Doctor Targeted by Radical Group

On June 24, 2007, a homemade bomb was discovered under the car of Dr. Arthur Rosenbaum. The bomb squad was notified and the bomb was removed. A faulty fuse kept the bomb from possibly killing Dr. Rosenbaum and others. The group claiming responsibility for this assassination attempt is the domestic terrorist group which calls itself the Animal Liberation Brigade. Dr. Rosenbaum is a researcher at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. The goal of the Jules Stein Eye Institute is to support research for "preserving and restoring eyesight." They also support school vision education programs, claiming that eye injury is the leading cause of child blindness in the United States. Animals are used in their research. The Animal Liberation Brigade believes that through murdering human researchers, animal lives can be saved.

The interesting thing about this incident is that hardly anyone heard about it when it happened. The media doesn’t seem to bat an eye when a person is targeted for assignation by a group trying to save animals from medical research. If the characters in this story were slightly different, it would have been headline news in all the major news outlets for weeks. How could this story be different in such a way that it would cause a national uproar? What if the doctor in this story performed abortions and the organization who planted the bomb was an anti-abortion group? You would have instant national media uproar.

The fact that this story was virtually buried by the national media is very telling. There appears to be more tolerance for attempts on the life of a doctor who uses animals to improve the lives of human beings than there is for a doctor who kills unborn babies. The attempts on the lives of doctors for either action, or for any reason, is wrong but it appears the priorities supported by the national media are flip-flopped. It seems absurd that the acceptable punishment (in the minds of the media) for killing an animal is death while the acceptable punshment for killing an unborn baby human is non-existent. It is absurd that killing an unborn baby human is considered a "right" while using an animal for research is considered a "moral evil."

- ed
e-mail: wwcw@wwcw.org

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