This is the Kind of Criminality That Too Many Animal Rights Extremists Call "Free Speech"
A victim of ancillary targeting in the UK has testified in a criminal trial about the kind of hell he experienced merely for working for a company that had a relationship with Huntingdon Life Sciences. From the story:
William Denison says what happened to his family at the hands of ALF extremists was like "Chinese water torture". He is managing director of F2 Chemicals, a company which did not deal directly with HLS but is owned by a Japanese glass firm that had links to it. He was picked out as a legitimate target.Most media stink at exposing the viciousness of animal rights terrorism, generally under reporting the stories and downplaying their importance. The UK's leftwing newspaper The Guardian, is an exception. Its editors and reporters understand that animal rights terrorism is not liberal and treats it for the Brown Shirtism that it is.
Denison and his family were hounded at home. His wife left her job as a result of stress, neighbours in his village were told he was a paedophile and he had to install 24-hour security and CCTV cameras in his home.
The targeting began at work, but spread quickly. Packages from the ALF arrived at his house several times a week. His car and house were vandalised, causing up to £10,000 of damage. The allegations of paedophilia were particularly damaging and stressful to his wife, who worked with children. "The paedophile allegation was almost devastating in relation to that," he told the court. Some of the many packages that arrived at his house contained shopping which he had not ordered or paid for, including a size 44E bra for his slim wife, in an attempt by the activists to ruin his credit rating.
Fireworks were set off over the family home and airhorns sounded outside in the middle of the night. In July 2003 a hoax bomb was delivered, and in the country roads around his home the words "Bill the murderer" and 13 other sinister messages were daubed in red paint. "It was quite clear I was to become a number one ALF target," he said. "For my wife it was becoming living hell."
Labels: Animal RIghts Terrorism. Huntingdon Life Sciences. Ancillary Targeting.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:03 PM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
What was this guy doing as managing director of F2 Chemicals that caused him to be targeted? I mean aside from having an indirect connection to Huntington Laboratories? The story and the blog don't say.
I'm not saying that what the targeters did was legal, and surely if their identities could have been determined they'd have been arrested, and I know SHS won't agree with me, but I do understand the logic behind trying to end what laboratory animals experience as brown shirtism, terrorism, and hell which is sanctioned by human society. I also know that there are far worse hells and sufferings than what was created here. I think one thing that outrages those who commit such acts is that those who inflict suffering which to humane sensibilities is viscerally offensive is that they do it with total impunity and complete sanction by society while living comfortable lives made possible by the material security and position of respect and legitimacy in society afforded by the jobs in which they cause such cruelty and suffering to occur. Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, which is why it doesn't work, but they have not been able to find another means by which to try to stop oppression, and their goal is to be effective in stopping it by whatever means possible. To them, the family members of the target, whom the profits of what they oppose support are not innocent bystanders, and are in a position to, and may decide to, try to discourage the target from continuing the offensive actions. They do these things because they are powerless, under the rules of society which legitimize and protect the offensive actions, to try to stop it any other way, and because they feel for the powerless animals who are the victims of those actions. SHS won't agree with me, but I respect their trying to do something about what they see as unjust more than I can respect someone who sees the same thing and thinks it's awful but after all what can they do, one can't fight the system, and/or thinks it's awful, but we're entitled to and want the benefits.
I saw Taub once in a public place and without even knowing who he was I got an instinctive bad feeling about him; subsequently I found out who he was, and understood why. These people can go on all day about how much good they are trying to do the human race, and they can be very convincing, even to themselves, but it doesn't make what they are doing right, and they wouldn't be targeted if they weren't doing it; they, not the targeters, started the dynamic, and the innocent victims are those who can't whine to a newspaper. I've got more respect for those whose concern is for other beings than themselves who are helpless and who are picking on someone their own size than for those who make a living causing suffering and complain about what's happening to themselves, while sometimes also complaining that it impedes their work on behalf of humanity. If they're that altruistic and dedicated, let them be genuine martyrs and work for free; they might even want to consider that the net result on humans of what they're doing, once the ultimate effects are tallied up, is negative. Naturally it would be better if the targeters found a legal and more effective way to achieve their ends; if I could think of one right now I'd want to track them down and tell them about it immediately. I know, SHS doesn't agree with me, but also wouldn't expect me to say otherwise.
Again, what was this guy doing? They wouldn't be going to all the trouble to do all these things if it weren't something they hadn't determined to be a cause of animal suffering. Some of the things they're doing may seem particularly odd, and seem odd to me, but beneath it all, they're not nuts.
p.s. Again, I'm not saying that it's ok for them to be breaking the law, or that harassing anyone is ok, or that their methods aren't somewhat counterproductive; I'm saying that I understand why they're doing it.
