People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) new
exhibition, is to be displayed in cities across the United
States. It consists of eight 60-square-foot panels depicting
photographs of farm and slaughterhouse scenes side-by-side
with photographs of Nazi death camp victims. Naked, emaciated
men are juxtaposed with a gaggle of chickens; pigs behind
bars with starving children behind barbed wire; mounds of
human corpses with mounds of cow carcasses. The unspoken but
unmistakable message is the group's long-time slogan "Meat is
Murder."
The new national campaign launched last week by People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) compares the
Holocaust and the meat industry, and is upsetting many
Jews.
"Civilized people's wells of indignation are understandably
depleted in these amoral times, but we must somehow summon a
special sense of outrage for People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals' new exhibition," said US Agudath Yisroel's
spokesman Rabbi Avi Shafran. This campaign seems to be an
expression of "the subtle societal dehumanization of men and
women in our day, a critique of the unconscious equating of
people with animals by contemporary social elements."
Dubbed "Holocaust on Your Plate," PETA's campaign and its
companion Web site, insists that the Nazi murder of Jews,
deviants and gypsies mirrors "the modern-day Holocaust" that
is the industrialized slaughter of animals for food.
Just as the Nazis forced Jews to live in cramped, filthy
conditions, tore children from parents and murdered people in
"assembly-line fashion," factory farms cram animals into
tiny, waste-filled spaces, treating cows, chicken and lambs
as meat-, egg- and milk-producing machines, PETA says.
Rabbi Shafran commented, "Unfortunately, one gets the sense
that PETA and its supporters are neither jokesters nor crazy,
and that the illness from which they suffer is moral.
"PETA's most elemental sin lies not in its abuse, ugly as it
is, of the Holocaust's victims, but rather in its apparent
equation of human beings with animals.
"Animals are part of Hakodosh Boruch Hu's creation
and, as Dovid Hamelech sings, "His mercy in on all of His
creatures." Our own mercy should be similarly placed. But
animals are still not humans. If we choose to forget that
fact, or act to obscure it, we sow the seeds of moral
disaster."
Most spokesmen only talked about the comparison with the
Holocaust. Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called the Holocaust
comparison "ridiculous."
"No responsible Jewish leader will have anything against a
campaign that seeks to limit the abuse and torture of
animals," Hier said. "But putting on a Web site the images of
the death camps, and comparing it to chickens cooped up in a
pen, denigrates the memory of the Holocaust."
The Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abraham
Foxman, called the campaign likening animal abuse to Nazism
"outrageous" and "abhorrent."
"Rather than deepen our revulsion against what the Nazis did
to the Jews, the project will undermine the struggle to
understand the Holocaust and to find ways to make sure such
catastrophes never happen again," he said.
The top lawyer for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum fired
off a cease and desist order to PETA last week, alleging the
group obtained the Holocaust images used in the campaign from
the museum under false pretenses.
A spokesman for the museum, Arthur Berger, said Prescott
requested the photos and signed an agreement to use museum
images while using a personal email account, failing to
disclose that he represented PETA or mentioning animal
rights.
Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism,
long has opposed the use of Holocaust imagery in animal-
rights causes, but hoped that PETA's dramatic tactics would
focus attention on animal rights. Despite his initial hopes
for the campaign, Schwartz changed his mind after sensing the
"rage" from some Jewish groups and even colleagues.
But PETA remains adamant that the "similarities" between the
Holocaust and factory farming are worth exploring, Prescott
said.
