Animal Rights Ad compares Jews to animals.

Here's a surefire way to get attention. Compare Jews to animals. (yes yes, I understand what they wanted to achieve with the ad, but I did get your attention didn't I?)

Okay, here's the lowdown. The Village Voice Media papers turned down running this ad that mixes Holocaust imagery with animal rights. It's got photos of messed-up Holocaust scenes, swastikas, and dead animals from slaughterhouses. They even threw in a quote from Nobel Prize Winner Isaac Bashevis Singer comparing animal slaughter to Nazi thuggery. The twisted brains behind this is the Consistency in Compassion Campaign (CCC), a project of the Northwest Animal Rights Network based in Seattle.

Jill Mogen, the Sales Director of Seattle Weekly, spilled the beans. She said some Village Voice Media papers, including the Village Voice and Seattle Weekly, said "no thanks" to the ad. Besides being pretty objectionable, CCC couldn't even confirm if they got the green light to use Singer's quote.

CCC made a big deal out of Village Voice pulling the plug on the ad. They released a statement saying the ad was sympathetic to the Holocaust, comparing its cruelty to how animals are treated on factory farms. But, get this, other papers also gave it the cold shoulder.

Over in Salt Lake City, CCC went all out to drum up controversy. John Saltas, the publisher of Salt Lake City Weekly and Mountain Times, found himself on local TV defending his papers' ad policy before the CCC ad was set to run. And what's the fallout? Well, a steakhouse decided to stop running ads in his Salt Lake City paper.

But wait, there's more. Outside Salt Lake City, the response to the ad has been kinda meh. The publisher of New Times Los Angeles didn't hear a peep of complaints, and the folks at Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper got only a handful of calls or letters. So, all in all, not as big a fuss as you might have expected.

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."