They toss marbles at horses, don't they?

Police horses hold the line during a 2002 riot in South Australia (AP photo)

"These hard-core groups are looking to take us on. They have increased their level of violence," says an angry New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly of Leftist fringe groups plotting to deliberately sabotage security for the Republican National Convention:

Internet-using anarchists are telling would-be troublemakers to decoy specially trained Labrador retrievers with gunpowder or ammonium nitrate-laced tablets in a bid to halt trains or even spur the evacuation of Madison Square Garden.

The dog decoy ploy is among the most insidious in the fringe groups' bag of tricks -- which includes throwing marbles under the hooves of police horses and using slingshots to pelt the animals.

What motivates these monsters? As Michele said in disgust earlier today, "animal cruelty is ok as long as it's for a good cause? The peace-loving protesters think that endangering the public is the best way to get their point across? Well, I shouldn't be surprised. After all, they thrive on self-centeredness. Everything is about them . . . It doesn't matter how many people are inconvenienced along the way," let alone how their false alarms will drain Police resources away from the main task of forestalling terrorist attacks.

Fanatics are like that, whether anarchists like these or Islamofascists like Osama & Company. Other people, other creatures, all are mere props in their megalomaniacal fantasies. This 2002 Sydney Morning Herald (registration required) report suggests their strategic "thinking":

If anything roused public sentiment against the M1 protesters last week, it was their targeting of the horses. It's one thing to spit on police officers and try to knock them to the ground while wearing pig masks and claiming to be victims of police brutality.

But public tolerance evaporates when you toss marbles and set off firecrackers deliberately to frighten horses. After all, a horse's legs break easily and then the animal almost always is put down.

Endangering the horses guaranteed them wall-to-wall publicity for what had actually been a feeble, poorly-attended rally of about 300 people, despite the grab bag of predictable causes offered, from asylum seekers, to Howard-hating and Middle Eastpolitics.

As Christopher Andrew observes in his essay "Why lessons of the past can help fight terror of the future" in the Scotsman, "Bin Laden and his fellow-travellers are so dangerous precisely because, like Hitler and Stalin, they combine obsessional conspiracy theories with great tactical and operational skill." On a less grandiose scale, the same can be said of the shadowy, loose-knit band of traveling troublemakers plotting to disrupt the Republican National Convention.