Tuesday, March 4, 2003
Over the years the anti-hunting, fishing, fur and basically anti-animal-use group PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- has done some pretty outrageous and idiotic things.
They or their minions have promoted drinking beer over milk, splashed blood-red paint on people wearing fur, ascribed human emotion and intellect to animals of all species and even extolled having sex with animals.
The group's latest escapade blows by all their previous egregious antics by quantum levels.
In a campaign that was unveiled on the West Coast this month as part of a national tour, PETA is now equating the use of animals with the slaughter of Jews by the Nazis. Repugnant is too nice a word to use for this campaign.
The PETA campaign contains a display showing photos of factory farm and slaughterhouse scenes contrasted with photos from Nazi death camps.
The justification
PETA goes to great lengths to justify this lunacy.
"The very same mind-set that made the Holocaust possible -- that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different' or 'inferior' -- is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day," PETA Youth Outreach Coordinator Matt Prescott said. PETA's press release said that members of Prescott's family were murdered by the Nazis.
I, also, have members of my family who were murdered by the Nazis. My mother's brother -- my uncle Kurt Steinberg -- was ratted-out by zealous Nazi sympathizers as he tried to hide in Vienna, Austria, in the days before World War II. He was captured, sent to a Nazi death camp and murdered.
By using their deliberate and grotesque comparison, PETA has effectively cheapened the murder of 6 million plus Jews, gypsies and others the Nazis exterminated.
Another excerpt from the PETA campaign states: According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic and indifferent in the face of others' oppression."
Furthermore, the release says, PETA wants to stimulate contemplation of how the victimization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others characterized as "life unworthy of life" during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals.
Just as the Nazis tried to "dehumanize" Jews by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions, tearing children away from their mothers, and killing them in assembly-line fashion, animals on today's factory farms are stripped of all that is enjoyable and natural to them and treated as nothing more than meat-, egg- and milk-producing "machines."
Amazing contrast
Simply amazing, isn't it? The death of millions of humans in Nazi death camps and the death of chickens means the same.
Allow me a quote here, to give the PETA crew a little lesson in something they seem not to get, that animals and humans are not the same thing.
From the Bible, the American Standard Version, Genesis 1:20-28, comes this little gem:
"And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so.
"And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind: and God saw that it was good.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
"And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
"And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
May God have mercy on PETA's souls.
braun@vindy.com