Peta compares farmers to nazis

THE RADICAL animal welfare campaign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is to bring a highly controversial campaign to London, reports The Independent.

The campaign, funded by an anonymous American Jewish philanthropist, has been on-tour in Europe and America since February where it has divided the Jewish community.

The exhibition compares the treatment of animals reared in intensive conditions to that of the Jews during the Holocaust in Germany between 1938 and 1945. 

The campaign, entitled Holocaust on your Plate, includes large photographs of concentration camps side-by-side those of animals such as battery chickens.

The campaign is designed to illustrate the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, Issac Bashevis Singer, a vegetarian who wrote: “In relation to [animals] all people are Nazis.”

The tour commences in Trafalgar Square and will defy Westminster City Council and the Greater London Authority who banned the exhibition because of its graphic nature.

But the exhibition of eight large images depicting graphic scenes has received approval from the city councils of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin.

Making a statement on the launch, Peta said that modern intensive farming had many obvious similarities to the Holocaust.

“Just as millions of Europeans ignored the concentration camps, allowing them to continue to operate for seven years because they were not being victimised, millions of people today turn away from the horrors of factory farming.”

The exhibitions organiser Matt Prescott, in an open letter to the Jewish community, acknowledged that some will consider it inappropriate.

He added that he did not feel that the images trivialised the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.