Posted on 01/04/2004 7:40:26 AM PST by Holly_P
When Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), infamously asserted in 1986, "There is no rational basis for asserting that a human being has special rights: A rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy," few believed that she meant it literally. Surely, people thought, Newkirk and PETA understand that humans have far greater moral worth than animals.
Actually, they don't understand that. In fact, it now appears that PETA's moral views have become so distorted and misanthropic that the organization sees no difference between eating a steak and cannibalizing a human being.
Here's the story: Armin Meiwes, the "German cannibal," shocked the world when he admitted to slaughtering, butchering and eating a man he met over the Internet. PETA's reaction to this sickening event? It sent Meiwes a vegetarian cookbook and a hamper full of veggie burgers in the hope of converting him to vegetarianism.
"What this man did to a German computer expert is done to other creatures everyday," a PETA spokesman explained. "The cruel scenario of slaughtering, cutting up, portioning, freezing and eating of body parts," the actions taken by Meiwes against his human victim, "is the grim reality for more than 450 million sentient individuals \[animals\] that are killed in this country \[Germany\] every year."
In other words, according to PETA, when you enjoy a lamb chop or eat a hamburger, you are acting no differently than the cannibal who butchered a man and ate his flesh.
Making odious moral equivalencies between animal husbandry and the worst crimes against humans has become a PETA trademark. Indeed, its notorious "Holocaust on Your Plate" pro-vegetarian campaign literally equates the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust with the eating of chickens. This reprehensible message isn't presented between the lines or done subtly in the hope that the reader will infer the comparison. Rather, it is the explicit and unequivocal theme of the entire national campaign.
First, there are the pictures. PETA juxtaposes photographs of emaciated concentration camp inmates in their tight-packed wooden bunks with chickens being kept in cages. In another truly despicable comparison (on several levels), a picture of piled bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims is juxtaposed with the bodies of dead pigs. (If the KKK did that it would be called hate speech.)
The text of the campaign is just as offensive. In a section entitled The Final Solution, PETA makes this astonishing comparison: "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."
Forget for the moment that Hitler was sometimes a vegetarian and that Nazi government passed some of the most far-reaching animal protection laws of the era, that PETA can't distinguish between the unspeakable evil of the Shoah and animal husbandry reveals a perverted sense of moral values that is almost beyond comprehension.
But this matter goes far beyond moral revulsion. If animal rights/liberationists actually believe that the activities undertaken by the meat industry are moral crimes akin to murder, cannibalism and the Holocaust, is it any wonder that some of the less stable members of the movement are increasingly resorting to violence to obtain moral and legal equality between humans and animals?
Recent violence against animal-testing facilities, food processing plants, fur farms and other businesses that use animals has gotten so extreme that the internationally respected Southern Poverty Law Center - which did so much to dismantle the White Supremacist movement - has added radical animal liberationist organizations to its list of domestic hate groups.
For example, the SPLC reports that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) posted a how-to-commit-arson guide on the Internet, advertised as Your Guide to Putting the Heat On Animal Abusers Everywhere. Moreover, according to the SPCL's report From Push to Shove, animal rights/liberation terrorists regularly employ "death threats, fire bombings and violent assaults" against those they accuse of abusing animals.
PETA's sending a vegetarian cookbook to the German cannibal as if his consuming of human flesh is no different morally than eating a pork chop, and its odious "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign, illustrate the twisted moral thinking that lies at the heart of the modern animal rights/liberation movement.
Rather than promoting the more humane use of animals - a noble calling - animal liberationists see no distinction between humans and animals. Because of these distorted moral views, some are now willing to use criminal means to coerce society into accepting their ideology.
Remember this, and "consider the source" the next time PETA presumes to tell you right from wrong.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He is researching a book about the animal liberation movement.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.