You simply must appreciate the tactical elegance of Animal Rights extremists in their on-going campaigns to win by coercion, intimidation, thuggery, harassment (link, link, link) up to and including overt threats of assassination what they cannot win through popular support.
I've written before about how the extremists do their nasty thing, while they plausibly arguing that they've broken no laws. Here's yet another example (registration required):
MARTINEZ - A chemical manufacturer and three of its employees have sued an animal rights group, alleging that members are trespassing at employees' homes and posting their personal information on the organization's Web site.
Walnut Creek-based Valent U.S.A. requested that Contra Costa County Judge David Flinn issue a restraining order against the group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty U.S.A., in response to demonstrations at employees' homes during the summer.
Employees want group members to stop harassing them, said their attorney, Mark Epstein. The attorney representing Stop Huntingdon said members have never broken any law and a judge's order would violate the group's right to free speech.
Employees of Valent, which produces pesticides and herbicides, awoke to demonstrators at their homes in July, August and September, according to court documents. Walnut Creek resident Elsa Zisook said in a statement that she found 30 to 60 people, some shouting through bullhorns, at 3 a.m. on her property. Court records indicate that protesters wearing masks and hoods returned the following afternoon and kicked down her fence.
``The employees are a bit tense that something further might happen,'' Epstein said.
Stop Huntingdon U.S.A. is the American affiliate of an organization that started in England in 1999. It aims to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that contracts with Valent and others to conduct animal testing services, according to Stop Hungtingdon's Web site.
In August, an Alameda County judge issued a restraining order against the group at the request of Emeryville-based Chiron Corp. In both cases, lawyers representing Stop Huntingdon said that the group has no members who conduct protests and that the group exists only as a Web site that provides information about animal rights issues.
In its suit filed in September, Valent alleges that Stop Huntingdon publishes addresses, phone numbers and other employee information that protesters use for demonstrations.
The group's attorney, Christine Garcia, said demonstrators post protest reports only after the events. The phone book provides the same information, she said, and the targeted Valent employees are executives -- public figures who lack an expectation of privacy.
Plaintiffs in such cases must show that the group is posting personal information to facilitate a direct event, said David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project in Oakland. It is unlikely that a judge will stop a group from publishing data that is available in the phone book, he said.
The structure of SHAC's approach in targeting victims and its defense when called to task for it is carefully conceived and brilliantly executed, as I've discussed before. Their success is based on the principle of compartmentalization.
In one compartment, you have people whose job it is to create and maintain a website, interact with the media, and perhaps to publish handbills and posters. It is the goal of these people to demonize their targets, to publish public information about them (addresses, telephone numbers, names of children, schools attended by children, etc.), to encourage demonstrations, to provide instructions on how to engage in "direct actions" (violence, vandalism, harassment, intimidation, coercion) against the hated animal torturers and their enablers, to glorify "direct actions" and the Holy Warriors who undertook them, and finally to stoke the fires of passion in the AR true believers to white heat.
The activities of these folks are arguably entirely legal — they don't instruct anyone to appear at time and place to vandalize anything or terrorize anyone. But they tell the world who deserves to be terrorized, how one could do it if one were so inclined, and why terrorizing the target is an ethical imperative. These people instigate intimidation, violence and vandalism by anonymous other people, but because they do so indirectly, they are generally considered to be within the law.
In the second compartment, isolated from the first, you have a variety of people who are sympathetic to the cause. These are folks who are moved by the instigator's web site, and who, for whatever reason, decide to act out illegally against the targets, using the information and techniques provided on the website. When a group of these people get together, they often resemble a mob, with all that implies in terms of intimidation and coercion. Also in this compartment are the "lone wolf" types — a select few anonymous individuals who see themselves as holy warriors on a holy crusade to win victories for the cause through intimidation, coercion, vandalism and terror.
Make no mistake about it: to be targeted by people like this is be terrorized. There are no "ifs", "ands" or "buts" about this. Indeed, that is precisely what the system is designed to do.
The beauty of the system lies in the fact that those in the "instigator compartment" and the "useful idiot" compartment are often strangers — or, if they are acquainted, they avoid planning "direct actions" together. So there are seldom direct ties between the useful idiot who vandalizes (for example) and the website that indirectly inspired him to do so.
What this means is that the useful idiot, if caught, pays the legal price, be it jail time or fines or community service. The instigator, however, drapes himself in plausible deniability — perhaps he doesn't even know the idiot — and invariably there is no evidence at all that he incited or directed the useful idiot to do the deed.
The system works well because it requires only a few useful idiots. It's like someone creating a tinder pile and pouring accelerant on it. Having done so, our pile-builder glorifies to the world the wonders of a bonfire, while inviting those impassioned by his rhetoric to light candles and gather around the pile. Sooner or later, some useful idiot will take it upon himself to touch off the conflagration.
Though it might not be possible to predict in advance who would ignite the fire, it is virtually inevitable that someone would. And, if your goal is to have a lighted fire, it is irrelevant who the useful idiot is who touches candle to accelerant.
In this connection, notice the argument offered by SHAC's defense:
. . . lawyers representing Stop Huntingdon said that the group has no members who conduct protests and that the group exists only as a Web site that provides information about animal rights issues.
Translation: All my clients do is operate a legal, informational website. They are not an organization because they have no members. You can't blame them for what others decide to do with the legal information they legally provide.
"It's not my fault! You can't blame me because someone set the tinder afire! I didn't tell them to do it!"
Many thanks to Liz Ditz for the heads up.
Brian