PETA, Jews, Nuanced Thinking, and the Final Solution

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has apparently been running an ad campaign equating slaughter houses with Nazi extermination camps. According to Wesley J. Smith in National Review Online , that campaign "explicitly compared eating meat to participating in the gassing of millions of Jews." Smith quotes from the PETA campaign:

The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.

Smith quotes from the forward to Charles Patterson's book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, which he says inspired PETA's program to simplify our thinking:

In Eternal Treblinka, not only are we shown the common roots of Nazi genocide and modern society's enslavement and slaughter of non-human animals in unprecedented detail, but for the first time we are presented with extensive evidence of the profoundly troubling connection between animal exploitation in the United States and Hitler's Final Solution.

Now, please let me know if I am wrong, but isn't this coming from the same camp which accuses the Republicans of simplistic thinking? Is this the camp which thinks the American abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison (most famously: humiliations) are worse than the Baathist tortures and executions of prisoners at the same place?

These are the same people who wrote Yasser Arafat a letter asking him to stop using donkeys in suicide bombings of Israeli civilians:

I am writing from an organization dedicated to fighting animal abuse around the world. We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing in Jerusalem on January 26 in which a donkey, laden with explosives, was intentionally blown up...

If you have the opportunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?...


Very truly yours,

Ingrid Newkirk
President, PETA

Now, I pulled that excerpt off of PETA's own website, so it is pretty likely reliable: PETA's callers were shocked to find that mass-murders of civilians had stooped to killing a donkey. It was the donkey which mattered.

Oddly, if Ingrid Newkirk and her fellows really think there is moral equivalence between murdering people and killing a donkey, why didn't she seem to have any problem at all with killing the people? Doesn't moral equivalence necessarily go both ways?

I think these are some seriously sick people.

UPDATE: The link has succumbed to link rot. However if one plugs "Ingrid Newkirk letter to Yasser Arafat" into a Google search, you will find plenty of links.