When Barack Obama became president, there was reason to believe that he might make a shift away from the “eco-terrorism” priorities of the Bush administration. As a senator, he
responded to a 2005 Congressional hearing on eco-terrorism by saying that the threat from environmentalists was dwarfed by that of other groups. There were only 60 eco-terrorism crimes in 2004, he said, but there were, according to the FBI, more than 7,400 hate crimes in 2003. “In our quest to apprehend these criminals, I hope we are not headed down the path of infringing on the ability of legitimate advocacy organizations to express their opinions and to raise funds in order to do so,” Obama said in a letter to the committee. “I do not want Americans to equate groups that advocate violence with mainstream environmental organizations.”
However, the labeling of environmentalists and animal rights activists as “domestic terrorists” has continued, and even expanded, under Obama’s watch.¹
