PETA THREAT FOR AIDS SURVIVORS.

Byline: Peter Cashman

SIR Paul McCartney arrives in Hollywood this week as host and performer at what is billed as the world's first ``millennium gala,'' a fund-raiser for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Pardon me if I don't celebrate.

As an activist and longtime survivor of HIV-AIDS, I continue to be astounded at Hollywood's support for PETA and its extremist agenda of immediate and total elimination of animal-based biomedical research.

PETA and other animal rights groups are engaged in a multimillion-dollar campaign running the gamut from slick direct-mail advertising to harassment, destruction and terrorism.

Scientists, doctors and patients, their families and co-workers have been targeted with hate mail and death threats. Other targets include the March of Dimes, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

This year, break-ins at laboratories at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the University of California, San Francisco, have resulted in the theft of animals and destruction of research on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, brain tumors and other cancers.

We taxpayers pick up the tab for such destruction, increased security costs and, not least, further delays in treatments and cures for ourselves and our loved ones.

PETA's leaders have refused to condemn these illegal and destructive acts. PETA outraged the AIDS community with its endorsement and support of Rodney Coronado, an Animal Liberation Front terrorist convicted of arson and destroying AIDS research at the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1989.

Today, people with AIDS continue to die of chronic diarrhea brought on by cryptospiridium. In 1993, an outbreak of ``crypto'' in Milwaukee killed more than 100 people, most of them people with AIDS.

PETA and other animal rights groups, fueled with the junk science and the urban myths of the Internet generation, would have us believe that animals can be replaced by computer modeling and cell cultures.

Animals and humans are complex living beings, which no computer or petri dish culture can fully mimic. So we use animals - 90 percent of them rodents. PETA would have us use dying people with AIDS and prisoners for such experiments.

A climate of fear brought on by PETA and its associates prevents many from speaking out against these extremists and their supporters in Hollywood. No one wants to see their families and co-workers threatened or blacklisted by individuals and groups infused with the self-righteous messianic zeal that now permeates the animal rights movement and has reached unprecedented heights this year.

So Saturday night, when limousines and sport-utility vehicles will descend on Paramount Studios, the major AIDS organizations and AIDS researchers, people with HIV or AIDS, along with many other patient and health advocacy groups across the nation, want to tell the Hollywood celebrities that PETA has not changed in recent years.

Entertainment industry types can't support PETA and then don the solidarity ribbons for AIDS, breast cancer and other causes. The animal rights movement is a direct threat to our survival.

The sad truth is that the only thing Hollywood celebrities have had to give up is their fur coats, but they are asking us to give up our lives.