The Holocaust, Animal Rights and Abortion: PETA's Latest Display Angers Many

NORFOLK, Va. — Jewish children are compared to pigs. An emaciated concentration camp victim is likened to a scrawny cow. A heap of Holocaust victims' corpses is compared to a pile of pig carcasses.

Nazi propaganda? No. It's animal-rights propaganda. The latest shock campaign from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA for short) compares animals in slaughterhouses to Jews mass murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

And it indicates that in PETA's view, human beings are no more important than farm animals in the order of creation. Ironically, though, while the PETA campaign rejects the Christian understanding of the special dignity of human life, it closely resembles a controversial pro-life campaign that compares the Holocaust to legalized abortion.

PETA's “Holocaust on Your Plate” project — eight giant billboards juxtaposing photos of barn animals and Jewish genocide victims — was launched at the Uni -versity of California at Berkeley in late February and toured other western U.S. campuses. In the first week of April it moved east, appearing on the steps of the state capitols in Harrisburg, Pa., and Trenton, N.J.

“Twelve million people perished in the Holocaust,” says PETA's campaign Web site at mass -killing.com. “That same number of animals is killed every four hours for food in the U.S. alone.”

A slideshow at the site features a black-and-white photo of Jewish men crammed on concentration-camp bunks next to a picture of chickens in cages with the caption: “To animals, all people are Nazis.”

‘Outrageous’

Holocaust survivor Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has described PETA's project as “outrageous á offensive, and taking chutzpah to new heights.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., from which PETA bought the historical pictures, called PETA's use of the material “exploitation á which not only trivializes the Holocaust but is also a gross insult to its victims and survivors.”

The museum's legal counsel, Stuart Bender, issued a letter to PETA president Ingrid Newkirk demanding the group immediately “cease and desist this reprehensible misuse of Holocaust material.”

But Matt Prescott, PETA's youth outreach coordinator and the director of the project, said PETA does not intend to stop using the material.

“We're not out to offend anyone,” said Prescott, adding that his own distant Jewish relatives were murdered in the Holocaust and noting that PETA quotes deceased Yiddish writer and vegetarian Isaac Bashevis Singer for inspiration.

“We're not trivializing the Holocaust,” Prescott insisted. “We're widening the circle of compassion. We're saying neither injustice is okay.”

Are they not saying also that people who eat meat — Jews included — are equivalent to Nazis?

“We're comparing the mind-set that makes it possible for pain and suffering to occur á the mind-set that might makes right. á We're saying people who eat meat are like the non-Nazi Europeans in the Ho l o caust who knew generally what was going on but chose to turn their back,” Prescott said. “We are asking people to al low understanding into their hearts and compassion onto their tables by em -bracing a nonviolent, vegan diet that respects other forms of life.”

“Abusive treatment of animals should be opposed but cannot and must not be compared to the Holocaust,” Foxman countered in a public statement. “The uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis and others ready to commit genocide even today.”

The uniqueness of human life, however, is not a concept PETA members subscribe to. They refer to it as “speciesism” — humans' unjustified sense of superiority over animals. As PETA's president Newkirk has declared: “When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

PETA and Abortion

PETA also has an ongoing campaign telling abortion opponents if they're really pro-life they ought to stop eating meat.

Though PETA says animals' sentience — or ability to feel pain — is the basis for pro-lifers' duty to “go veg,” they are not moved by the pain experienced by aborted babies.

Recent studies suggest unborn babies feel unimaginable pain during second- and third-trimester abortions — more even than an adult would feel, because their nervous systems have developed but their pain inhibitory responses have not.

PETA's Prescott is unmoved by this argument. “PETA does not have a stand on abortion,” he said. “We are only concerned about non-human animals.”

Ironically, the Holocaust on Your Plate campaign is strikingly similar to the Genocide Awareness Project, a campaign of the pro-life Center for Bioethical Reform. The Genocide Awareness Project display, (online at abortionno.org), compares photographs of aborted babies to the Holocaust, lynching, massacres and other human-rights atrocities.

The Genocide Awareness Project has been to dozens of universities in North America — and banned from others such as Harvard — setting off fiery free- speech debates violent protests by abortion advocates and encouraging many pregnant students not to abort.

Gregg Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Bioethical Reform, said animal-rights activists have proved to be the most vociferous combatants to the Genocide Awareness Project display on campuses. They've taken a keen interest in the display, too, asking organizers where they got their material and photographing it.

“If imitation is the highest form of flattery,” Cunningham said. “Then this is adulation from PETA.”

Genocide Awareness Project has billboards targeting the animal-rights crowd. In one, a photograph of a tortured Rhesus lab monkey has the caption: “If this is wrong,” next to a photograph of an unborn baby's decapitated head in forceps, and the question: “How can this be right?”

That billboard compares humans to animals, too, but it raises the human being above the animal — the key difference between the Genocide Awareness Project and PETA displays, according to Father Thomas Lynch, a theology professor at St. Augustine's Seminary in Scarborough, Ontario.

“Humans, like it or not, will always have a unique place in creation,” he said. “[Genocide Awareness Project] is trying to have other members of our own species recognized as such.”

And, he added, by making that argument, animal-rights activists are actually edging morally toward the dehumanization that the Nazis inflicted on millions of innocent Jews.

“Trying to make human victims and animals moral equivalents,” Father Lynch said, “necessarily lowers the status of the Jewish victims to the level of animals.”

Celeste McGovern writes

from Portland, Oregon.