Campaign angers Holocaust survivors

Campaign angers Holocaust survivors

Peta claims animals face similar trauma to Holocaust victims

A campaign by an animal rights group, likening the slaughter of livestock to the suffering of Holocaust victims has outraged survivors and Jewish groups.

The campaign called The Holocaust on Your Plate juxtaposes images of Jews in concentration camps with pictures from meat farms.

Created by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, (Peta), the campaign began a national tour of the US on Friday.

The uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis

Abraham H Foxman, Holocaust survivor

But it has been denounced as "trivialising" the mass murder of the Jewish under the Nazi regime in the Second World War.

The display is a set of eight 60ft (20-metre) panels showing photographs, which are also displayed on the group's website.

'Offensive'

The images show Holocaust victims, emaciated men, crowds of people being forced onto trains, children behind barbed wire, heaps of human bodies, which are set next to similar images of cattle, pigs and chickens.

They all appear under the message: "To animals, all people are Nazis."

The Anti-Defamation League condemned the project and Peta's appeal for support from the Jewish community.

We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farm

Matt Prescott
Campaign creator

It called the campaign "outrageous and offensive".

Abraham H Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the civil rights group's national director, said linking the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights was "abhorrent".

Criticism 'expected'

He said while animal cruelty should be opposed it must not be linked to the Holocaust.

"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," he said.

But Peta member Matt Prescott, the creator of the campaign, said he himself is Jewish and his family lost several members in Nazi concentration camps.

He said the campaign was funded by a Jewish philanthropist who wishes to remain anonymous.

He said criticism of the campaign was not unexpected.

"The fact is all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness," he said.

"We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms."