We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1721390,00.html
The arguments around animal rights, Danish cartoons, Livingstone and
Irving have more in common than you think
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday March 2, 2006
The Guardian
It was a bright cold day in February, and the digital watches were
blinking thirteen. Across the street from the concrete skeleton of a
large building, a noisy crowd was repetitively chanting "Stop the
Oxford animal lab! Stop the Oxford animal lab!" Just around the corner,
at least 500 demonstrators, among them many Oxford university students,
gave their vocal reply: "Stand up for science! Stand up for research!
No more threats, no more fear! Animal research, wanted here!" A student
wordsmith had obviously worked hard on the chants, which continued with
"Pro-science! Pro-gress! Pro-test!". Then there crackled through an
oldfashioned electronic megaphone the voices of Oxford academics, a
doctoral student and, most movingly, the mother of a disabled child.
They explained howprogress in medicine depends on carefully regulated
animal tests and called on us to resist the "animal rights terrorists".
A large banner held aloft in the middle of the crowd proclaimed
"Vegetarians against the Alf". Alf stands for Animal Liberation Front,
the extremist animal rights network which has attempted (sometimes
violently, sometimes successfully) to intimidate universities into not
doing research on animals.
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