- A campaign by the radical animal rights group Peta which
compares the suffering of intensively reared animals with the plight of
Jews in Nazi death camps is to be staged on London next week in defiance
of a local authority ban.
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- An exhibition, entitled Holocaust on Your Plate, placing
large photographs of concentration camps side by side with those of factory
farms and slaughterhouses, will open in London on Tuesday. It will later
tour the country.
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- By setting up the display in Trafalgar Square, Peta will
defy a decision by Westminster City Council and the Greater London Authority
to ban the staging of the exhibition in a public place because of its "graphic
nature". But local authorities in Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow
and Dublin, have not objected to the exhibition, which has attracted controversy
in Europe and the United States where it has been on tour since February.
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- Andrew Butler of Peta, which stands for People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals, said staff setting up the eight panels of
the display were prepared to be arrested. He said: "We are doing this
because we want as many people as possible to see the display and so we
are going to be doing it in one of the most populous areas of London. If
we don't get closed, we expect to be there for several hours.''
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- The exhibition, Peta says, is designed to illustrate
the point made by the Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis
Singer, a vegetarian, who wrote: "In relation to [animals] all people
are Nazis", and to act as a reminder of the dangers of ignoring victims
of oppression.
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- Peta say: "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." Like the victims of
the Holocaust, it adds, animals are "forced to endure a frightening
journey on tightly packed transport vehicles ... and are herded to their
deaths".
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- The exhibition, which has been on the road since last
year, is funded by an anonymous American Jewish philanthropist and has
divided the Jewish community. The Holocaust Memorial Museum has objected
to the photographs and some Jewish groups have denounced the show.
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- But members of Bashevis Singer's family have backed the
campaign, as have Jewish vegetarian groups and Holocaust survivors, some
of whose supporting letters are on the Peta website.
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- The exhibition's organiser, Matt Prescott, lost members
of his family in the Holocaust. In an open letter to the Jewish community,
he acknowledges that some will consider it inappropriate to compare the
suffering of animals with that of humans, but says that he believes the
exhibition does not trivialise the suffering of the Jewish people in the
Holocaust. He said that it was important to remember that factory farms
offend one of the anchors of Jewish tradition, that of compassion towards
animals.
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- Peta, founded in America by the British-born activist
Ingrid Newkirk in the 1980s, has made a speciality of aggressive campaigning
and publicity stunts. Its members have disrupted fashion shows to protest
at models wearing fur and it persuaded models to appear without clothes
for a poster campaign under the caption saying that they would "rather
go naked than wear fur".
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- A more recent spoof on the American dairy industry's
"Got Milk" advertisements has a picture of Rudy Giuliani, the
former New York mayor, sporting a milk moustache, with the caption "Got
Prostrate Cancer?
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- Another stunt was to deposit a dead raccoon on the lunch
plate of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, in protest at her magazine
carrying advertisements for fur.
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- Ms Newkirk has decreed in her will that after her death,
a portion of her body should be barbecued as a protest against what she
terms "flesh foods" and her feet turned into an ornament, like
the umbrella stand, to remind the world of the "depravity" of
using animals in a such a fashion.
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- She also wants part of her skin be turned into a leather
product such as a purse to prove the point that human and animal skin are
the same thing.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=518937
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