of the extreme language used by Ferdin and company to describe people they have targeted.

Just remember that Ferdin's husband, Jerry Vlasak views violence and non-violence as merely tactics to achieve the greater end.

Then there's this link to a protest against a research facility to be built at Cambridge University. Note the list of speakers include Vlasak and Ferdin, the latter being described as the head of a primate protection outfit. That would be in addition to heading ADL and at least as of August 2004 of running another group that several years earlier had been involved in beatings of biomedical researchers.

The happy couple started their life of protest at least as early as 1996-97, in this turkey protest in which Vlasak was jailed for mischief and Ferdin was identified as the protest organizer. Ferdin is identified as a trauma nurse - which makes sense if Vlasak is a trauma doctor, but prior to this her work was with a New York company that handled animal control on contract from the Big Apple.

Flip around the web a bit and you can come across Animal Scam, a site dedicated to countering animal rights groups.

This is where the whole story gets rather interesting, at least from a local angle and our ongoing hate-affair with veteran money vacuum Paul Watson.

Despite the fall-out from Peter Gullage's piece on Paul Watson and Jerry Vlasak last winter, it seems Vlasak is still on the board of the Sea Shepherd society. This link rather neatly describes Ferdin and Vlasak's status in the United Kingdom. Her Majesty views them as a threat to public order and likely with cause.

Watson also sits on the Sierra Club board. He tried to take over the Sierra Club board during internal elections but apparently failed. in the meantime he is still there. The Sierra Club of Canada is part of the international Sierra Club organization.

These guys are also linked to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA as it is commonly known. Does anyone at memorial remember some guy named Alka Chanda? This guy used to teach at MUN and is now a researcher at PETA.

PETA has the standard anti- seal hunt website, complete with video and the complete lie that "baby" seals are killed.

Check out the Rebecca Aldworth shown on the ice at the end of the International Fund for Animal Welfare video that PETA uses and you will find this. Apparently she grew up in a community of 340 people somewhere in Newfoundland and is now working with the Humane Society of the United States as Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues. She's someone Paul Watson has described as "the world's most active" anti-sealing protestor.

Rebecca also subscribes to Watson's idea that stopping the seal hunt would actually help with cod recovery. Try this link on for size.

Of course in her former life, as president of the student's union at Concordia, Becky found violence of the type she helped provoke last winter on the ice floes to be just a bit too unpalatable.

I guess Beck changed her mind about violence as she got older.

And realized the money to be made from it.

Of course, the nut factory once known as Sir George Williams U has always been a dodgy place.

She seems to have fit right in, once skating topless on the Rideau Canal to protest against fur as clothing.

Personally, I'd like to know what part of Newfoundland she's from.