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Add an EventUC Regents Make Case for Illegal Action to Stop Animal Abuse by Attacking Peaceful Picketr
For Immediate Release
November 10, 2008
UC Regents Make Case for Illegal Direct Action to Stop Animal Abuse
Prosecution of Legal Protester Demonstrates Effectiveness, Safety of Clandestine Action
Los Angeles, CA: Last week, University of California regents and their corporate attorneys obtained a civil conviction in Santa Monica of peaceful picketer Pamelyn Ferdin, who was charged with handing out leaflets detailing the torture of non-human primates in UCLA laboratories. Ferdin is a regular protester of animal abuse, albeit one who has never participated in illegal actions of any kind. Jailing her (sentencing is set for November 18) undoubtedly demonstrates the university’s frustration at an inability to determine who is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars via acts of sabotage, as the Animal Liberation Front(ALF) and other clandestine organizations labor to stop the torture and murder of innocent non-human primates at the hands of UCLA and other campus vivisectors like Baldwin Way, Arthur Rosenbaum, and Edythe London.
The Case:
Using a well-known law firm, Irell and Manella (840 Newport Center Drive, Suite 400, Newport beach, CA), UCLA sought and obtained a temporary restraining order(TRO) on May 14th of this year, naming five persons and three organizations. Ferdin was not named; one defendant, UCLA Primate Freedom, appears to be a fictional group being used by the lawyers as a catch-all to restrain any and all activists from demonstrating. Two clandestine, direct-action groups, the Animal Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Brigade, were also named, but presumably were not served with the order since they are, after all, clandestine. The current TRO prohibits such legal action as passing out leaflets with vivisectors' addresses on them, and protesting within 50 feet (150 feet after 6pm) of any UCLA vivisector's home.
The reasons Ferdin has never been named in the TRO are twofold: (1) she has filed, and won, an anti-SLAPP motion in each of 3 similar TROs filed against her in the past, which decried her loss of guaranteed civil liberties, and which resulted in her obtaining over $100,000 in legal fees from the opposition. (2) By not being named, she is denied a jury trial (scheduled for February 18th, 2009 in the current case) to defend herself. Instead, she was charged with contempt for acting "in concert with' others named in the TRO, thus depriving her of the right to file an anti-SLAPP motion or impanel a jury. She was then forced to appear before an arguably mentally ill judge, John Segal, who by all appearances was paid by UCLA to render them a favorable decision; he ignored virtually every word uttered and case cited by Ms. Ferdin, while engaging in mutual heavy-petting with the plaintiffs attorneys (John Hueston and Wendy Scruggs for Irell and Manella). Ferdin, who faces additional criminal prosecution for the same charges later this month, could be sentenced in this civil case to 6 months in jail and fined.
The Result:
Perhaps inadvertently, the UCLA regents are sending the same message loud and clear to the underground, which has proclaimed such for many years: direct action gets the goods, and keeps activists safe and out of the legal morass that passes for a justice system in this country. Out of thousands of illegal direct action that has forced hundreds of animal abusers to change their ways, and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of animals, no more than a handful of activists have ever been caught, and fewer still have spent significant time in prison. Historically, when it comes to helping animals being tortured to death in places like UCLA laboratories, nothing will effect change, nothing will force perverted animal abusers to change their ways, and nothing will minimize untoward effects on brave activists, like illegal direct action. If it was not crystal clear before, UCLA regents have proclaimed loudly: "Legal protesters will be hunted down and punished for their noble attempts at shining the light of day on animal abusing thugs, but the ALF is what is hurting our ability to do business-as-usual." To quote the former primate killer Dario Ringach, after being intimidated by direct action warriors, "I quit!"; there's more Darios out there who will come to see the light as long as the ALF and other clandestine activists stay on the job. After at least fourteen acts of major direct action against the University of California alone in the last year, exactly zero activists have had to waste time in court or jail. Enough said.
