The Chicken Shoah
Maybe PETA wasn’t so far off:
JPost reports,
Agriculture Minister Ze’ev Boim, who came under a barrage of criticism last week for his ministry’s response to the avian flu, hit back Sunday, telling the cabinet that Israel took action more quickly than other countries in the world faced with a bird flu outbreak.
[…] Boim, briefing the cabinet on how Israel combated the flu, said that in nine days some 1.2 million poultry from 53 chicken farms in 14 different communities were destroyed and buried.
Called diseased by your captors, cooped up in a ghetto, forced to labor, only to be brutally exterminated and buried in unmarked mass-graves, while the world sleeps. It’s a shanda I tell you. It truly is.
not funny. not witty. not this time.
sorry. :-S
to me it seems less funny than actually rather serious. why should a call for extending moral consideration to animals be seen as an attempt at humor?
If our priority is to protect and save human life, is there an alternative?
Hard to say, from the information contained in this article. But it’s worth pointing out that the emergence of the flu is most likely tied to the inhumane conditions in which birds are kept to begin with.
first they came for the chickens….
Chickentration camps in Israel. And the world is silent.
Anyone remember who said ‘for animals, every day is Auschwitz.’ The answer might surprise you….
This is a joke, right? At what point do you turn off the respect for human dignity in your head to make a point for the better treatment of animals. Yes, we are compelled to treat animals well. But making this comparison invites no sympathy for PETA’s cause. It is truly a shanda.
Just tell me it was a bad joke. Please. Or are Jews’ lives so cheap?
Oy! But they already made the movie–the chickens’ Schindler’s List– the name is Chicken Run. Some old timers call it the chickens’ Stalag 13. Either way, the parallels are quite remarkable. Even an idiot could see them.
The shanda is that the chickens are not taken care of properly in the first place. But don’t worry. It don’t matter. We’re about to experience the flood all over again.
Global warming?
This time the sky IS falling! If mad cow doesn’t get us first. Or maybe Hanta virus. Insecticides anyone?
And that quote is from Isaac Bashevis Singer, the nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. And hell of a writer.
When I read this, I think I understood I became a vegan because I am jewish.
compassion must rule.
I think (and hope) that Mobius was making fun of PETA. For anyone who is outraged and revolted, I guess Mobius is saying that you defintely should be.
Btw, anyone notice the COLORS on the chickens? i.e. red, white, and green, with a little black here and there? Yup, Jews are the Nazis of the 21st century in more ways than one.
Whoops, what was I thinking? I recant my statement, after taking another look at the story. Mobius’s joke kind of trivializes Holocaust victims. Err…
You don’t have to turn off respect for human dignity in order to argue for better treatment of animals. They are not mutually exclusive. Whether PETA’s ad is in good taste is a separate question.
“14 different ‘communities'” were destroyed! Oy, the horrors! Let’s build museums!
> Anyone remember who said ‘for animals, every day is Auschwitz.’
I. B. Singer http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/articles/art_animalholocaust.html
I’m sure that the author meant to be funny. But the message I got was that the author is indifferent to the 6 million+ Jews who died in the camps, thus his/her vegetarianism is a thinly veiled reaction-formation self presentation ploy (the author doesn’t care about animals either, he/she cares about being seen as morally sensitive while he/she is indeed insensitive) I would suggest removing the faces of the holocaust victims from the page then apologizing for the emotional harm inflicted by your callous, mean-spirited, and adolescent ‘joke’ .
seriously, not a funny joke mobius.
so let’s DO get serious here. We are talking all these germs, global warming, etc. but what I have yet to see posted here with any seriousness is the current genocide going on in Darfur and Sudan. So far the Shaaria regime in Karthoum has murdered 2,000,000 Christians since 1983, and now they are working on the African Muslims in Darfur using the Janjaweed. They give ’em guns and money to do the cleansing, and the only governments who might have influence are China and India who between the buy 73% of their oil.
So instead of talking about dead animals, let’s talk about wholesale murder of humans today.
Any one care to help stop the killing by prevailing on the Chinese and Indian powers that be?
Is anyone here who is in the States gonna show up on the mall in DC on 4/30? Has anyone been sending out Ruth and Tommy;’s postcards?
Just curious, ya know?
A simmilar and tandem rally will be occuring in Toronto, Ontario (Canada) in Queen’s Park. This thing will he huge and include large numbers of students. Hats off to the Union of Progressive Zionists – more specifically Hashomer Hatzair in Toronto for getting involved in this and lending support to this hugely important issue.
