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March 06, 2006

Climate of Fear Part 39

Environmental terrorism is one of the more violent forms of political intimidation in America today. Fortunately the Federal government takes it seriously and is prosecuting people and institutions for it. The New York Times reports:

An animal rights group and six of its members were convicted of terrorism and Internet stalking yesterday by a federal jury that found them guilty of using their Web site to incite attacks on those who did business with or worked for a British company that runs an animal testing laboratory in New Jersey.

The good part is that prosecuters are going after groups that act as non-violent fronts, but still facilitate and support political violence done by their associates:

Although federal prosecutors presented no evidence that the defendants directly participated in the vandalism and violence, they showed jurors that members of the group made speeches and Web postings from 2000 to 2004 that celebrated the violence and repeatedly used the word "we" to claim credit for it.

Prosecutors also produced telephone records indicating that the president of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Kevin Kjonaas, called a man charged with bombing a California biotech lab shortly after the explosion.

Jurors were also shown a videotape of the group's director, Lauren Gazzola, at a protest in Boston, making reference to the previous acts of violence and warning a target, "The police can't protect you!"

In related news, here is a Guardian column by Timothy Garton Ash on related political violence by animal rights terrorists in England:

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.

Ash goes on to distinguish between legal political speech and illegal political threats:

If someone says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for their systematic extermination", he is a distorter of history who deserves to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If, however, someone says "kill the Jews", or "kill the Muslims", or "kill the Americans", or "kill the animal experimenters", and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be met with the full rigour of the law. That's why, of all the recent high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise.

Previous Climate of Fear post.

Posted by Pete at March 6, 2006 02:06 PM

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Comments

At some point one of these people is going to get cancer or have a family member with cancer or some other disease and then what? Will they let that person die instead of using drugs developed using animal testing? Hippies.

Posted by: Jeff at March 8, 2006 05:09 PM