ELF said behind damage
August 22, 3003
HUMMERS TORCHED
ELF said behind damage
August 22, 3003
LOS ANGELES - A pre-dawn fire aimed at sport utility vehicles engulfed Clippinger Chevrolet, an auto dealership in West Covina, California, a suburb east of Los Angeles.. The Earth Liberation Front said on its Web site that spray painted messages at the dealership indicate the group was responsible.
Fires gutted a parts warehouse and destroyed 20 Hummer H2s, with another 20 Hummers and several Chevrolet Tahoes significantly damaged by fire and spray-painting.
Slogans such as "Fat, Lazy Americans" and "I (heart) pollution" were painted on vehicles during the attacks concentrated in Los Angeles' eastern suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley. Dealers throughout Southern California who sell sport utility vehicles were adding security measures in the wake of the incidents. "We are concerned," said Josh Sage, a sales manager at Huntington Beach Chrysler Jeep and Hummer.
Sage said the dealership moved its Hummers to a back lot and hired an extra security guard to patrol all night. "If people want to look at Hummers, we just walk them back there," he said.
FBI officials released a surveillance tape that depicted two young men running around the Duarte Ford dealership that was vandalized. The FBI said it had developed new leads in its investigation based on the public release of the tape.
Some of the SUVs were spray painted with the words "terrorist" and "gross polluter" at two other California dealerships. In addition to the fire, Hummers were defaced with graffiti and scrawled on several of the vehicles were the letters ELF.
The crimes prompted a national SUV owners' group to condemn the incident and criticize celebrities like California gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington, a founder of the Detroit Project, which has challenged automakers to produce fuel-efficient vehicles.
"While we believe these groups do not condone such activity, those who have generated the greatest amount of media coverage are creating an atmosphere where it is open season on SUV owners and their vehicles. It must stop," SUV Owners of America President Jason Vines said in a statement.
Several dozen SUV enthusiasts rallied at the arson site and local officials condemned the ecoterrorist attack.
An editorial cartoon vilified the perpetrators:
interviewed Brian Levin, a Cal State San Bernardino professor and director of
the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. LEvin said, "ELF are terrorists,
period. These people are terrorists because they want to use violence as a way
to force their agenda on democracy." Ecoterrorists have supplanted the anti-government
militia movement as the most prolific home-grown terrorists, he said.
The ELF claimed via an e-mail sent Friday that North American members have caused more than $100 million in damage since 1997.
The ELF is suspected in a $50 million arson fire earlier this month that destroyed a five-story housing complex under construction in San Diego's fast-growing northern edge.
But the ELF's activities are taking an ominous turn, Levin said.
"The kinds of attacks they're doing could easily result in loss of life," he said. "The rhetoric and culture of the movement is becoming increasingly more violent."
ELF claims on its Web site that "no one has been injured from the group's actions ... If an action similar to one performed by the ELF occurred and resulted in an individual becoming physically injured or losing their life this would not be considered an ELF action."
"This business of nobody being hurt is a crock," said Ron Arnold , executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
The ELF and its associate group, the Animal Liberation Front, are responsible for death and serious injury to people, mainly in Europe, he said, including the death of a McDonald's employee in France and the baseball bat beating of an animal research lab executive.
The Earth Liberation Front formed in 1992 as a splinter group from the Earth First! movement during an international conference held in England, Arnold said.
The ELF may include a relatively small number of people - maybe a couple hundred, Levin said, but the support system is more substantial.
The group is not organized like a service club, where you pay $20 and get a handbook and a membership card, he said.
"You anoint yourself into ELF by following their principles, by acting out aggressively against ELF-approved targets," Levin said. "These include those who are perceived to pollute the environment and also those perceived to be cruel to animals."
The ELF Web site explains that ELF does not contain a hierarchy, and is organized into autonomous cells that operate independently and anonymously from one another and the general public.
Some attacks come from isolated groups, or cells, Arnold said, but some convictions of ELF members point to perpetrators typically between 17 and 22 years old recruited and trained by outsiders to the area who are slightly older, perhaps 25 to 28 years old.
The younger people are subjected to intense peer pressure, he said. The beliefs of ELF members can range from young, idealistic types who want to purify the world to those who see human beings as a cancer on the earth, Arnold said.
Ecoterrorists are paying a price for their actions. Jeffrey Luers, convicted of torching SUVs at an Oregon dealership, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, Arnold said.
The perpetrators in the San Gabriel Valley cases may have targeted the area to preserve their own security, he said.
"If the perpetrators are ever discovered in these arsons, it wouldn't surprise me to find they came from elsewhere ... in the L.A. area," Arnold said. "They pick a place that wasn't expecting it, someplace where there would be a surprise factor."
FAIR USE NOTE: In accordance with U.S. Copyright Law as codified in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is displayed without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. It is posted here only after a commercial purpose of any copyright holder has been satisfied, and complies with fair use clauses of the U.S. Copyright Act. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
RETURN TO CENTER FOR THE DEFENSE OF FREE ENTERPRISE HOME PAGE