In the latest controversy, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is touring North America with gigantic posters that depict the supposed similarities between Nazi death camps and slaughter houses. Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors are appalled by the campaign, saying it belittles millions of murders in an attempt to convince meat eaters to stop eating meat. The Jewish community is calling the analogy “obscene.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) agrees and has denounced PETA’s project for trivializing the murder of six million Jewish people. Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and national director for the ADL, said the campaign “takes chutzpah to new heights.”
Web surfers agree. An informal poll on CNN.com shows nearly 88 percent of participants in a “QuickVote” on the news agency’s Web site felt the campaign is “an unfair and outrageous comparison.”
PETA is known for stirring up controversy – after all, it gets their name in the headlines. But it’s campaigns such as this Holocaust comparison that takes a good message, concern for the welfare of animals, and ultimately turns people off and even turns them defensive.
In response to the campaign, several Web sites are promoting an “International Eat an Animal for PETA Day,” which was scheduled for March 15. Apparently the brainchild of a New Jersey writer, she and others are using their own “outrageous publicity stunt” to “get even” with PETA by eating steak, chicken, fish, or “anything else PETA wouldn’t want you to eat” on that day. There’s also encouragement to write PETA expressing the effect of their project.
With such a negative response to their ad campaign, which appears not to be educating individuals about animal cruelty at all but only infuriating most everyone, it’s difficult to take PETA seriously.
April 2003 Render