Making a Hero Out of an Animal Rights Criminal

Rodney Coronado, now in a penitentiary for teaching people how to make an explosive devise with the intent that someone commit a violent crime—and convicted previously of torching an animal research lab—a terrorist who admits he committed other crimes for which he was not caught, is the subject of a new biography. And the “Trade” reviews are almost as atwitter for Coronado as the MSM are for President Obama.  From Kirkus “starred review” reprinted on Amazon.com:

Kuipers delivers a searing narrative on the fringe animal-activist movement. Despite his decades of experience covering the radical environmental movement, the author is careful to remain an objective narrator, presenting much contextual detail and allowing Coronado and his peers’ brimming passion to tell the story.  A provocative and careful testament to the ever-changing definition of activism.

And here’s the Book List’s even more breathless “starred review”:

Passions run high when it comes to environmentalism, yet few condone the extreme tactics of such groups as the Animal Liberation Front. Los Angeles Times editor Kuipers, author of the counterculture saga Burning Rainbow Farm, focuses on eco warrior, some would say ecoterrorist, Ron Coronado as a key to the incendiary side of green activism. A Californian of Yaqui descent, Coronado began demonstrating in support of animal rights while still in grade school. He joined Sea Shepherd, a direct action anti-whaling group, instead of going to college, thus launching a life of illegal protest that turned him into a saboteur, arsonist, and fugitive; landed him in jail; and embroiled him in an infamous legal case that fuses freedom-of-speech issues with ramped-up domestic-terrorist laws. Coronado’s outlaw adventures for the cause are electrifying, from his covert videotaping of crimes against animals to his fiery destruction of fur farms and research labs, and his spiritual and moral struggles are equally compelling and genuinely instructive. As Kuipers meticulously tracks Coronado’s intense commitment to animals and eventual rejection of violence, he illuminates the tenets of deep ecology and animal rights and provides an invaluable history of radical environmentalism, a force that may gain momentum as mainstream society fails to respond to looming crises.”

Here’s a thought experiment: Replace the word “pro life” in each spot in which these reviewers used the term animal rights or referred to environmental activism: As in, “As Kuipers meticulously tracks Coronado’s intense commitment to unborn children...he illuminates the tenets of pro life ethics and provides an invaluable history of anti abortion advocacy, a force that may gain momentum as mainstream society fails to respond to the abortion Holocaust.”

Does anyone think these reviews would have so glowingly reviewed a biography of an equivalent pro life “warrior?”  Of course not—nor should they. But if it is wrong—and it is—to engage in vandalism, arson, and personal attack in the name of stopping abortion, if a biography romanticizing the exploits of a pro life Ron Coronado would have been searingly condemned—and it would be—it is just as wrong to do it in causes of the Left like animal rights.  But don’t expect our ideologically corrupted intellectual institutions to figure that out.