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Moroccan wins Holocaust cartoon contest By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer
Thu Nov 2, 8:42 AM ET



TEHRAN, Iran - Ignoring widespread condemnation, Iran awarded the top prize in a Holocaust cartoon contest to a Moroccan artist for his depiction of Israel's security wall with a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp on it.



The organizers of the exhibit — meant as a response to the Danish cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad that enraged many Muslims — awarded Abdollah Derkaoui $12,000 Wednesday for his work depicting an Israeli crane piling large cement blocks on Israel's security wall and gradually obscuring Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. A picture of Auschwitz appears on the wall.

The mosque is Islam's third-holiest site.

Iranian officials said they wanted to emphasize that Palestinians were the indirect victims of the Nazi's killing of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II.

"Palestinians have been victim of a deceptive history by Zionists," Iranian Culture Minister Hossein Saffar Harandi was quoted Thursday as saying by the conservative daily Kayhan. "The cartoonists expressed their hate against oppressors and their love toward (Palestinian) victims in their works."

The contest generated little coverage in the Iranian press and many ordinary Iranians expressed little interest, or criticized the exhibit as unnecessarily provocative.

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, has called for Israel to be destroyed, and Tehran has several times announced plans to host a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, dismissing it as exaggerated.

"The Iranian regime has unfortunately joined the obscene chorus of Holocaust denial," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. "It is surely a historic tragedy that the leadership of a country has adopted such a hateful agenda."

He said that until now, only neo-Nazi groups had been denying the existence of the Holocaust.

The State Department has slammed the exhibit at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Arts, calling it an outrageous attempt to "denigrate the horror that was the holocaust."

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Denis Simonneau said "This 'contest' does not interest us."

The display in Tehran, comprising 204 entries from Iran and abroad, opened in August. Carlos Latuff of Brazil and A. Chard of France jointly won the second prize of $8,000, and Iran's Shahram Rezai received $5,000 for third place, the organizers said.

Chard regularly draws cartoons for Rivarol, a small weekly whose director is expected to face trial next year for running an interview in which extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen denied the brutality of the Nazi rule. France has very strict laws against denying the Holocaust.

Hajar Smouni of Reporters Without Borders said the Paris-based media rights group was shocked by the "very poor taste" of the contest. He said Tehran was far from showing the same degree of openness to local journalists who publish caricatures criticizing Iranian rulers.

"This is not proof of their open-mindedness or their acceptance of the fundamental principles of freedom of expression," he said.

The Tehran daily Hamshahri, a co-sponsor of the exhibition, said it wanted to test the West's tolerance for drawings about the Holocaust. The entries on display came from nations including United States, Indonesia and Turkey.

The exhibit drew few crowds, apart from students in state-run schools who were brought by their teachers.

Iranian media didn't comment on the competition Thursday apart from reporting its outcome. None reproduced the winning cartoons.

"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."

Some people on the streets of Tehran voiced skepticism about the contest.

"Drawing cartoons ... isn't a good way to solve real and old problems," said Ahmad Nasiri, a 23-year-old student. "Denying the Holocaust through cartoons doesn't contribute to humanity."

The exhibit curator, Masoud Shojai, said, however, that the contest will be an annual event.

"Actually, we will continue until the destruction of Israel," he said. The museum is next to the Palestinian Embassy, which was the Israeli diplomatic mission before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Oh, and as to the cute little condemnation of Islam at the bottom of your post, I'd just like to point out that even though your religion is generally a moderate and peaceful one in this day and age, historically Christianity still has quite a lot of blood on its hands.

Who's Taking Blame for Christian Violence?
by Calvin White

Now that imams in Britain and Canada are standing up and publicly condemning terrorist acts as anti-Muslim and against the teachings in the Qur'an, I wonder if pressure might be put on Christian leaders to take a similar stand.

Contrary to what some might like to insist, Christianity is not the religion of "an eye for an eye" but it is the religion of Jesus, who refined those earlier directions and distilled the ten commandments into two. One was to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Pretty definitive isn't it? As is the edict of turning the other cheek.

Jesus expected to be betrayed. He expected to be arrested by the authorities. There was no exhortations to prepare for battle. There was no bloody attempt to stop the proceedings.

Even as Jesus was brutalized while carrying his own crucifixion cross and being nailed onto the timbers, there was no violent counterforce from his disciples. Not even an outcry.

No matter where one reads in the accounts of Jesus, the only conclusion one can come to is that Jesus was about love.

So where are the Christian leaders when it comes to violent actions by our Western leaders? Where are the televangelists, who every Sunday take over the airwaves to trumpet the message of Jesus, when it comes to taking on bunker busting bombs and mass carnage?

Where are they when it comes to the death penalty prevalent in the majority of American states?

