Letters to the Editor

A different kind of victim

As both a Jew whose family members were murdered by Nazis and the coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Holocaust on your Plate” exhibit, I’m disappointed that Brian Bishop (“No comparison between Bush and Hitler,” Letters, Tuesday) did not understand our use of graphic photographs to show the similarities between oppression and murder during the Holocaust and the slaughter of animals raised for food.

The exhibit is based on the thoughts and lives of Holocaust survivors and others who lost entire families and responded by rejecting cruelty to all beings (please read their own words on MassKilling.com).

We are not suggesting that people and animals are identical. We are saying that while the victims are different species, the system of confinement, abuse, prejudice and slaughter are the same. Tragically, those who dismiss the mutilation of animals on factory farms today and who ignore their frightened faces peering out through the slats of the trucks taking them to their deaths, sound hauntingly similar to those who dismissed the suffering of Jews because they were “unworthy of life.” As Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, wrote, “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They’re only animals.”

MATT PRESCOTT

Campaign coordinator

People for the Ethical Treatment

of Animals

Norfolk

Developmental problems in San Mateo

On July 12, The Washington Times published an article by Thomas Sowell, an economist based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, titled, ” ‘Saving crusade’ with a track record.” Mr. Sowell accused the “Save Bay Meadows” group in San Mateo, Calif., and its spokesperson, of leading a phony effort to save the Bay Meadows racetrack. Based on evidence that the spokesperson for the group had never in 19 years of living in San Mateo attended a horse race at Bay Meadows, Mr. Sowell jumped to the conclusion that the only explanation for this group’s interest in Bay Meadows was to restrict any housing development that might allow moderate -income folks to settle in San Mateo, specifically blacks, thereby threatening San Mateo’s exclusive white enclave. The only problem with Mr. Sowell’s gleefully argued article is that it is false.

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