The Earth Liberation Front isn’t al-Qaida, but it’s too close for comfort.

The main difference is body count. Monday’s Street of Dreams arsons in Woodinville – which have ELF’s modus operandi written all over them – didn’t kill anyone.

The ELF saboteurs, who prefer property destruction, have been lucky. They haven’t burned anyone to death in their many torchings of homes, apartments, a UW laboratory and other targets of their disapproval. But when you make political statements by setting massive fires, you put human lives – especially the lives of firefighters – at risk.

In other respects, the ELF eco-terror-ists bear a striking resemblance to violent Islamist extremists. Like al-Qaida, they seem to have nothing but contempt for democracy – all that tedious business of public education, persuasion, peaceful protest and compromise. They call what they do “direct action,” a term that could as easily describe flying planes into the World Trade Center.

Their fanaticism looks very much like aggressive, intolerant faith. Like al-Qaida, they operate in unorganized, underground cells – tiny, elusive groups without hierarchy. That makes them hard to catch.

But not impossible to catch. Several years ago, federal and state investigators mounted a full-court press – Operation Backfire – against ELF eco-terrorists who’d been on an arson spree across the West. The spree included the insanely mistargeted 2001 firebombing of the UW Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, which destroyed years of poplar research that could have helped reduce logging in wild forests.

The crackown produced a slew of arrests and convictions. Sentences ranged from three to 13 years, depending on whether the crime met the federal definition of domestic terrorism. One ELF ringleader, William Rodgers, committed suicide in a jail cell after discovering that a fellow conspirator had incriminated him.

A loose end of that investigation is being tied up now in Tacoma. A 32-year-old California woman, Briana Walters, has been on trial in the federal courthouse on charges of serving as the lookout during the UW bombing six years ago. On Friday the case went to the jury, which has been deliberating since then.

The convictions in those earlier cases demonstrate that it’s possible to break the most secretive eco-terrorist cells and bring their operatives to justice. There’s been speculation that the Woodinville arsons might be ELF’s way of saying that it’s still around. If so, the enforcement agencies that gave us Operation Backfire will have to show that they’re still around, too.