When President George Bush insists that billions of dollars need to continue flowing to the war effort in Iraq which leads to more American body bags and Iraqi graves, why is there no outcry? Why don't the Christian leaders stand up and challenge those decisions, and passionately assert that Jesus would have sought another way of solving the problems?

In this time when Christianity is on the rise all over America, when there is a growing surge in extolling Christian values, why is it that when the born-again Bush says it's better to fight "them" over there than on American soil, no concerted group of leaders stands up and yells that he's got it wrong?

Like Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also born again.

Yet, their combined leadership has been responsible for excruciating death and injury to innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They both claim a righteousness in their policies of destruction. They were even counseled by their secular allies not to resort to the carnage. Where was the equal pressure from the Christian leadership?

Interesting, isn't it, that Muslim fanatics use the idea of holy jihad and rewards in paradise to recruit their dupes into terrible acts of destruction, and in Christian circles there is the solemn assembling for prayer and seeking of blessings for the troops and leaders in their mission of war.

Interesting, isn't it, that polling clearly indicates the Christian right in America is emphatically against bad language on TV and in the movies, horrified by Janet Jackson's bare n****e — but drawn with considerable relish to violence in the same media.

The additional galling irony of Jesus being emblazoned on the foreheads of those in command of the sharpest swords is that Jesus was also all about intelligence. He was all about deeper understanding, about using insight and keenness of mind to solve problems. Think of how the Pharisees tried to trick him by holding up different sections of the law to trip him up.

His disciples picking corn, for instance, and thus working, on the Sabbath. Jesus answered that the Sabbath was for man and not the other way around. There was the adulteress brought before him to be stoned; he responded that any without sin might cast the first stone.

What kind of insight have Bush and Blair employed? What intelligence, what deeper understanding is demonstrated by the tactic of blast and shoot with as much technologically advanced weaponry as is available?

What compassion, what recognition of common humanity is shown when the biggest concern is how to pad the soldiers with as much body Kevlar and the humvees with as much armour as possible so they can kill all the easier without casualties — and thus retain the support of the home front.

How do our current religious leaders think Jesus would react to the concept of collateral damage?

Nowhere in Islamic history can one find a doctrine similar to Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“lead them in”—i.e. “force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ). Augustine’s frightening idea that all must be compelled to “conform” to the “true Christian faith” has unleashed centuries of unparalleled bloodshed. Indeed, Christians have suffered more under the rule of Christian civilization than under pre- Christian Roman rule or any other rule in history. Millions were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies, to say nothing of the various Inquisitions, or the Crusades, when the European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.” Needless to say, these transgressions— and indeed all the transgressions of Christians throughout the ages—have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus Christ and or even the New Testament as such. Indeed, no Muslim by definition would ever or will ever blame this on Jesus Christ (the Word made Flesh, for Christians and Muslims). So how is it that Sookhdeo blames Muslim transgressions (even though far less than “Christian” ones) on the Qur’an (the Word made Book, for Muslims)?


By no means was such indiscriminate violence limited to Europe’s “Dark Ages” or to one period of Christian history. The Reformation and Counter Reformation took inter- Christian slaughter to new extremes; two thirds of the Christian population of Europe being slaughtered during this time. Then there were (among many others wars, pogroms, revolutions and genocides) the Napoleonic Wars ( 1792-1815 ); the African slave trade that claimed the lives of 10 million; and the Colonial Conquests. Estimates for the number of Native Americans slaughtered by the Europeans in North, Central and South America run as high as 20 million within three generations.


Despite the ravages of Europe’s violent past, in the 20 th century, Western Civilization took warfare to new extremes. A conservative estimate puts the total number of brutal deaths in the 20 th century at more than 250 million. Of these, Muslims are responsible for less than 10 million deaths. Christians, or those coming from Christian backgrounds account for more than 200 million of these! The greatest death totals come from World War I (about 20 million, at least 90 % of which were inflicted by “Christians”) and World War II ( 90 million, at least 50% of which were inflicted by “Christians,” the majority of the rest occurring in the Far East). Given this grim history, it appears that we Europeans must all come to grips with the fact that Islamic civilization has actually been incomparably less brutal than Christian civilization. Did the Holocaust of over 6 million Jews occur out of the background of a Muslim Civilization?


In the 20th century alone, Western and/or Christian powers have been responsible for at least twenty times more deaths than have Muslim powers. In this most brutal of centuries, we created incomparably more civilian casualties than have Muslims in the whole of Islamic history. This continues even in our day—witness the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandans in 1994 in a population that was over 90 % Christian; or the genocide of over 300,000 Muslims and systematic rape of over 100,000 Muslim women by Christian Serbs in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.

Proof??? And don't mention the Crusades, that was in the name of 'Christendom' and NOT Christianity.

You know muslims saying; "How dare you say islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for saying that!!!" isn't exactly the best way to prove to the rest of us that 14th century Byzantine Emperor wasn't right!