Australian animal rights activist Tash Peterson is often strongly condemned by non-vegan Jewish communities and other anti-vegans for calling animal agriculture “the largest Holocaust in history with approximately 3 trillion non-human people brutally murdered every year for human food consumption (Sky News, 21 Jul 2023).” She’s accused of belittling the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi concentration camps. However, as pointed out by Pastor J.R. Hyland, “holocaust is [really] the term used to designated the burnt offerings of animals as described in the Book of Leviticus” (Hyland 2000: 91). And such animal holocausts are explicitly detested by God:-
I hate and despise your feasts… When you offer me HOLOCAUSTS, I reject your oblations, and refuse to look at your sacrifices of fattened cattle… But let justice flow like water, and integrity like an unfailing stream. (Amos 5:22 Jerusalem Bible)
Indeed, Nobel Prize in Literature winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a Jewish American whose family died in the Holocaust, writes in his short story, “The Letter Writer”:-
"In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."
In this regard, Pastor J.R. Hyland highlights “the moral/ethical relationship between a claim that animals can be tormented and slaughtered in the best interests of the human race and the Nazi claim that prisoners were brutalized and murdered because that served the best interests of an emerging super race” (Hyland 2000:92).
In a word, it is blasphemous anthropocentric speciesism to support animal holocausts by buying animal flesh and to revile the righteous comparison of regular animal massacres to the Jewish Holocaust.
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