Cowards turn to terrorism

Home-grown American goons who bomb, burn and murder as self-anointed guardians of their pet causes will learn what old hands at terrorism have learned on foreign soil down through the ages.

Terrorists never convince anyone with brutality, nor win their causes through savagery.

At the end of the day, most terrorists either land in prison or die violently, and always are repudiated by those who champion the same causes with more success through peaceable, legal means.

The dandies who torched $12 million worth of Vail ski resort property the other day are cut from the same mold as terrorists everywhere: they concoct a nom de guerre reeking of banana republic bravado – in this case, the Earth Liberation Front – then slither around in the shadows waiting to ambush their targets when darkness falls.

That requires no courage, only cowardice.

Just as it required no courage for low-IQ members of the Ku Klux Klan to hide under sheets and terrorize blacks for several generations.

Nor was any courage needed for the sniper who shot and killed an abortion doctor in upstate New York over the weekend, hiding in the darkness and firing without warning into the physician’s home, then fleeing back into cowardly anonymity.

Those who submit their views, however unpopular, for public inspection in the daylight are exemplars of courage, and take their chances in the courts of law and public opinion.

Today’s overwhelming, enlightened public sentiment for protecting the environment and guarding wondrous American public lands was created by activists who relied on intelligent, patient and persistent oratory and images – not guns, bombs, sniper rifles and torches.

One can tick off failed terrorist causes by the hundreds, and, tragically, view the meaningless bloodshed spilled by terrorists.

Timothy McVeigh didn’t bring the federal government to its knees with the bomb in Oklahoma City. Islamic terrorists haven’t destroyed Israel. Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army didn’t change the American economic system with their armed bank heists. The Irish Republican Army’s ghastly reign of terror has only succeeded in filling graveyards with more innocent victims.

Abortions are still legal and being conducted in clinics, despite doctors being gunned down and clinics being bombed and burned.

So, the Earth Liberation Front’s hopes of ending the expansion of Vail ski areas are doomed to the same sort of futility and failure as other terrorist movements.

Ski resorts throughout the West are under stresses. Communities are straining to resolve often-bitter divisions over growth, land use, and environmental safeguards. The Wood River Valley has its own festering quarrel – the contentious issue of affordable housing for workers who’re being driven away by soaring living costs.

By logic of the Earth Liberation Front, this sort of fuss is settled by torching someone’s property.

Every dispute with high emotions has losers and winners. But far better outcomes are the result of the rule of law, not the rule of thugs.