Posted on 08/04/2003 2:46:14 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
SAN DIEGO, CALIF. – THE TERRORIST-IGNITED FLAMES, 200 FEET HIGH, produced an inferno so hot that in apartments blocks away windows blew out and plastic window shades melted.
More than 400 terrified neighbors fled for their lives through a rain of grapefruit-sized fireballs into what moments before had been the peaceful 3 a.m. darkness of University Town Center, a northern suburb of San Diego, early last Friday.
“It looked like sunrise,” said San Diego city Fire Chief Jeff Bowman of what he saw while racing northward to the blaze. “An enormous orange glow covered the entire sky.”
The quick response of more than 100 firefighters saved nearby homes, but the terrorist target – the first wood-framed phase of what the city had approved to become 1,500 condominiums – was reduced to ash and cinders.
No lives were lost, although many were put at risk of dying by smoke or flame.
This conflagration could easily have spread to hundreds of homes in the densely-packed neighborhood not far from La Jolla beaches. Perhaps known to the arsonists, the development’s dirt roads were impassible by many fire trucks, and only one working fire hydrant was available at the site.
Friday’s attack destroyed a whole subdivision of half-finished homes, toppled and destroyed a 100-foot construction crane worth $7 million, and blew up a 500-gallon fuel tank.
“I’m out of work now. Thank you, arsonist,” one carpenter on the project told reporters. He was one of thousands whose livelihoods or investment were devastated by this attack.
The estimated cost of this blaze, set during the tinder-dry days of San Diego summer by an arsonist who knew when and how to do maximum damage, is $20 million.
“If you build it, we will burn it,” read the 12-foot-long banner authorities found at the scene. “The E.L.F.s are mad.”
An email received by the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper declared the banner “a legitimate claim of responsibility by the Earth Liberation Front,” a group identified and pursued as terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
E.L.F. has been linked since 1997 to an estimated $50 million in arson and other sabotage damage. This includes the 1998 torching of ski lodge facilities under construction in Vail, Colorado; the burning of luxury homes worth $2 million being built three years ago on Long Island; the 1999 firebombing of Michigan State University’s Agricultural Hall; and the destruction of SUVs at car dealer lots last January in Pennsylvania and last April in Santa Cruz, California.
“On its Web site, ELF describes itself as ‘an international underground organization that uses direct action in the form of economic sabotage to stop the destruction of the natural environment,’” write Los Angeles Times reporters Julie Cart and Monte Morin.
“The site,” they write, “also includes downloadable manuals on setting fires and maintaining security among ‘cells’ – loosely organized groups that do not operate under a centralized authority.”
“ELF was founded in 1992 in Brighton, England, by disenchanted members of Earth First!, a radical environmentalist group. It operates through independent, autonomous cells,” reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Parallels between the Earth Liberation Front and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist do not end with structure or their self-righteous willingness to use deadly violence.
Both, for example, have now operated through San Diego, the Pacific command center of the United States Navy, home both to one of our military’s most important centers and to a classified number of nuclear-armed warships and submarines.
A week before ELF in San Diego unleashed its largest-ever terrorist blaze, the Joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence issued a report about the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon giving details of how two of the skyjackers had lived and trained in San Diego.
These two al-Qaeda agents, who would later die in the airliner they crashed into the Pentagon, reportedly received assistance while in California’s second-biggest city from an FBI informant, a Saudi civil aviation authority employee, and a radical Saudi who had received charitable funding from Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Bandar bin Sultan.
Once upon a time we tended to regard environmentalists as gentle idealists, despite the watermelons – Green outside, Red inside – among Green leaders who have always tried to use this movement to undermine and destroy private property and capitalism.
Many years ago the ACLU called me with the surprising news that a spy for the Los Angeles Police Department had made secret notes about a speech I had given years earlier to a California State University Los Angeles environmental group Would I like to know what the police spy wrote about me? "Of course," I said.
I was then told that this police infiltrator wrote: “Lowell Ponte spoke about global climate change – and plugged his book.” And what else? “That’s all,” the earnest ACLU attorney said. (The book I had promoted was The Cooling, published by Prentice-Hall.) We both laughed.
But in the wake of 9/11, and as environmental extremism has mutated from this to the tree spikers of Earth First! to the firebugs of ELF, the laughter has ceased.
The ACLU’s position has been that law enforcement authorities should be prohibited from any monitoring of activist groups…prohibited even from something as trivial as keeping a manila folder of public newspaper clippings about what extremist groups – including environmental extremist groups – are saying, doing and opposing.
Will last Friday’s escalation of eco-terrorist violence in San Diego prompt some civil libertarians to accept more surveillance – and perhaps even profiling – of those who exhibit radical ELF-like environmental views or are linked to them?
Nobody wants to burn the Bill of Rights – except the terrorists themselves. But no sane person wants to give eco-maniacs an unfettered path to their new weapon of choice, pyromania. As Smokey Bear might say, only we can prevent wildfires set by eco-terrorists – and for the sake of both the natural habitat and human environment we need to take whatever steps are needed to do so.
One good step would be to make these terrorists pay a political price. When they burn down a permitted development of 1,500 condominiums under construction, local and county authorities should give developers permission to build 1,750 units on the same site. (No, this will not encourage builders to torch their own sites to gain unit-density upgrades.) This will provide some recompense to builders and a deterrent to terrorist acts of destruction.
Another useful step would be to remind the public that this latest act of terrorism in San Diego destroyed homes. Once again, eco-extremists have shown that they despise humankind and practice their own form of racism by discriminating against one natural species, homo erectus, the erectors of civilization. No compromise or quarter should be offered to fanatics whose worldview equates humans and spotted owls.
