Not that! Anything but that!

An Iranian newspaper is seeking cartoons about the Holocaust. Normally, the Middle Eastern media only publishes anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying trash on days ending in "Y", but this Jyllands-Posten thing has them really, really ticked off for once:

Iran's largest selling newspaper announced today it was holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
"It will be an international cartoon contest about the Holocaust," said Farid Mortazavi, the graphics editor for Hamshahri newspaper - which is published by Teheran's conservative municipality.

He said the plan was to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression.

"The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons," he said.

The Elders of Zion will order us to whine to the UN, stomp on Iranian flags, burn Iranian embassies to the ground and boycott the billions and billions of dollars worth of Iranian consumer goods regularly exported to the West. And I had my heart set on buying a shiny new Paykan, too...

Update: "kaspu" notes in the comments section, "what is so interesting about all this is that the first reaction of Iran to a Danish publication, in a country that has less jews than my local deli, is to not only blame the jews, but to immediately pick Holocaust-denial as their reaction." Well, if you believe Jews control all the media in the Western world, it makes perfect sense.

Tim Blair, meanwhile, asks, "do you kind of get the feeling Iran is desperate to keep this issue boiling?" Yep, and it's not just Iran. The Syrian government once destroyed an entire town, killing 20,000 of its own civilians, to put down an Islamist insurgency - so if it wanted to keep an angry mob from burning down the Danish and Norwegian embassies, it could easily have done so. And I'll bet there's a lot of Saudi money not just behind the purchase of all these flammable Danish flags, but also behind the idea that Mohammed can never, ever be portrayed in a drawing or cartoon.

Posted by damian at February 7, 2006 07:51 AM | TrackBack