PETA's Inhumane Campaign

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has moved beyond street theater and into depravity. "Holocaust on Your Plate," a sick exhibit featured on

, a PETA web site, consists, in PETA's own words, of "stomach-churning images of the torturous experiences of both Jews and animals."

In an impressive use of Macromedia Flash, the web-animation program, Masskilling.com juxtaposes images of German Holocaust victims--the skeletal living and the brutally piled dead--with photographs of starving animals and pig corpses. Their point is that animals slaughtered for food are every bit the victims of our inhumanity as those who died in Hitler's death camps.

As might be expected, this distasteful exhibition, which PETA hopes to send on tour around the country, has stirred up a storm of protest. PETA attributes this reaction not to a feeling that the Holocaust's dead have been violated anew by PETA's ad, but rather to the public's failure to come to terms with its complicity in the victimization of animals. "If we are revolted by comparisons between the plight of animals and the plight of human victims of oppression," Masskilling.com intones, "it can only be because we are not yet prepared to accept our own role in the animal's fate."

In an attempt to render this obscenity respectable, the PETA exhibit prominently posts a quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer, "a Yiddish writer and vegetarian": "In relation to [animals] all people are Nazis," Singer wrote, "for [them] it is an eternal Treblinka."

A spinster with a cat, I've often been bemused at some of PETA's wacky antics--the billboards claiming "Jesus Was a Vegetarian," and the naked marches to protest wearing animal fur. Now, I'm appalled.

On reflection, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Shocked, yes; surprised, no. "Holocaust on Your Plate" is very much in line with the philosophy that fuels all of PETA's activities. Whatever they think of animals, PETA seems to find mankind distasteful. Theirs is an anti-humanity perspective. This is implicit in the "Holocaust" campaign and explicit in much of what PETA's founder, Ingrid Newkirk, has written over the years.

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