crosspost: Paul Watson and the Armada of Death

[bananas]

A good article on Paul Watson was posted the other day in GD:

http://silverdonaldonsunday.blogspot.com/2008/04/paul-watson-and-armada-of-death.html

Silver Donald on Sunday

A view of the world from Nova Scotia

Sunday, April 20, 2008
Paul Watson and the Armada of Death

Let me get this straight. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, aided by the RCMP, boarded and seized the Dutch-registered protest vessel Farley Mowat in order to prevent injury to sealers -- just a couple of weeks after DFO drowned four sealers itself in a terrifying display of incompetence.

And the European master and mate of the vessel have been jailed and charged with offences under a set of "marine mammal protection regulations" that were created specifically to stifle dissent by preventing protesters from approaching seals who are in the process of being slaughtered.

And all this hits the headlines just as the European Union debates whether to ban seal products from the EU completely. A triumph of Canadian diplomacy.

And the Minister, Loyola Hearn, contributes to the calm and rational discussion of the seal hunt by sneering at the internationally-venerated Farley Mowat, who had the effrontery to putup bail money for the jailed officers. Hearn also excoriates Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd Conservation society as "a bunch ofmoney-sucking manipulators."

If money-sucking manipulation is now a crime under the Fisheries Act, perhaps we should send a few fisheries officers to call on The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney. Whether or not Mulroney's skulking encounters with Karlheinz Schreiber were otherwise illegal, there's not much doubt that they represented "money-sucking manipulation" on an Olympic scale.

But that's not true of Paul Watson. Say what you will about Paul Watson -- and you can say, with some justice, that he's intransigent, uncompromising, hyperbolic, pugnacious, rash and intemperate -- you cannot ascribe cynicism to a man who has spent his whole life charging whaling ships with rubber rafts, getting himself tear-gassed and beaten and jailed, and confronting armed and angry sealers and whalers far out on the cold and lonely sea.

FULL story at link.

[bananas]

1. link to the GD thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=3183977