In a PETA video published this week, actress Natalie Portman uses a quote from a famous activist to compare animal cruelty to the Holocaust.
Portman, who is of Jewish descent and was born in Jerusalem, pays homage to the late animal rights advocate Isaac Bashevis Singer in the video. The vegan celebrity praises Singer for articulating “the plight of animals so boldly that the modern world couldn’t ignore him.”
“Isaac Singer grew up in the same part of Poland as my family. And like them, he fled the horrors of the Holocaust,” Portman explains. “But the cruelties he witnessed made Singer one of the most powerful writers of the 20th century.”
The “Annihilation” star goes on to reference a quote from Singer’s 1978 novel “Shosha,” saying, “We do to God’s creatures what the Nazis did to us,” essentially equating the act of eating meat today to the evils carried out by Adolf Hitler’s henchmen in the 1930s and ’40s.
To make matters worse, this is not the first time PETA has aired such an inflammatory comparison. In fact, in 2009, the German high court barred the animal rights group from promoting a campaign that equated animals in slaughter houses to Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps.
The censored ad was part of what PETA described as its “Holocaust on Your Plate (HOYP) traveling display,” which the organization launched in 2004.
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“This ruling left the staffers of our German affiliate scratching their heads, because the display only renders the humans’ suffering ‘banal and trivial’ if the animals’ suffering is considered banal and trivial, which is the whole point of the display,” PETA’s statement at the time read.