ANIMAL RIGHTS TERRORISM PAYS OFF:

The constant calls, the people frightening his children, and the demonstrations in front of his home apparently became a little too much.

Dario Ringach, an associate neurobiology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, decided this month to give up his research on primates because of pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project, which seeks to stop research that harms animals.

Anti-animal research groups are trumpeting Ringach’s move as a victory, while some researchers are worried that it could embolden such groups to use more extreme tactics. . . .

Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks’s elderly neighbor’s house, and did not detonate.

If people were doing this to animal-rights activists, it would be called fascism.

UPDATE: More threats against children here. And the Insta-Wife wonders why the AIDS activists aren’t going after the anti-research animal-rights terrorists. Good question!

And reader William S. Aronstein emails:

“If people were doing this to animal-rights activists, it would be called fascism.”

In fact, this informal “control of the streets” was a key part of the National Socialist and Fascist program. By intimidating their opponents with threats of violence, the fascists silence them.

With all of the reports of unhinged leftist mayhem catalogued by Michelle Malkin and Gateway Pundit, how far away from such a situation are we?

Still pretty far, fortunately. But I think the FBI should come down hard on animal-rights terrorism, and I think these guys deserve RICO suits to the same degree that anti-abortion terrorists do.