{"id":30362,"date":"2016-05-31T12:03:28","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T18:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=30362"},"modified":"2016-05-31T12:03:28","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T18:03:28","slug":"op-ed-irans-holocaust-cartoon-contest-is-no-caricature-of-regimes-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/op-ed-irans-holocaust-cartoon-contest-is-no-caricature-of-regimes-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"OP-ED: Iran\u2019s Holocaust cartoon contest is no caricature of regime\u2019s identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By BEN COHEN<\/p>\n

(JNS.org) — A haredi Jew looks into a mirror and sees the face of Adolf Hitler gazing back at him. The walls and guard towers of Auschwitz are squeezed into a snow shaker, with flying dollar bills replacing the fake snowflakes. Another haredi Jew waves a swastika-shaped fan at an Israeli flag, which blows furiously atop a corpse draped in a Palestinian flag.<\/p>\n

\"Haredi_Hitler\"

These are just a selection of the entries submitted to Iran\u2019s latest Holocaust cartoon contest<\/a>, currently on display in Tehran at the none-too-subtly named Islamic Propaganda Organization. By and large, the cartoons are crudely drawn, in keeping with the themes that they promote.<\/p>\n

Yet I have to confess to being more bored than shocked. Such imagery is hardly new, after all. The depictions of Jews in this exhibit are straight out of Nazi propaganda, while the depiction of the State of Israel as Hitler\u2019s inheritor was pushed by the Soviet Union for almost half a century. The Islamist barbarians who run Iran may be many things, but creators of pathbreaking art they are definitely not.<\/p>\n

\"Devil_Bibi\"

Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the regime can be simply bifurcated into \u201cmoderates\u201d and \u201chardliners,\u201d those Iranian leaders identified in the West as \u201cmoderates\u201d come out of this latest cartoon scandal looking far shabbier than their \u201chardline\u201d rivals. Recall that Iran\u2019s \u201chardline\u201d supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to question whether the slaughter of 6 million Jews had in fact occurred. The cartoon contest, backed to the hilt by the regime, is the natural outgrowth of Iran\u2019s state policy of anti-Semitism, which holds that the Holocaust is a myth shamelessly used by the Jewish state to garner world sympathy. Khamenei and his cohorts, who are structurally and politically at the center of power in Iran, are quite open about all this and don\u2019t feel the need to rationalize or excuse the state-sponsored mockery of the genocide of Jews.<\/p>\n

Not so with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, whose detestation of Israel doesn\u2019t blind him to the fact that the countries he flirts with, like Germany, take a dim view of Iran\u2019s Holocaust denial antics. But unlike the \u201chardliners,\u201d who are disarmingly honest about their views on the Jewish people and their desire to eliminate Israel, Zarif speaks with a forked tongue.<\/p>\n

That shouldn\u2019t mask the fact that Zarif is both a coward, since he refuses to condemn the cartoon contest, and a liar, since he insists that the regime he represents has nothing to do with it. Speaking to The New Yorker<\/em>, Zarif clucked, \u201cDon\u2019t consider Iran a monolith. The Iranian government does not support, nor does it organize, any cartoon festival of the nature that you\u2019re talking about.\u201d That claim is about as truthful as the Obama administration\u2019s reassurance that the nuclear deal struck with Tehran will prevent the regime from developing nuclear weapons. In other words, it isn\u2019t at all.<\/p>\n

\"Arbeit_AlAksa\"

As the Iranian writer Majid Mohammadi pointed out in a detailed briefing published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the institutions involved in the exhibit are \u201call organized, financed, and managed under the supreme leader\u2019s office, his appointed bodies, and the executive branch headed by the president. There are no private or independent nongovernmental institutions active in this area. The government and its varied set of institutions are the only ones that pay for these types of ideologically oriented activities. There is no channel for private funds, and no provision in Iran\u2019s tax code, to support these activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why engage in such an activity in the first place? \u201cThe Islamic Republic seeks to be the most prominent global voice of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment and in doing so has made connections with and promoted individuals espousing these views from across the world,\u201d Mohammadi says. \u201cThe Holocaust is just a subject of a set of cartoons in this effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a recent development, nor is it related to Israeli policy or anything Israel actually does. Anti-Semitism among Iran\u2019s Islamists in fact precedes the creation of the State of Israel. In his excellent book \u201cGermany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold,\u201d German historian Matthias Kuentzel described the massive audience in Iran for Radio Zeesen<\/em>, a Nazi propaganda outlet that broadcasted programming in Farsi. Among the listeners was the figurehead of Iranian Islamism, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. According to Kuentzel, Khomeini was an enthusiastic \u201cconnoisseur\u201d of European anti-Semitism. \u201cThey are liars and determined,\u201d Khomeini wrote in a tract entitled \u201cThe Islamic State.\u201d There was also the following claim, based on the same wretched fantasies that lead to Holocaust denial: \u201cWe see today that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qur\u2019an and have made certain changes in the Qur\u2019ans they have printed in the occupied territories.\u201d<\/p>\n

These same views prevail among Iran\u2019s leaders today, no matter what Zarif says. Indeed, to disavow Khomeini would be unthinkable in the current context, as demonstrated by the recent election of Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati as head of the \u201cAssembly of Experts,\u201d a key ruling body that chooses the supreme leader.<\/p>\n

Jannati is a boilerplate fanatic who leads chants of \u201cDeath to America\u201d and \u201cDeath to Israel\u201d at Friday prayers. It was Jannati who, in 2009, backed then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u2019s blood-drenched crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators. The regime that existed in 2009 still exists today, with the same mechanisms of fearsome repression at its disposal. It cannot be reformed, and certainly not from within. But\u2014heretical as it is to say this\u2014it can, and should, be overthrown.<\/p>\n

Ben Cohen, senior editor of<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>TheTower.org<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>& The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of<\/em>\u201cSome of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism\u201d<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Edition Critic, 2014).<\/em><\/p>\n

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