PONTEFICATIONS

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.