An international cartoon contest around the theme of Holocaust denial has been organized in Iran, the Tehran Times reported.
’The 2nd International Holocaust Cartoons Contest has been organized in protest against French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo’s recent publication of the cartoons insulting Prophet Muhammad,” reported the newspaper, a publication describing itself as “the voice of the Islamic Revolution.”
The contest was announced by the museum''s art director, Masu Shojaei-Tabatabaii, who represents its joint organizers, Iran’s House of Cartoon, and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex.
It is not the first time a Holocaust denial cartoon contest has been organised in Iran.
The first one was launched by the Iranian daily Hamshahri in 2006, in response to cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published that same year.
It was won by a Moroccan entry showing an Israeli crane building a wall on which there was the image of the infamous Auschwitz death camp. The wall is seen blocking off the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem.
This year, the winner will be paid $12,000, and the image will go on public display at the Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.
Holocaust denial is not uncommon in Iran. The new cartoon constest comes one week after International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,
“This is obviously an Iranian way of spitting in the face of the western world,” Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, said.
He added: “The Iranians are showing their disdain for Western values. Attitudes toward the Holocaust have become a litmus test, because the Holocaust is now acknowledged as the paradigm of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. It underscores the systematic effort by the Iranian regime to undermine, not only the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but even its historical legitimacy.”
“The new Holocaust cartoon contest promoted by the Iranian authorities in response to caricatures published in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo shows once again how the current regime in Iran is thoroughly saturated with anti-Semitism,” said Yad Vashem spokesperson Marisa Danson.
‘’Although the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed in Charlie Hebdo has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or the Holocaust, the Iranian regime insists on making a distorted and direct connection between the two. The manipulative, intentional distortion of the Holocaust desecrates the memory of both victims and survivors, and suggests strongly that the Iranian regime has yet to overcome the politics of hate.”
Iran''s leaders, in particular Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have regularly called for the State of Israel to be wiped from the face of the map and frequently expressed skepticism that the Holocaust even occurred, or was not at least grossly exaggerated.