Moving Beyond Vegan Combat Boots: Making Veganism Political Again

Our guest is total liberation activist Betty Melon and we play a section of Betty's speech from the 2019 Animal Rights Forum in Naarm/Melbourne that specifically covered racism and animalisation. The speech was entitled Forming Alliances with Other Movemements and focuses on how we can building solidarity with other social justice movements and doing so through a lens of consistent anti-oppression. We discuss how animalisation and speciesism relate to the occupation and genocide in Gaza, and delve into the use of vegan washing and pink washing as tools of propaganda in Israel. We acknowledge that today, December 10 is both the International Animal Rights Day and  also the International Human Rights Day.  Links: Betty's full speech from the 2019 forum can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItkAhRrj10g&t=88s Plant the Land Team is a vegan food justice and community projects volunteer team based in Gaza, co-founded by Anas Arafat, a lawyer and longtime humanitarian aid activist based in Gaza, and Laura Schleifer, a Jewish American vegan, Free Palestine solidarity activist and overall activist for human, animal and earth liberation. Plant the Land Team buys and distributes vegan food, plants food forests on public land, and provides Gazan farmers with seeds and planting tools. Previous fundraising projects have also included providing plant-based insulin to children with diabetes, providing medical treatment, raising the money for a village water well to be built, and our yearly vegan food fundraiser for Ramadan. http://www.planttheland.org/ Palestinian Animal League (PAL) was formed in 2011 and is the only locally-run animal protection organisation operating within the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Those who run the organisation are local Palestinians who realise that the plight of non-human animals is inextricably linked with the position of Palestinian people living under occupation. https://www.facebook.com/pal.legue/  Vegans for Palestine statement of solidarity can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/vegansforpalestine/ Music played on the show: Palestine will never die by Lowkey and Mai Khalil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LliKxwn2KDw Christmas is in the air by the Tuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqVT2pKQYF8 Thank you for listening to Freedom of Species. We welcome your feedback and invite you to contact us via email: freedomofspecies@gmail.com or via social media - Facebook, Instagram or X/Twitter.