CONTROVERSIAL PETA HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT COMING TO AUSTRALIA

(PRWEB) December 2, 2003

The PETA "Holocaust on Your Plate" exhibit is coming to Australia where it will be on display in Melbourne on Tuesday, Dec. 9 and in Sydney on Friday, Dec. 12.

The controversial display consists of eight 60-square-foot panels, which show photos of animal factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side by side with photos from Nazi concentration camps. The panels graphically depict the point made by the Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka." (Treblinka was a Nazi death camp north of Warsaw.)

The exhibit is based on the highly acclaimed book "ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust" (New York: Lantern Books, 2002) by historian and Holocaust educator Charles Patterson, Ph.D.

Patterson's book has been attracting international attention. It has been translated and published in Italy (UN'ETERNA TREBLINKA, Editori Riuniti, Rome), Poland (WIECZNA TREBLINKA, “Vega!POL” Publishing House, Opole), and the Czech Republic (VECNA TREBLINKA, Publishing House Prah, Prague), where it will soon be reviewed on Prague Radio.

It has also been translated into German and is scheduled for publication by Zweitausendeins Versand Dienst GmbH, Frankfurt am Main in June 2004. Publishers in Israel, Spain, and The Netherlands are also reviewing the book for publication.

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING ABOUT THE BOOK--

"I urge you to read Eternal Treblinka and think deeply about its important message."

         --Dr. Jane Goodall

"Compelling, controversial, iconoclastic...strongly recommended...a unique contribution."

         --Midwest Book Review

"Eternal Treblinka should be on every list of essential reading for an informed citizenry...for the compelling comprehensiveness of the life-and-death story it tells."

         --National Jewish Post & Opinion

"The whole effect is a very powerful document...No one who reads this book will fail to be moved."

         --Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals

"There are good books...entertaining, useful, informative; great books...whose message reveals a fundamental truth previously unknown or overlooked; and important books...that can save lives and ameliorate suffering: Eternal Treblinka is all three."

         --Satya Magazine, New York City

"The moral challenge posed by Eternal Treblinka turns it into a must for anyone who seeks to delve into the universal lesson of the Holocaust."

         --Maariv (Israeli newspaper)

"Important and timely...written with great sensitivity and compassion...I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read."

         --Martyrdom and Resistance (Holocaust publication)

"Thorough and thought-provoking book"

         --Ha'aretz (Israeli newspaper)

"Every so often a book is written that has the potential to make an incredible difference. Eternal Treblinka is one such book."

         --N. Glenn Perrett

"It is seldom that such a comprehensive work of scholarship springs from a heart of compassion in the service of a noble and necessary idea. All the ingredients of your thesis--that the oppression of animals serves as the model for all other forms of oppression--have been available to thinking people for generations, but it remained for you to pull them together."

         --Helen Weaver, author of The Daisy Sutra

"Powerful, moving, gut-wrenching, brilliant--destined to be a classic"

         --Aviva Cantor, journalist and author

"You must read this carefully documented book"

         --La Stampa (Italian national newspaper)

"...promises to be one of the most influential books of the 21st century."

         --Dr. Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns

"It grips like a thriller."

         --The Freethinker (UK)

"This book is going to change the world."

         --Albert Kaplan, Albert Kaplan & Co., Johns Island, SC

For more information about the book, visit http://www.powerfulbook.com.

PETA hopes that its exhibit will stimulate people to think how the victimization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others, characterized as “life unworthy of life” during the Holocaust, parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals.

Just as the Nazis tried to “dehumanize” Jews by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions, tearing children away from their mothers and killing people in assembly-line fashion, animals on today’s factory farms are stripped of all that is enjoyable and natural to them and are treated as nothing more than meat-, egg-, and milk-producing "machines." Hens are crammed on top of each other in small wire cages. Pigs are kept in narrow, barren, concrete-floored stalls and are castrated and have their tails cut off without painkillers. Calves raised for veal are taken away from their mothers within hours of birth, only to be chained inside tiny, dark stalls where they cannot turn around for four months before they are taken to the slaughterhouse.

"The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible--that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different' or 'inferior'--is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day," says PETA Campaign Coordinator Matt Prescott, who organized the exhibit and is bringing it to Australia and whose family members were murdered by the Nazis. "We are asking people to allow compassion into their hearts and onto their tables by embracing a nonviolent, plant-based diet that respects other forms of life."

Prescott will be taking the exhibit to Europe in the spring.

To view the photo panels of PETA’s "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign and find out more about it, visit http://www.MassKilling.com.

CONTACT:

Dr. Charles Patterson

545 West End Avenue--12d

New York, NY 10024-2725

212-874-5664