Haunting Cartoons

AP:

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.

...

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.

...

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."

I guess I'm a little puzzled by the conflation of these cartoons and Holocaust denial.  Yes, the Iranian regime is on record as being anti-Israel, anti-semitic and rejecting/minimizing the Shoah, and this contest isn't particularly in good taste.  Still, I don't see that the cartoons themselves are necessarily denying historical facts of the Holocaust, but rather using it as a backdrop and moral comparison to Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

I look at the winning cartoon as a haunting echo of what happened at Auschwitz and how we're seeing something similar today.  Is it the same scale of industrialized murder?  No, but does that lessen the immorality of what Israel is doing?  I think not, but then again I've never been into the whole notion of "keeping score" and trying to one-up other people with personal and historical tragedies.

Since the AP article merely described the cartoon and didn't actually show it, which seems rather silly, I used The Google to find Derkaoui's work and other entrants.  IranCartoon.com had a number of other pieces I thought were also rather haunting:

Carlos Latuff/Brazil 

Gatto Alessandro/Italy 

Boghosian Edik/Iran

That last one really struck a chord with me.  The dove might be a fossil, but the olive branch still lives...

ntodd

PS--Obligatory reminder of my family history.

PPS--HotAir also notes the story.