Aug. 31, 2006
PARALLEL UNIVERSE: Israel, French Mayor, Jewish Leaders Condemn Iran
Holocaust Cartoon Exhibit; Rioting Fails to Break Out Across the World
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Have you heard about all the rioting by Jews in the wake
of an exhibit in Tehran, Iran of cartoons mocking the Holocaust? Of course
you haven’t because it hasn’t happened, unlike the major worldwide Muslim
uproar several months ago in the wake of the Danish newspaper publishing
cartoons mocking Islam.
A few months after the Danish paper in September 2005 published the cartoons
lampooning the founder of Islam, Muhammad, rioting broke out all over the
world, with 139 people killed and several European embassies burned.
What HAS happened, according to Reuters, is that the Israeli government,
Jewish groups and the mayor of Paris on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006 “condemned
an Iranian exhibition of cartoons on the Nazi Holocaust, accusing Tehran of
spreading hatred and trivializing the murder of six million Jews.”
I first read about the exhibit in an online story in the New York Times,
which quoted exhibition organizers as saying the show was created to
challenge Western taboos about the Holocaust – an event that Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed as a “myth” – for which he has
drawn international condemnation. Holocaust deniers like Mel Gibson’s dad
notwithstanding, the meticulous Germans documented everything on the
slaughter of six million European Jews of all nationalities as part of the
Nazi regime’s “Final Solution.”
Times reporter Michael Slackman interviewed Iran’s sole Jewish member of
Parliament, Morris Motamed, who expressed disgust with the exhibit. Yes,
Iran still has a few thousand Jews resident in the violently anti-Semitic
country. The vast majority of Iran’s once large and ancient Jewish community
– which lived in peace with their Muslim countrymen under the late Shah --
are refugees living in the greater Los Angeles area or in Israel.
Reuters: “Israeli government spokesman Gideon Meir called on the
international community ‘to express disgust from such an anti-Semitic and
inhuman event.’
“Yosef Lapid, chairman of the council of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in
Jerusalem, said: ‘The exhibit not only is horrific propaganda that supports
Holocaust denial, it also paves the road to justifying genocide of the Jews
in Israel.’"
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction, saying he wants
to “wipe the Zionist regime off the map.”
According to Reuters, “Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe condemned the display in
a letter to Iran's ambassador, saying it ‘intended to mock the tragedy of
the (Holocaust) and to trivialise a new anti-Semitic bid under the false
pretext of art and freedom of speech’".
The news service, which was in the news itself a few weeks ago for
distributing a doctored digital photograph of bomb damage in Lebanon, noted
that “France is home to western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim
communities. It is a crime in European countries such as France, Germany and
Austria to deny the Holocaust.”
This forthright expression of disgust from France, a country that has
displayed anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments in recent times, is a
welcome sign that Europe may be waking up to reality.
Radical Islamists of the kind found in Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are
against Christians as much as they are against Jews and it’s to Delanoe’s
credit that he seems to recognize this.
Here’s a link to the Reuters story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060817/wl_nm/iran_holocaust_reaction_dc_1
Investor’s Business Daily, a widely read and respected Los Angeles-based
publication, has an excellent editorial on the exhibit:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=241398849503517
The New York Times story can be accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/world/middleeast/25iran.html