 |
 |
 |
|
|
The winning cartoon from Derkaoui Abdellah (Morrocco)
|
|
|
|
|
|
| By Associated Press November 3, 2006 |
|
| |
 |
| Cartoon depicting Jews entering a film of the Holocaust, suggesting that the destruction of European Jewcy was a media invention. It was published in Sharif News -- a university news service in Iran. |
| |
Iran's competition for cartoons mocking the Holocaust drew international reproach but made little impression at home, with not a single Iranian newspaper publishing the winning entries and people on the street saying it left them unmoved.
Iran awarded the first prize -- worth $12,000 -- late Wednesday to Moroccan cartoonist Abdollah Derkaoui, who drew a picture of an Israeli crane erecting a wall of concrete blocks around Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest site. The blocks bear sections of a well-known photograph of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz where as many as 1.5 million people -- mostly Jews -- died during World War II.
"The exhibition had no remarkable impact on public opinion," said Gohar Dashti, a professor at the Soureh Art University in Tehran. "It was neither a concern of students nor of the media."
Israel deplored the competition, which drew 204 entries from Iran and abroad.
"The Iranian regime has unfortunately joined the obscene chorus of Holocaust denial," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
The ADL also slammed the Iranian ploy. "The Iranian cartoon contest served as a bullhorn for the regime to broadcast some of the ugliest anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that exists in the Muslim world, and to give such expressions of bigotry a patina of legitimacy. "
But Iran's minister of culture dismissed the criticism.
"The cartoonists expressed their hate of oppressors and their love of (Palestinian) victims," Hossein Saffar Harandi was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition of the conservative Kayhan newspaper. "Palestinians have been the victim of a deceptive history by Zionists," the minister added.
The cartoons, which have been on display at the Museum of Contemporary Arts for Palestine since August, have not drawn large crowds though state schools bused their students to the show.
"Drawing cartoons ... isn't a good way to solve real and old problems," said Ahmad Nasiri, a 23-year-old architecture student. "Denying the Holocaust through cartoons doesn't contribute to humanity."
Iranian newspapers reported the results of the competition Thursday, but gave it no significant coverage. Not one paper printed the winning cartoon.
The competition was launched by the Hamshahri newspaper after a series of Danish cartoons on Islam's Prophet Muhammad provoked widespread indignation among Muslims early this year.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supported the exhibition. His frequent denials of Nazi Germany's killing of 6 million Jews during World War II have made the Holocaust a feature of Iranian foreign policy.
Two of the top three cartoons did not even deny the Holocaust and could be interpreted as affirming it. The point of Derkaoui's winning drawing and that of Carlos Latuff, a Brazilian who tied for second place, was to compare the Holocaust with the suffering of Palestinians today.
The exhibition was condemned worldwide. The U.S. State Department criticized it and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed his displeasure during a visit to Iran in September.
Hajar Smouni of Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media rights group, said she was shocked by the "very poor taste" of the competition.
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
|