Like so many whose minds become infected with leftist dementia, these home-grown eco-terrorists have slid from idealism, to ideology, to power-mad insanity and violence. The Statue of Liberty, we need to remember, raises her torch to spread light, not fire.
Why not? Because you say it won't?
Here is a link to a Portland, Or page with Jeffry Luer's (SUV arsonist) statement on this conference.
Free (Jeffrey Luers) - Statement to the Break the Chains Conference
DON't LET THEM GAIN MOMENTUM! NIP THESE TERRORISTS IN THE BUD!
(Sorry for yellin' with my caps.)
I am on the "right" coast and cannot travel to make this.
Need Left Coast FReepers to belly up to the bar. Here is your chance to make a difference.
No doubt the idiots helped him get the 22 year, 10 month sentence with this act of brazen stupidity. You don't leave a cancer in the body alone and expect to be healthy years down the road. ELF and ALF are not that big now. If they are left alone, they can grow, flurish, and give the U.S. domestic terrorists that rival anything we have seen anywhere else in the world.
We have to be vigilant and proactive. If we care about this country at all that is.
"A federal judge Thursday suspended logging on three Willamette National Forest timber sales after environmentalists objected to the cutting of old-growth timber.U.S. District Judge Garr King halted cutting at the Pryor, Straw Devil and East Devil sales in the Middle Fork Ranger District east of Oakridge.
King's order came in response to a lawsuit from the Oregon Natural Resources Council, which argues that the Forest Service failed to adequately assess the impacts of logging on wildlife..." (continued in link)
This city is a center for activists of all stripes. The non-violent forest defenders attract the ELFers who try for as many converts as possible. This is a real and serious problem. We need to wake up to this. Big time.
Note: John Zerzan's name generates many links in a search. The one above I linked to give one that gives an idea what he is about.
Get educated on this movement and people. Be prepared.
"Sparks flew in more ways than one when felling began at the Straw Devil timber sale just off Highway 58 southeast of McCredie Hot Springs the morning of July 23. Contention over the old-growth sale, brewing since 1999, came to a head when loggers, tree-sitters, activists and Forest Service staff convened upon Unit 1 of the sale.'The Forest Service decided that this old-growth needed to be cut down for a few bucks. It's the last remaining habitat of the red tree voles.' –Straw Devil tree-sitter Amidst the sounds of saws and falling trees at the site were shouts from above of "Fire the Forest Service, the perpetrators of destruction in the National Forest," "This forest works as one big ecosystem — people should come out here and help try and stop them [(loggers)]" and "The Forest Service decided that this old-growth needed to be cut down for a few bucks. It's the last remaining habitat of the red tree voles." (cont. in link)
Ha! - Ha! - Ha!
What, does the ACLU thinks that COPS are not smart enough to come to FreeRepublic and search for the key words Ecoterrorist, ELF, EarthFirst, Environmentalists, etc. to get all the stories from around the country and world for their intelligence files on these dirt bags?
The ACLU is dumber than I ever imagined!!!!!
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
This is not only terrorism but a crime. Why are they being given a pass?
More "new tone" behavior from Bush. We can't be "mean" to the left can we?.
The official Bush administration policy: "Taking away kids' model rockets and harrasing 90 year olds at the airport; all the while turning a blind eye to the ELFs and keeping our borders wide open."
Most folks aren't. They think these creeps are no more dangerous than tree sitters.
… and the media NEVER associate these ELFs with the Left … NEVER with Democrats.
That's the first thing that came to mind when I heard about this. I know a few people who had their livlihood destroyed when their tools and equipment were destroyed in that environmentalist arson fire, and none of them have been able to collect any insurance yet.
The FBI knows who these terrorists are; why aren't they arresting them?
Me too. When the ELF simultaneously firebombed the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture and their test farm in rural Washington several years ago the terrorists destroyed 10 years worth of scientific research besides the buildings and agriculture plant material resulting from the ongoing research. How the hell do you put a value on something like that?
No arrests have been made, no relief for the damaged parties. I'll bet my last dollar, if the radicals would have firebombed a gay bath house/bar or mosque there would have been an arrest and the damaged parties would have been made whole, even at US taxpayers expense. This type of selective enforcement must be eliminated.
Here's another response. Previous stories said that this site was destroyed to protect some sort of swamp next door. Imagine if some group of concerned citizens got ahold of some Agent Orange and killed it off, leaving behind a banner, "IF YOU PROTECT IT, WE WILL KILL IT."
It would be a damned shame, certainly, and deserving of harsh punishment, but I imagine that only a few such incidents would be necessary before the ELF knocked it off.
Great idea!
I was pleasantly surprised to see FOX News had a good segment covering this fire and they indicted ELF for the terrorist group that it is.
I also agree with bigfootbob, that if a gay bath house would have been torched, suspects would be hanging and congress would be passing legislation naming burning of bath houses an ultra-hate crime.
It gives me no end of grief knowing that these jerks will never be caught.
A most intriguing idea, but far outside the posting rules here. The goons do monitor this site, and are looking for some little thing to use for an example.
How so? The action would be non-violent, and I in no way advocated it in any case.
I was simply speculating about what might well happen--things like this have actually happened before--and what the effect might be.
THE SAN DIEGO CHANNEL.com: "ECO-TERRORISTS RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSIVE FIRE?" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "A large banner near the fire read, "If You Build It, We Will Burn It -- ELF." Investigators believe ELF could stand for the Earth Liberation Front -- an eco-terrorist group responsible for numerous construction site fires worldwide.") (August 1, 2003) (Read More...)
It's a proposal to gather support to break the law.
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