The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a radical organization that advocates the creation of the moral and legal equality between humans and animals.

Demonstrating the twisted thinking of this fanatical group, Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s head, recently complained bitterly to Yasser Arafat about a terrorist bombing in Israel. Her beef? She was upset that the terrorists’ weapon of choice was an explosive laden donkey that the terrorists blew up. Taking pen in hand, Newkirk bitterly complained about the death of the animal. When later asked why she did not complain about the killing of innocent people, she sniffed that she kept out of human wars with each other.

Now, just when you thought that PETA’s priorities and morality could not become any more twisted, the group has launched its “Holocaust on Your Plate,” pro-vegetarian campaign. Holocaust on Your Plate is an exhibit touring the nation’s colleges and universities that accuses meat eaters of being morally equivalent to the death camp SS officers who conducted the Final Solution against the Jews.

I am not kidding. “To animals, all people are Nazis,” PETA asserts. And get this astonishing exercise in moral equivalence: “The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.”

Using mere words to describe this campaign does not do justice to the vile nature of this propaganda. You must see it to believe it. PETA juxtaposes a horrific photograph of stacked dead Jews in a concentration camp, with another photograph of a pile of dead pigs. Had the KKK made such an explicit comparison of the moral worth of Jews and pigs, the uproar over the anti-Semitism would never quiet down. Yet, PETA does it, and other than a rebuke by the Anti Defamation League, the silence has been deafening.

But what is the difference? Just because PETA comes from the extreme Left rather than the extreme Right, does that make speech explicitly equating Jews with pigs any less hateful? And where are other animal rights and welfare organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States in the face of this outrage? So far, they are silent. Could they actually agree with PETA that eating meat is as evil as mass genocide?

If animal rights/liberationists appear to actually believe that animal husbandry is the moral equivalent of Hitler’s Holocaust, is it any wonder that some animal rightists resort to violence to obtain human/animal moral and legal equality? Indeed, the violence against animal testing facilities, food processing plants, fur farms, and other businesses that use animals has gotten so extreme that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long tracked domestic terrorist threats, has added some extreme animal rights groups to its list of hate groups.

As just one example, the SPLC report notes that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) has published a how-to-commit-arson guide “Arson Around with Auntie Elf: Your Guide to Putting the Heat On Animal Abusers Everywhere,” available for would be terrorists on line; no questions asked.

It is a very short distance between accusing meat eaters of engaging in Holocaust and justifying violence against scientists, farmers, and others who use animals for human benefit. PETA, perhaps best known for recruiting super models to pose naked in anti-fur advertising campaigns, isn’t funny anymore. We ignore intellectual radicalism and anti-human emotionalism at our very real peril.