In late May, a nursery in Quakertown PA that specialized in raising peonies was attacked by the Animal Liberation Front. The reason: the owners of the nursery (the family Hsu) had applied to their township for permission to house primates for medical research on some unused land, and the ALF didn't want that to happen. ALF spray-painted the usual threats around and about (''F--- with primates, get f---ed by us. ALF''; ''the ALF is watching''; and ''this will just be the start'') and splashed paint stripper on cars. They also destroyed over 1,000 of the lovely flowers. (As it happens, the Hsu family withdrew their application because they were unable to meet zoning requirements, so that project would have died a natural death without ALF's helpful "direct action" that destroyed the peonies.)
That attack, however, is now a featured event in the Pennsylvania legislature, which is considering whether to adopt specific legislation crafted to combat domestic terrorism.
It is an interesting piece for a couple of reasons, not least because it enticed a comment or two from the entertaining and irrepressible Dr. Jerry Vlasak, former spokesman for the Physicians Commettee for Responsible Medicine, a group with close financial and administrative ties to PeTA:
"ALF is watching."
That warning - scrawled recently on a Bucks County business - comes from the Animal Liberation Front, one of several special-interest extremist movements that the FBI recently labeled "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats."
The group's latest target is Michael Hsu, whose greenhouse was vandalized May 26 after he applied to Richland Township to kennel monkeys for use in animal research labs.
Other groups on the FBI's watch list include the Earth Liberation Front, an environmental movement that uses violence to stop what it calls urban sprawl, and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, a campaign targeting Huntingdon Life Sciences Ltd., a British company with operations in East Millstone, N.J.
Six members of the Huntingdon group are scheduled to go on trial this week for allegedly vandalizing the company and harassing its employees.
[ . . . ]
Tomorrow, Hsu will testify before the state Senate Judiciary Committee in Harrisburg about an eco-terrorism bill intended to outlaw such crimes.
Also planning to testify is John S. Ellis, executive director of the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research. "If we want to keep up with medical advances in this country, we have to find a way to curb animal-rights violence," he said in an interview.
This is especially important in Pennsylvania, a major pharmaceutical hub with no laws banning eco-terrorism, Ellis said. "We're one of only 13 states that does not have protection for research institutions in their laws."
According to the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, a private nonprofit that accredits programs that use animals in research, 36 programs in Pennsylvania are accredited. More than 680 programs - among them Huntingdon's - in 26 countries are accredited.
Between 17 million and 30 million animals are used nationally each year in animal research, 96 percent of which are mice and rats, said Ellis. Fewer than half a percent are primates.
Groups such as ALF want to end such research, and members are willing to break the law for their cause.
"We do call them domestic terrorists," said Jerri Williams, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia office of the FBI. The criteria are set out in the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act as "causing physical disruption to the functioning of an animal enterprise and causing loss of property," she said.
[ . . . ]
ALF's guidelines, as stated on fliers and Web sites that appear to support ALF goals, are to "inflict economic damage to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals."Some of those Web sites include detailed instructions on how to vandalize property in order to maximize economic damage.
Enter Dr. Jerry Vlasak . . . self-appointed ALF "Press Officer."
"When there's no other way to stop this oppression and suffering and agony, that's when groups like Animal Liberation Front tend to get involved," said Jerry Vlasak, a spokesman for an organization called the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. The group is based in Canoga Park, Calif., and describes itself as an above-ground organization sympathetic with the underground ALF's cause.
"We agree with what they're doing, but we are not doing it and we have no idea who is doing it," said Vlasak.
ALF has no central leader or membership list. Cells of two to five members operate autonomously. Nobody knows how many members ALF has, Vlasak said.
Vlasak says "terrorism is a completely inappropriate word" to describe ALF activities because no one at ALF hurts innocent people.
It seems like every time the good Dr. opens his mouth, he stuffs both feet in . . ..
Dr. Vlasak himself is on record as declaring that killing scientists is "morally acceptable" for the AR cause, and is even more on the record for having openly advocated the practice of assassination itself. One can only conclude that Dr. Vlasak is endorsing terrorism, even if we artificially restrict the definition of it to his own: that "terrorism" can't be terrorism unless someone is injured or killed.
What the ever-entertaining Dr. Vlasak has done is to re-define a word (terrorism) and demand that the world accept it as if it was the gold standard. (One could almost draw a parallel between Dr. Steven Best's "Me First" ethic and Dr. Vlasak's sense that his own definition of a word is so significant that it merits changing the dictionary's! No small ego here, no lack of narcissism!)
