PETA’S ‘Holocaust On Your Plate’ Exhibit Banned In Manchester

Animal Rights Group Compares Council Censorship to Nazi Book-Burning

For Immediate Release:
13 May 2004

Contact:
Sean Gifford 020 7357 9229, ext 226
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229, ext 224

Manchester – Manchester City Council has revoked PETA’s permit to exhibit its controversial graphic display, which juxtaposes today’s factory-farm horrors with Nazi death camps. In protest of the ban, the creator of the campaign, Matt Prescott, a US national whose family members were murdered by the Nazis, will stand on the spot where the exhibit would have been displayed with black tape over his mouth to signify Manchester authorities’ censorship, and holding a poster directing people to the Web site MassKilling.co.uk:

Date:  Thursday, 13 May
Time:  12 noon-1 pm
Place: Piccadilly Gardens, near the fountain

The display – which was also banned in London, where activists struggled with police to show the exhibit, and in Birmingham, where an activist was arrested for displaying the images – graphically depicts the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer when he wrote, ‘In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis’.

PETA wants people to consider how the victimisation of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others who were characterised as ‘life unworthy of life’ during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals. Just as the Nazis tried to ‘dehumanise’ Jews by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions, tearing them away from their families and killing them in assembly-line fashion, factory farmers deny animals all that is enjoyable and natural to them and treat them as nothing more than meat-, egg- and milk-making ‘machines’.

‘People are in denial about the torture that is taking place in their own backyards, and that is the very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – the belief that we can do anything we want to those we decide are different or “inferior”’, says Prescott. ‘By revoking our permit, the Manchester City Council is imposing censorship of progressive and ‘controversial’ ideas, much as the Nazis did with their book-burnings. We are simply asking people to bring a deep, all-encompassing compassion into their hearts and onto their tables by embracing a diet that respects other forms of life.’

The current leg of the exhibit’s tour will also include stops in Glasgow, Dublin and Brussels. The exhibit has visited more than 70 cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Warsaw, Copenhagen, New York and Stuttgart, Germany.

For more information about PETA’s ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ Campaign and to view the display, please visit MassKilling.co.uk.

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