[Vivisection, or experimentation on animals, is not only an evil that is perpetrated on millions of innocent animals, but is also scientifically fraudulent. While 20,000 children worldwide die every month from the effects of unclean water, vivisectors in University of California laboratories are wasting money addicting primates to crystal methamphetamines, gluing coils to the globes of their eyes and doing other inhumane and painful experiments on other species of animals, including cats, dogs, pigs, mice and birds. In a civilized society, and with better alternatives to animal experimentation, US academia should be on the fore-front of good, solid, non-animal-based research that could save the lives of children and adults alike. Instead, greedy "scientists" continue business as usual by mutilating non-human animals; it seems that until they begin doing ethical and scientifically-valid non-animal research, vivisectors will continue to be a target for those who are moral, courageous and heroic.
Jerry W. Vlasak, MD, a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, states "Animal research is destined to end, and if the University of California could end their own addiction to easy grant money for this fraudulent research, they could instead lead the scientific community in the legitimate pursuit of medical cures using methods of research shown to be more effective than the use of non-human animals, including primates. Instead however, UCLA continues to harass and intimidate legal picketers and leafleters, which only seems to increase the numbers of those who prefer to remain under the cover of darkness."]
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Contact: Press Officer Jerry Vlasak, MD
Animal Liberation Press Office
6320 Canoga Avenue #1500
Woodland Hills, CA 91367
818.227-5022
www.animalliberationpressoffice.org
press@animalliberationpressoffice.org
Subscribed journal
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7143/full/447353a.html
Unwise branding
Equating animal-rights activism with terrorism increases the penalties for offenders and will please many of their victims. But it is not in the interests of science.
Terrorist is not a word you throw around lightly. And it is certainly not a word you apply to anyone with whom you would like to have a civil conversation. A US tendency to apply the label to militant activists who are against animal research or genetic engineering slams shut a door that might be difficult to reopen — to researchers' cost.
In a courtroom in Eugene, Oregon, last week, federal prosecutors asked for a 'terrorism enhancement' on the sentencing of ten environmental activists. The activists have admitted to a string of arson attacks in the western United States in the late 1990s and the start of this decade. They torched places where things were done of which they disapproved, including a lab that they believed was growing genetically engineered poplar trees. If the judge applies the requested enhancement, their sentences could be longer and the conditions of their imprisonment more severe.
They are criminals, to be sure. Their arson cost millions of dollars and destroyed scientific work in progress. But although some of their more knuckleheaded actions could easily have accidentally hurt someone, their ethos was to damage property, never to hurt or kill.
Other extreme activists are also being labelled terrorists. Last November, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was signed into law in the United States. It creates tough penalties for damaging property, making threats and conspiring against zoos, animal labs and the like. Leaving aside the merits of this act, its very name enshrines into law the idea that destructive activists are terrorists.
As one of the communities targeted by these activists, scientists may be tempted to embrace this rhetoric. Indeed, many people have personally felt terrified by the actions of the most extreme. But 'terrorist' is a word so debased and loaded by political use that, if it has any meaning at all, it is counterproductive. There is no such objective thing as a terrorist. A criminal is a person who has been convicted of a crime. We can examine a person's records and make an unemotional determination of whether or not they are a criminal. But a terrorist is, in practice, a person who fights for a cause we do not believe in using methods that we do not approve of. Calling someone a terrorist is a value judgement.
It is a value judgement that seems to be increasingly used in the United States since the attacks of 11 September 2001. Indeed, the nation is waging, in official parlance, a "global war on terror". The term is useful politically exactly because it expresses an absolute rejection of a person and their aims. The terrorist label definitively ends any possibility of dialogue. But if there is any hope of bringing closer together those at the extremes of scientific controversies such as animal research and genetic engineering, the various parties must be able to speak to one another.
Although most activists feel that the actions of the criminal few are unproductive and embarrassing, for every activist saboteur with a lighted match there are hundreds of people who are sympathetic to his or her cause. Label that saboteur a terrorist, and you risk alienating all of them. Efforts to bring together defenders and attackers of animal research, such as those by the UK-based Boyd Group, often do not admit those who espouse criminal acts, and that is appropriate. And it leaves open the possibility that an activist who has renounced criminal actions can come to the table. But who will be willing to publicly break bread with a terrorist, reformed or otherwise?
We should avoid building an unbreachable wall between criminal activists and their victims.
We should avoid building an unbreachable wall between criminal activists and their victims. The judge in this case should reject the call for 'terrorism enhancement'. We must all speak more objectively and calmly.
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