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Iran daily holds contest for Holocaust cartoons
Tue Feb 7, 2006 1:23 PM ET
TEHRAN (Reuters) -
Iran's best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the
best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication in
many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. The Brussels-based Conference of European Rabbis (CER) denounced the idea and urged the Muslim world to do likewise. The Anti-Defamation League, which fights anti-Semitism, described the competition as "deliberately inflammatory."
The Iranian daily Hamshahri said the contest was designed to test the
boundaries of free speech -- the reason given by many European
newspapers for publishing the cartoons of the Prophet. "Does
Western free speech allow working on issues like America and Israel's
crimes or an incident like the Holocaust or is this freedom of speech
only good for insulting the holy values of divine religions?" the paper
asked. Davoud Kazemi, who is in charge of the contest, told
Reuters that each of the 12 winners would have their cartoons published
and receive two gold coins (worth about $140 each) as a prize.
In Paris, CER President Joseph Sitruk, who is also Chief Rabbi of
France, said: "The Iranian regime has plummeted to new depths if it
regards the deaths of six million Jews as a matter for humor or to
score cheap political points. "Sadly, we are not surprised by
this action," he said, recalling Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's calls last year for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and
his dismissal of the Holocaust as a myth. In a statement issued
by the CER, which represents chief rabbis from over 40 European
countries, Sitruk said the Iranian government menaced Jews and the
whole international community. Sitruk noted that European religious leaders had condemned the publication of images likely to offend Muslim feelings.
"This is a test for the Muslim world to react immediately to condemn
their own co-religionists in Iran for such obscene behavior as we
condemned those who sought to insult them," he said. Iranian
protesters hurled petrol bombs and stones at the Danish Embassy in
Tehran for a second successive day on Tuesday and Tehran announced it
had cut all trade ties with Denmark. A Danish newspaper
published the cartoons in September, and newspapers in Norway and a
dozen other countries reprinted them last month, citing the need to
defend freedom of speech. Arieh O'Sullivan, spokesman for the
Anti-Defamation League's Israel office, said it was committed to free
speech and a free press but that did not mean a license to foster
hatred. "What bothers us this incident has been used by the Arab world basically as an excuse to stick it to the Jews," he said.
"Iran is doing a dare to see how free the press is in Europe. This is
deliberately inflammatory," O'Sullivan said, accusing newspapers in the
Arab and Muslim world of frequently running cartoons of Jews that
recalled Nazi propaganda. In Belgium, a radical Muslim group
based in Antwerp began publishing cartoons on its Web site which it
also said were intended to challenge European taboos and highlight
inconsistency in the European approach to freedom of speech.
They included a cartoon of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in bed with Anne
Frank, a Jewish girl whose wartime diary written in hiding in Amsterdam
is a worldwide best-seller, and another that questioned whether 6
million Jews died in the Holocaust. "If it is the time to break
taboos and cross all the red lines, we certainly do not want to stay
behind," the Arab European League said on its Web site (www.arabeuropean.org).
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt accused the group of fuelling
riots in Antwerp in November, 2002. The group's leader, Dyab Abou
Jahjah, was briefly arrested at the time. He ran unsuccessfully for
parliament in 2003. (Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan in Paris, Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem and Paul Taylor in Brussels)
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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