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| This cartoon won the museum's twisted contest in 2006. |
A twisted "art" contest sponsored by an Iranian
museum -- with the apparent blessing of the Islamic Republic's regime -- has
cartoonists competing for prizes and prestige by making fun of the Holocaust.
The Second International Holocaust
Cartoons Contest -- the first was held in 2006 -- will pay the winning artist
$12,000, and the image will go on public display at the Palestine Museum of
Contemporary Art in Tehran. Organizers claim the contest's revival was brought
on as a protest of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that was
attacked by Islamist killers last month because it published cartoons of
Muhammad.
“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 Tehran
Times, 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 represented its joint organizers, Iran’s House of Cartoon,
and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex.
“This is obviously an Iranian way of spitting in the face of
the western world,” Efraim Zuroff, internationally renowned Nazi hunter and
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation
- Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Foundation
The previous contest, in 2006, 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 -- a holy Muslim site -- in the Old City of Jerusalem.
“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,” Marisa Danson, spokesperson for the
world famous Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, told
FoxNews.com.
“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.”
Coming so soon after last week's 70th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, Iran’s decision to promote the competition appears to
once again underline the Islamic Republic’s attitude toward international
Jewry. The Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews, as well as millions more from
the Roma, homosexual, communist, and Catholic communities, among others, were
exterminated at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe, was
the defining moment of the 20th century for Jewish people.
“This is obviously an Iranian way of spitting in the face of
the Western world,” Efraim Zuroff, internationally renowned Nazi hunter and
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, told FoxNews.com. “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 Iranian leadership, in particular all-powerful Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has 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.
In 2013, then new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani --
currently involved in the ongoing controversial nuclear negotiations with the
U.S. and its allies -- made international headlines when he appeared to suggest
in a CNN interview that he condemned the Holocaust. But Iran’s official FARS
news agency was quick to step in and accuse the American broadcaster of
inaccurately translating its president’s words. FARS suggested that Rouhani
said, “The aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects, is a
duty of the historians and researchers. I am not a history scholar.”
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