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Cover Story

Sneezing on Greenpeace

by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

United Kingdom, Greenpeace self-professed "spin doctor" Ben Stewart did not like Canada Free Press' take on a recent Greenpeace protest gone wrong.

Thirty-five Greenpeace activists, likely expected no trouble when they decided to storm the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London last week.

With long ago studied stealth, they slipped into a closing door and then charged onto the trading floor, blowing ear-piercing whistles and sounding doleful foghorns.

Rudely disturbed from their daily work and initially taken by surprise, traders, most of them below 25 years old, decided to rush the loud and boisterous protesters. Using anything close at hand, they piled turned over filing cabinets on top of the Greenpeacers, kicking and pummeling them before finally forcing them into retreat.

When it was all over, the traders had put up such a passionate resistance that two Greenpeacers actually had to be hospitalized, one with a broken jaw, the other with concussion.

"The vision of young co-ed types taking on aging Greenpeace activists with graying ponytails is something the environmental lobby's spin doctors will have to work at," wrote CFP in a last week cover story.

Noting that Greenpeace has become increasingly corporate, CFP suggested that the world's largest environmental lobby group should change its ways and get back to saving the whales.

But broken jaws and concussion won't stop Greenpeace, which we hear does not insure its activists in the event of physical injury.

"Why change our ways?" wrote Stewart in a CFP letter to the editor. "We stopped global oil trading for an hour, got our message out that Kyoto doesn't go far enough, got tonnes (sic) of free media, in which we called on companies like Exxon to stop blocking action.

"It was a classic Greenpeace action and it worked. You might not like it, but that's the way it goes. Sorry."

Here in Canada, Greenpeace is going after supermarket shoppers stocking up on Kleenex for winter colds.

Greenpeace announced that it would be touring Southwestern Ontario this week to let supermarket shoppers know that when they choose Kleenex brand tissue products, they're actually "paying for the destruction of Canada's ancient Boreal Forest".

The Greenpeace Forest Crime Unit will be targeting selected stores in London, Waterloo, Guelph, Hamilton and Mississauga to call on Canadian shoppers "to stop buying Kleenex" and "to make informed purchasing choices when they buy their tissue products".

according to holier-than-thou Greenpeace, tissue may be just tissue to ignorant Canadian consumers, but Kimberly-Clark is the world's largest manufacturer of tissue products, and their Kleenex brand of products, while synonymous with tissue products, is "contributing to the devastation of Canada's Boreal Forest."

Where the other manufacturers of tissue are devastating their ancient forests, Greenpeace did not say.

Guess Greenpeace activists have never run into frantic supermarket shoppers, headed straight for the Kleenex shelf as instant relief for bothersome red, runny noses.

Meanwhile, common cold-plagued shoppers cannot overturn file cabinets on in-yer'-face Greenpeace activists, who will take them by surprise. all they can do is sneeze on them.


Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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