Of course, Dr. Vlasak's requirement that terrorism must involve actual injury as a matter of definition is a silly and self-serving restriction that doesn't pass the laugh test. The definition of terrorism does not require actual injury, much less death.
Terror is an emotional state: It is fear of what might happen. Period.
But don't take my word for it. Try this definition of "terror" on for size, and notice number 4 in particular:
n.
1. Intense, overpowering fear. See Synonyms at fear
2. One that instills intense fear: a rabid dog that became the terror of the neighborhood.
3. The ability to instill intense fear: the terror of jackboots pounding down the street.
4. Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes.
5. Informal. An annoying or intolerable pest: that little terror of a child.: an intense fear of physical injury or death
; also : the infliction of such fear n 1: an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety [syn: panic]
2: a person who inspires fear or dread; "he was the terror of the neighborhood" [syn: scourge, threat]
3: a very troublesome child . . .
The point: Terror is an emotional state, not an act of violence.
Dr. Vlasak has conveniently conflated cause with effect: threats and vandalism are the cause, terror is the effect.
But more than that — by finding it "morally acceptable" to assassinate scientists and openly advocating the practice of assination, Dr. Vlasak has not only endorsed terrorism by his very own standards (those which require actual injury), he has added fear to the proverbial fire: the fear of being assassinated is now on the table, after Dr. Vlasak's comments, much more so than ever before. (I am mindful of the spontaneous reaction of Prof. Graham Jenkin of Monash University, a guest along with Dr. Vlasak, when Dr. Vlasak endorsed assassinating scientists on TV: "Yes, I'm somewhat intimidated by Jerry's attitude." Which is the point, after all . . .)
"If you're not abusing animals, if you're not profiting from their abuse, you have nothing to worry about," he said. "If anybody is the terrorist, it's the guy who straps a monkey down in a restraining device and watches them scream in agony."
Here again, we are required to abandon normal definitions of words and accept Dr. Vlasak's definition of "abuse." To Dr. Vlasak, "abuse" is anything he — Dr. Jerry Vlasak — believes it to be, and he regards virtually any exercise of control by humans over animals as being abusive.
In Dr. Vlasak's world, there is no moral difference between a human being and an animal: If it is immoral or unethical to do something to a human, it is equally so to do it to an animal.
Which gets me to PeTA: PeTA kills animals.
Where is Dr. Vlasak's condemnation of them? Are they not terrorists by the very definition he would force upon the world? PeTA kills animals needlessly, the very animals that are most vulnerable, for no other reason than they don't want to spend the money to keep them alive.
If Dr. Vlasak is willing to endorse acts of vandalism, intimidation and coercion as practiced by ALF, and even to endorse killing scientists, would he endorse similar . . . sanctions . . . against Animal Rights activists who kill animals merely because its cheaper than keeping them alive?
And what about those who endorse spaying and neutering, and those who perform the surgical acts themselves? How can Dr. Vlasak justify excluding them from others who he fingers as "terrorists" and "animal abusers?"
Surely, the surgical mutilation of an animal's reproductive organs, robbing it of its normal drive (marking territory, aggression, vocalization) and forcibly violating its reproductive rights for human convenience alone should merit at least some small part of Dr. Vlasak's outrage!
If Dr. Vlasak is unwilling to apply the "terrorism label" to those in PeTA who kill animals and those (like PeTA) who advocate spaying and neutering them, and to encourage the same tactics of intimidation against them that he feels are "morally acceptable" when used against scientists and seal hunters, he is mocking the doctrine of "equal protection" . . . he is discriminating against the doomed animals held by PeTA, those who will be done to death at PeTA's bloody hand.
How can Dr. Vlasak justify his silence?
There is a simple explanation: Dr. Vlasak likes to pick and choose his slippery slopes.
In doing so, Dr. Vlasak makes it crystal clear that his "ethic" is simply an attitude, one based on his personal preferences rather than any sort of ethical standard to be applied universally.
There are clearly some groups that are exempt from the proscriptions he would see forced on the world: PeTA is one such group, and Dr. Vlasak has yet to condemn PeTA's killing of over 10,000 animals in the past few years, or their advocacy of spaying and neutering, even though both killing animals and mutilating an animal's reproductive organs meet his bizarre definition of terrorism.
Dr. Vlasak either doesn't see the contradiction, or does see it and chooses to ignore it.
I'll leave it to you the reader to determine which is worse.
Brian