A terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to coerce a reaction out of people.
PETA's propaganda's purpose is to horrify people into not eating meat.
PETA's funding and relationship with ALF has the purpose of terrorizing scientists, agribusiness, and other groups that they want to cause harm to by threatening to or actually destroying research, burning down buildings, destroying crops, freeing animals, ect. They give people who have engaged in such activities leadership positions, portray it as a reasonable response, give them money, recruit members for them, ect.
Ergo, they are a terrorist front group. I felt that this was pretty clear from the whole "they do in fact go around burning stuff down, commit arson" and I threw in the dog thing because it was from a personal encounter with such "activists" (they tried to "liberate" the rabbits from a rabbit farm down the street during the summer; the guy who noticed their truck with their dog locked up in it came back with a baseball bat to smash in the window to let the dog out after passing it twice, but they had taken off by then). And arson, murder, and jaywalking constructions are always fun. Their association with various ecoterrorist groups, and comembership with such lovelies, and funding... well, it all speaks for itself. But its usually good to say it out loud.
It is entirely appropriate to label people as terrorists when they are, in fact, terrorists. Its like calling a member of the KKK a white supremacist; it might be a [i]negative[/i] term, but it is also without question a [i]correct[/i] term and a [i]descriptive[/i] term. A lot of people are unaware of the fact that PETA is, in fact, a terrorist organization, so I generally feel obligated to mention it.
Unless it is site policy not to use the word terrorist, in which case I will... probably fail to remember the next time it comes up, and then get in trouble. Ah well.
A terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to coerce a reaction out of people.
The set of people who do that is not the same as the set to which 'terrorist' applies. In fact, it isn't even a superset.
Unless it is site policy not to use the word terrorist
There is no rule. Just a general tendency to think less of the contributions of sloppy thinking. In fact political advocacy of this kind is somewhat discouraged in general due to the near inevitable nature of such conversations.
I notice that a large fraction of Effective Altruism people are vegetarian. This makes sense: in general Effective Altruists take moral issues seriously, even when that means changing your lifestyle. I'm not sure it's a good balance, though.
One way to think about this is to convert it into money. How much would I need to be paid to give up eating meat? All animal products? How much money would I need to spend on myself to be about as happy as I would be with less money but continuing to eat animals? I'd probably be willing to go vegetarian for about $500/year, vegan for maybe $2000/year.
It turns out you can probably pay to convince other people to be vegetarian much more cheaply than that. I estimate the cost of a vegetarian-year at $4.29 to $536 while Brian Tomasik estimates $11 with better methodology (which I looked at). This is by placing ads on facebook for a site where people can watch an animial cruelty video and ideally become vegetarian or vegan.
If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?
(While you're giving money, you should probably give it to the organization that you think will do the most good with it, which I think is probably one of GiveWell's top charities. The nice thing about money as opposed to actions is that it's easy to redirect.)
I also posted this on my blog.