PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has finally and unequivocally come off the rails. Attempting to convince us to become vegetarians, the anti-human advocacy group has mounted a new public relations campaign asserting that the eating of meat is the equivalent of the torture and slaughter of Jews by the Nazis.

This odious message isn't insinuated subtly between the lines. It is the explicit theme of the entire campaign--which is now being presented at colleges and universities across the country.

First, there are the pictures, which can be seen at www.masskilling.com. PETA juxtaposes photographs of emaciated concentration camp inmates in their tight-packed wooden bunks with chickens being kept in cages. It gets worse. In a despicable comparison, a photo of piled bodies of Holocaust victims is juxtaposed with one showing bodies of dead pigs.

The text of the campaign isn't any better. In a section entitled "The Final Solution," PETA makes this astonishing comparison: "Like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."

The website also extols the writing of a "Holocaust scholar" named Charles Patterson, author of the book "Eternal Treblinka," which is pitched on the PETA site. Patterson is quoted as follows:

During the Twentieth Century two of the world's modern industrialized nations--the United States and Germany--slaughtered millions of human beings and billions of other beings. Each country made its own contribution to the century's carnage: America gave the modern world the slaughterhouse; Nazi Germany gave it the gas chamber.

Forget that Hitler was an on-again off-again vegetarian and that Nazi Germany passed some of the most far-reaching animal protection laws of that era. That PETA can't distinguish between unspeakable evil and animal husbandry reveals a deeply perverted sense of morality. That the organization--perhaps the most prominent animal rights group in the world--believes that a leather jacket is the moral equivalent of a lampshade made of human skin, should discredit it in the eyes of any decent person, regardless of one's feelings about animal cruelty.

PETA's grotesque PR campaign points to a real crisis for the modern animal protection movement. Just as people are becoming increasingly aware of their distinctly human duty to treat animals humanely, the activists behind the animal rights/liberation movement are growing progressively more fanatical and extreme.

The comparison of meat-eating to Hitlerism, if taken literally, is an incitement to violence. So perhaps it is no surprise that the movement is increasingly violent. Animal rights/liberation violence has gotten so bad that the Southern Poverty Law Center--certainly no right-wing group--issued a report last fall explicitly comparing two animal rights groups--the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)--to organizations such as the KKK and Aryan Nation. According to the report, animal rights terrorists regularly employ "death threats, fire bombings, and violent assaults" against those they accuse of abusing animals.

Some of the most vicious attacks have been mounted by SHAC against executives of Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British drug-testing facility that uses animals to test drugs for safety before they are tested on people. The threats and violence became so extreme that Huntingdon fled Britain for fear that some of their own were going to be killed, after assailants wielding baseball bats attacked one of their executives and another was temporarily blinded with a caustic substance sprayed into his eyes.