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Posted on 11/4/2001, 1:49:39 PM by Sir Francis Dashwood

USA TODAY - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2001

Page 19A

Enemies here threaten food

By Richard Berman

On the same day America was directly attacked for the first time in 6 decades, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) were taking credit for the burning of a McDonald's in Tucson.

''Make no mistake about it,'' FBI special agent David Szady told 60 Minutes this year, ''by any sense or any definition, (ELF) is a true domestic-terrorism group.''

These homegrown terrorists have not let up since September. Federal agents are investigating a fire and unexploded incendiary devices found Oct. 15 at a government holding pen for wild horses and burros in Nevada -- a site where animal-rights extremists committed arson in 1991. And ALF claims to have set fire to the Coulston Foundation primate-research facility 9 days after the terrorist attacks on the United States.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson now has warned that the nation's food supply could be the target of a terrorist attack. The people we need to worry about, though, may not be international terrorists. They could be the middle-class kids down the street.

The growing wave of domestic terrorism by animal-rights, anti-corporate and anti-biotech extremists has gone beyond vandalism. Property has been destroyed, and lives have been put at risk. And Americans are the perpetrators.

Even the incendiary devices are nothing new. ALF says it was the group that used such devices last March to set fire to two meat trucks in New York. ALF also took credit for setting devices beneath trucks in Canada on Christmas Day 2000.

ALF or ELF -- or both -- have claimed responsibility for vandalism at New York banks, arsons and firebombings at meat companies, the destruction of homes in several states, and the burning of a feed mill in Wisconsin, among many other acts. On New Year's Eve 1999, ELF says it set fire to Michigan State University's Agriculture Hall, causing about $1 million in damages. Its reason: Researcher Catherine Ives' work would ''force'' developing nations to switch to genetically engineered crops.

''I lost basically my entire professional life,'' Ives told 60 Minutes. She said she was working on disease-resistant crops that would help feed Africans.

What will it take for the United States to recognize the clear and present danger that such groups present? The death of a McDonald's employee in a bombing, as occurred in France last year?

Perhaps it will require an American Graham Hall. Hall, a British journalist, was kidnapped at gunpoint in October 1999. The letters ''ALF,'' 4 inches high, were burned into his back with a branding iron. An ALF spokesperson's comment: ''People who make a living in this way have to expect from time to time to take the consequences of their actions.''

Hall's ''crime'': He made a video documentary critical of ALF.

Complacency is no option; it will happen here. Just this summer, Bruce Friedrich, vegan campaign coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told an animal-rights convention in Virginia, ''It would be a great thing if, you know, all of these fast-food outlets and these slaughterhouses and these laboratories and these banks that fund them exploded tomorrow.'' After the audience's applause died down, he added, according to a tape of his comments,

''I think it's perfectly appropriate for people to take bricks and toss them through the windows. . . . Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it.''

An attack could be more insidious than a brick. In April, PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk expressed hope that foot-and-mouth disease, so devastating in Great Britain, would infect the United States.

''If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals. . . . I openly hope that it comes here,'' the anti-meat activist proclaimed. ''It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks.''

In 1997, former senator George McGovern wrote prophetically about a ''new age in this country'' with a fragmentation of society ''based on paternalism -- what we believe is best for each other.'' He asked: ''Where do we draw the line on dictating to each other? How many of these battles can we stand? Whose values should prevail?''

Or, in the words of Walt Kelly's Pogo: ''We have met the enemy, and he is us.''

Richard Berman is executive director of The Guest Choice Network, a coalition of restaurant and tavern operators.

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