If you set a chicken free, it would die without human supervision. Chickens depend on people to eat them *so* that they might continue to exist. If everyone in the world suddenly became a vegitarian it would spell mass genocide for chickens and cows.
poor joke mobius
a) i’m not a vegetarian. but i give organic/freerange meat preference over factory farmed meat.
b) all four of my grandparents are shoah survivors and my mother — aka kyle’s mom — is a holocaust educator and one of the founders of the 2nd generation network of holocaust survivors. she wasn’t offended… she brought up chicken run!
c) who was joking? when over a million animals are killed in a week, people should notice. even if ä÷á’’ä made us master over all the animals in his dominion, it seems to me we’re asleep at the wheel.
fine, bring up the plight of chickens, mobius. But to place them alongside the images of victims of the Shoah sickens me. Was that really necessary to make your point? Maybe it was necessary for PETA’s adolescent agitprop, but you? Here?
No excuse. Disgusting.
um…that’s peta’s ad from their “holocaust on your plate” campaign. i didn’t make it.
i’d like to take a poll — how many of the people freaking out about this post actually are descendants of survivors?
you quoted it, and extended the same disgusting metaphor.
And what does it matter if one is the child of survivors? That gives one the right to compare them to chickens?
interesting, all the complainers didn’t say anything about the fact that there is a movie out there that made the parallel eons ago and they even show it to their KIDS… after all, I was sitting with my 6 year old granddaughter and had a jon stewart moment “WHA?!!!”
Only ONE, count ’em, one person, responded to my post about SUDAN, where genocide is going on, and most didn’t realize that this chicken post led to a post about humans…so instead of taking the thread where it should logically go–to discuss stopping the genocide in Darfur and Sudan (an Chad is next) some people prefer pounding old dirt and miss the point. why am I not surprised?
Listen There is a problem. It needs to be solved. 1.5 million chickens in an industry that feeds millions of people and is a major factor in the economy,,,and the thread leading to a conversation about “real” genocide–though no one here seems to care about that ‘cept two of us chickens…well, you might say, The Sky Is Falling.
So are we gonna bitch about an image that made the rounds (and Isaac Bashevis Singer is the one who said Everyday is Auschwitz for animals)? Or are we gonna figure out a way to convince the Chinese to convince the Arabs to stop committing genocide and killing the infidels?
establishing basic human services than they care about ‘killing infidels’. Don’t belittle them.
The Palestinians are ‘killing infidels’ because paramilitary groups claiming to be descended from Abraham stole their country.
Also, the goyim should be equally sensitive to the Holocaust because the Holocaust is the prime example of the misapplication of science in the modern era. The holocaust wasn’t just a Jewish tragedy it was a human tragedy. More than 10 million people of all ages races and religions died in Hitler’s camps. The holocaust shows us that we are capable of treating other people with terrible brutality if the proper scientific techniques are levied at the level of the group. Mobius is right when he says ‘to animals all people are Nazis’. The message put forth is true. We treat chickens just about the same way Hitler treated Jews.
I don’t care about chickens because I am conditioned not to value the life of chickens just as Nazis were conditioned to think of Jews as vermin. The most important message I got from Mobius is that the same conditioning used to make Nazis kill Jews was and is employed to increase profits for the meat industry. I remain critical of using the image of Holocaust victims to make a political point, but Mobius, the point was well made.
um, the first sentence of the previous post is : Last I checked, Arabs care more about reforming their corrupt governments and … establishing
I am talking about genocide in Sudan. NOT HAMAS–or the Palestinians. But who would bother reading the post… NO ONE, because stupidity ranks higher than logic, reason, morality and ethics. Right?
Who was talking about Palestinians? Not Me. I was talking about an Arab Regime in Khartoum that is murdering hundreds of thousands of ethnic African and Christian residents in their country and this oil sucking Arab regime in Africa has killed more than 3,000,000 Africans since 1983. Not one Arab government said boo last week to the regime as the killing went on. Saudi, Egypt, they blamed Israel and canceled a summit in Egypt because Egypt talks to Jews.
But since this Genocide in Sudan not directly related to killing Jews, and the lunatics are blaming it on the Jews, I guess it really doesn’t matter to most of you.
The Palestinians have no power except terror. They are the trash of the Arab world. Regimes like Khartoum would finish them off if they were locals.
We are talking Khartoum here, and genocide spreading to Chad and Nigeria. But…. who cares? the chickens are dying… and if they aren’t Jews, what the f…. I guess it just don’t matter.
Never Again? Jews and chickens only.
Sheesh.
I did read the post. I agree on Darfur: we should be screaming from the highest hilltop about the genocide. I agree about the treatment of animals: the conditions in the meat industry in general are deplorable.
But. But. Appropriating images of dying Jews to make the point do nothing to win anyone over.
Just because I bitch out the messenger for the adolescent use of imagery, don’t think that the full context is lost. But the manner of the message was so offensive as to lose the intent. And that’s my last comment on this, I promise.
We cannot resist putting in that environmentalism and love of animals (especially equating them to humans or even placing them above humankind) is the pet token progressive value of all fascists. Alexander Cockburn did this great four-part series on it; Goebbels apparently was brought to tears by vivsection, and the Nazis were very much against shellfish (which are cooked by essentially being boiled alive).