[Blarg]

To judge the efficacy of outlandish statements comparing one's agenda to issues surrounding the holocaust, we need to get into far touchier subject matter than this. This is as close to nothing at all as possible.

Let's look at anti-abortion proponents instead. They call abortion a holocaust, compare abortion doctors to Josef Mengele, and spout numbers like 6 million dead in an effort to make comparisons to the Holocaust of WW2. Some of them openly support the murder of abortion doctors. A great many support the harassment of not only workers in the abortion clinics, but their children, and such behavior has frequently included the literal stalking of children from their schools to homes, berating them with anything from insults to threats against both their parents and themselves. (So much for Islam being the violent and intolerant religion, eh?) Some laymen and preachers themselves have indirectly comforted the most extreme members of the anti-abortion sects by refusing to condemn murder of abortion clinic personnel, and insisting such acts will continue.

If we want to seriously discuss moral issues and the way metaphors are used, it's no use to retreat to the back yard and politeness over a few soft cocktails. One must grab the bull by the horns. It is not PETA activists that are crazed or tolerant of craziness -- it's you and me, buddy. We like our own craziness quite a lot. So enormously and murderously that we turn a blind eye to horrific moral transgressions we ourselves support, at least, by turning a blind eye to it and dissembling about it.

A great many of us have zero ground to stand on when attacking PETA, or really anybody about anything. A murderous spirit is so common to the human heart that trying to assign it to one group or another as if to point it out as something special or extraordinary is at the very best naive and at the very worst reiterates its obvious profitability. Perhpas it is the human capacity for murderous judgment that should be held up for scrutiny, rather than how that judgment manifests itself.