Village Voice Media Papers Decline to Run the Ad.
Several AAN papers have run or will be running an animal rights ad that employs Holocaust imagery to draw attention to its cause. The ad juxtaposes photos of mangled bodies of Holocaust victims, the Swastika and dead slaughterhouse animals, and features a quote from Nobel Prize Winner Isaac Bashevis Singer comparing animal slaughter to Nazi thuggery. The ad was produced by Consistency in Compassion Campaign (CCC), a “project” of the Seattle-based Northwest Animal Rights Network.
According to Jill Mogen, Seattle Weekly’s Sales Director and past president of AWN, several Village Voice Media papers have declined to run the ad, including the Village Voice and Seattle Weekly. In addition to the objectionable nature of the ad, Mogen says CCC was unable to confirm whether it had received permission to use Singer’s quote.
CCC issued a press release trumpeting the Village Voice’s decision to pull the ad, stating that “the half-page ad — which its creators say is sympathetic to the Holocaust while comparing its cruelty to how animals are treated on factory farms — was pulled days before it was to run by several newspapers, including the Village Voice.”
In Salt Lake City, CCC contacted the press to drum up controversy. As a result, Publisher John Saltas found himself defending his papers’ ad policy on local TV news before the CCC ad was even scheduled to run in his papers, Salt Lake City Weekly and Mountain Times. According to Saltas, the only post-publication backlash came from a steakhouse that said it would stop running ads in his Salt Lake City paper.
Elsewhere, response to the ad has been underwhelming. New Times Los Angeles Publisher Charles N. Gerencser says he received no complaints, while Chicago Reader Publisher Jane Levine says the Reader and Washington City Paper received few calls or letters.
According to its website promoting the ad (http://www.stopeatinganimals.com), the Northwest Animal Rights Network says, “It is our sincere intention not to offend, but to provoke debate on the issue of animal suffering on modern factory farms. Nazism was based on the myth that people of alleged Aryan descent were superior to other races purely because of their genetic makeup. The Nazis operated under the arrogant assumption that Aryans were somehow intrinsically ‘better’ than non-Aryans and therefore had the right to wield all power over them. This attitude parallels the way that humans think about animals. Unblinking supremacist thinking, whether it is humans over humans or humans over animals, is wrong. Might never makes right.”
