Garbanzo Toons: More Cartoon Riots? I doubt It

Monday, September 25, 2006

More Cartoon Riots? I doubt It

According to this article the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon Contest has finally arrived. Have Jews around the world started rioting and murdering yet? Have they issued death threats?

Of course not. Only one religion is base enough and unsure of its tenets enough to do that. Only one religion still demands that all the world live by its rules. And they are still in a tizzy over a perceived slight from the Vatican from over a week ago.

I find it interesting that the article's focus is on those Iranians who are appalled by the display.

Spoofing the Holocaust was something that Armin Salami, a German visiting his native Iran, couldn't quite imagine. So he made his way, with a young cousin who never had traveled outside Iran, to a downtown gallery to decide whether art had been used for a political low.

The hallways at the Holocaust International Cartoon Contest, an exhibit of anger, art and revisionist history, were a revelation for Salami, an artist and social worker who moved to Germany 20 years ago. Salami was astounded that anyone in his native land would call the work clever. He was chagrined to hear his college-educated cousin, Laaia, express enthusiasm for what Salami saw as propaganda.

Salami was quick to point out that the history of the Holocaust is not taught in Iranian schools. The slurs sketched out in some of the brightly colored caricatures -- the depiction of gun-toting Israelis with thin, Pinocchio-length noses, hiding behind a barbed-wire fence that spelled the word "Holocaust," or an etching of a man with a Star of David and vampire teeth, slurping blood -- seemed to mystify his cousin.

Not Salami, who lives in the country that spawned the Holocaust and whose leaders are dedicated to admitting how a Nazi government orchestrated mass killing. But his recent tour of the more than 200 cartoons displayed at the private Museum of Palestinian Contemporary Art informed him in a way he hadn't expected: It was another sign to him of how determined Iran is to remain isolated from Western thought.

And we must be reminded that Kofi Anon who regularly supports the Palestinians in their attempted genocide against the Israeli people protested the exhibit. Frankly, I'm not impressed.

Labels: cartoons, Iran