Please change the title of this thread
Does anyone even look at the whole picture anymore before they jump on the oh-my-god look at that horrific correlation bandwagon?
Did anyone even read the entire news article or did everyone just freak when the word Holocaust or Nazi was uttered? Try and shelve your righteous indignation for a sec and take stock of what PETA actually did.
PETA simply carried forth a message from a stauch JEWISH vegetarian, survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, esteemed author, secular and religious historian AND Nobel Peace Laureate I might add.
His name is Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Here are some quotes in case your search engine fails you:
"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." - Enemies, A Love Story
In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth "What do they know - all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka." - "The Letter Writer" from The Seance and Other Stories
NOTE: Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland. Singer believed the Nazis got their ideas for the camps from animal slaughterhouses.
So it was NOT PETA that drew these comparisons, it was a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
While these were stories that he wrote, many felt that he was indoctrinating them with his own views on the consumption of animals for food. Indeed, the man stuck by these views in his own life and even said that he would tell God to his face that he disagreed if God told him that vegetarianism was wrong.
Feel free to counter with any factual information you can find or play the 'yeah but he was a bad whatever' game, but the inescapable fact is that it is he who originated this theory, not PETA.
Now, if you'd like to debate the appropriateness of PETAs using his analogies for their campaign for something he very vocally, publicly and firmly believed in, that's up to you, he's dead so he won't be able to clarify what he meant. But I think it's pretty plain.
Their biggest blunder was probably in trying to get a collective Jewish community to sign onto the campaign, as there would be meat-eaters in the group who would probably not want to align themselves with it. Come to think of it, for that matter, there are probably Jewish PETA members for all we know?!
*NOTE: I am not a vegetarian nor do I necessarily subscribe to his or PETAs views. NO TO PELTING FOR FUR COATS THO!
out of it. if that makes me an immature and pathetic neanderthal, then so be it.