On rereading, I see that the identity of at least one of the targeters must have been determined, or there wouldn't have been a criminal trial. I doubt that they didn't know they were taking that risk. I also doubt that the managing director of a chemical company isn't responsible for quite a bit of experimentation on animals occurring that causes quite a bit of suffering by sentient beings. Whatever else anyone may say about the targeters, they had to know they might end up in jail, but they acted on the courage of their convictions, and they've got guts, and in the end, that counts bigtime.
None of the above comments changes the status of animal liberationists one whit: they're all terrorists. I remember the baby boy killed by an ALF bomb - is this the work of warm fuzzy heroes?
Was this horrible allegation of pedophilia made anonymously? If the person doing it could have been determined, there ought certainly to have been massive defamation or libel charges (I can never remember which is which). That's exactly the sort of blatant and horribly damaging lie for which such laws were set up in the first place. I'm assuming it was some sort of whispering campaign, perhaps anonymous letters or phone calls to neighbors?
I can never remember which is which either, or whether the two overlap, and, if they do, how. I think that libel involves the written word, and that the elements of defamation are making a statement, in any form, that one knows to be untrue, with the intention of causing harm and loss, and that does in fact cause such harm, and that truth is an absolute defense re both.
I don't know how they did it, or whether it was done anonymously, or why they thought it would help matters, other than by creating the impression that this guy was morally corrupt and underscoring it by creating the impression that he was so morally corrupt that that he would cause harm not only to non-human animals, but also to human children, to cause emotional distress and loss of reputation to him and his whole family, and by damaging the wife's career in order to enhance the overall effect. Their intention must have been to give the company a less positive reputation than it already had, and to make things so unbearable as to stop what was going on in the laboratories, sort of like running the former out of business and running the latter out of town. In fact, none of this is the way these campaigns used to be done; from what I read back when I was first interested in the issue in the 1980s, anti-vivisectionists horrified by what was being done in the laboratories used to let the neighbors know what the researcher in question was doing to animals in them, sometimes with emotional embellishment, calling them cat murderers, etc., and that was the extent of it. It's impossible for this not to be an emotional issue, just as it is impossible not to express emotional outrage over suggestions of infanticide and the giving of a tenured chair to one who has made such a suggestion by Princeton. These ones have left themselves open to litigation and criminal charges, which they were willing to risk, and their intention must have been also to gain public attention on a wider scale, and have given themselves the reputation of terrorists, which is somewhat counterproductive. But they want to be considered terrorists, as part of an effort to make those who do the outrageous stop. They are acting out of empathy with victims of those who lack empathy for those victims, and that does give them a certain standing. Whether have achieved the result they desire to any extent, I don't know. Obviously they feel that the end justifies the means, which doesn't seem like the right way to go about things, but that's part of their point; their rationale includes the point that the researchers' rationale is that the end justifies the means, and that what the researchers are doing is outrageous and should be illegal, and that they are giving them a taste of their own medicine by inflicting on them end-justifies-means tactics and outrageous, illegal actions. Again, two wrongs don't make a right, and it would be better if they could find a way to accomplish their ends that did not involve illegal acts and expose them to sanction and label them as terrorists, but they have not been able to do that. There is a method to their madness, though, and their intention is not to destroy civilization or lower the status of humans; it is to stop barbaric, cruel, and inhumane acts that humans are capable of being above committing against innocent, helpless, terrorized non-human animals.
This is the first I've heard of a baby boy killed by an ALF bomb, or for that matter of ALF bombs, but then I was pre-occupied with trying to save a family member's life from the effects of the death culture for quite some time. I find the characterization of all animal liberationists as terrorists extreme; there are many different ways, including peaceful ones, in which those who are dedicated to stopping cruelty to animals go about doing what they do. As for warm and fuzzy, I'm hardly sympatico with that concept, but I've never to this day broken a law or done anything that could in any sense be construed as along even remotely terrorist lines in the course of doing animal rights work, and I am one among many of whom the same truthfully can be said.
I had the opportunity to talk with someone who was targeted by SHAC USA because his company contracted with Huntington to do safety/toxicity testing of his product on animals. (This usually involves the death of laboratory rats.)
After a year of harassment he capitulated and canceled his contract with Huntington. SHAC, of course, claimed a huge victory.
I asked him what happened to the testing. He said, "Oh, we just contracted it out to someone else."
So NOT ONE ANIMAL was saved. Not ONE LESS TEST was performed.
Any "activist" who claims this as a victory is not deserving of the name.
Padriag: I agree that it's not a victory until and unless they stop the "someone else," and then the "someone else" after that, and so on, until it is actually stopped. The companies will find ways to make it more and more difficult to stop them, and it's going to take a lot of work and research and persistence. But doing something, even if it doesn't succeed the first time out, is better than never even trying when it is a matter of the courage of one's convictions. At least, that's what we do our best to teach our young.
Sorry for the typo in which I misspelled your name, Padraig.
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