Holocaust analogy in animal rights
The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy.
[1] The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.
"[6] Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, made the comparison in several of his stories.
[9] J. M. Coetzee, a South African–Australian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, said of the Nazis' treatment of Jews: "... in the 20th century, a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.
"[10] In her 2005 book The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, animal rights advocate Karen Davis says that the horrors of the Holocaust and the treatment of animals by contemporary society can and should be "reasonably and enlighteningly compared" as a way to raise awareness to something that "most people do not want to hear about, or have trouble imagining, or would just as soon forget."
He also notes that conditions on CAFOs "resemble the mechanized production lines of concentration camps" where animals are "forced to produce maximal quantities of meat milk and eggs – an intense coercion that takes place through physical confinement but also now through chemical and genetic manipulation.
[13] In another article, she wrote that every act of cruelty suffered by thousands of living creatures is a crime against humanity.
[14] American animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky compared factory farms to concentration camps.
[16] In 2006, Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses" as part of the organization's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign.
Captions alleged that "like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter.
The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.
"[18] The exhibition was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist,[19] and created by Matt Prescott, who lost several relatives in the Holocaust.
The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.
While not entering formal proceedings to decide in the matter, the court expressed severe doubts as to whether the campaign constituted an offense against human rights in its opinion to dismiss the appeal, as had been found by the orderly courts, but acceded to the other grounds of the former rulings that the campaign constituted a trivialization of the Holocaust and hence a severe violation of living Jews' personality rights.
"[23] Holocaust survivor Abraham Silverman argued that the comparison is offensive, undermines the suffering of Jews during World War II, and inspires antisemitism online.
