DALLAS (ABP) — As violent protests to caricatures of Muhammad intensify in the Muslim world, an Iranian newspaper has found a new way to express outrage: holding a contest for cartoons to make light of the Holocaust and its victims.
Tehran-based editors at Hamshahr, Iran's largest newspaper, said they would award gold coins to the winners of their contest.
“The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons,” Graphics Editor Farid Mortazav told The Associated Press.
Other Iranian papers ran a cartoon online that showed a devil holding a Danish flag and the Jewish Star of David. The latest retaliations followed the publication of 12 cartoons last fall in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The cartoons featured drawings of the revered prophet wearing bombs, using swords or blindly leading robed women.
Those cartoons came to light in the Muslim world last month when seven publications in France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands reprinted them. Some editors who ran the cartoons have since been fired.
Despite apologies from the Danish paper, dozens of students continued attacks on the Danish embassy in Tehran. NATO peacekeepers shot and killed three demonstrators in Afghanistan after a crowd fired weapons and threw hand grenades.
In Lebanon, where a large Christian population has become an easy target for Muslim resentment, Lebanese Christians fought hundreds of Muslim protestors in the Christian Ashrafiyeh district. Christian leaders blamed the rioting on pro-Syrian saboteurs, according to Christianity Today.
A notable victim of the violence in the Muslim world was Roman Catholic priest Andrea Santoro, an Italian who was shot while praying in his church in Turkey Feb. 5. BBC reports listed eight additional deaths related to the protests in Afghanistan and one in Somalia as of Feb. 7.
Charles Kimball, professor of comparative religions at Wake Forest University, said violence came because the cartoons provided an outlet for frustration that has accumulated for years in Muslim countries worldwide.
According to Kimball, “instigators” have capitalized on prior resentment toward Western influences — something easily done against Danes, whose less-visible status in world affairs has emboldened Muslims to jump to conclusions, he said.
“The most hideous images you can imagine have historically been attributed to Muhammad,” Kimball said, giving the example of Dante's Inferno, which depicted the prophet in the lowest circles of hell.
“On the flip side, I have never met a Muslim who would say anything against Jesus or Moses. These are prophets of God. For Muslims, it's inconceivable that anyone would denigrate one of the prophets.”
While Kimball doesn't condone the violence, he said, the many facets of the conflict make it difficult for outsiders to evaluate.
Clifford May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said the furor has persuaded “so many people … that the cartoons in question insult Islam” that the episode has turned into a victory for militant Islam and a defeat for moderate Muslims worldwide.
“Few dare argue that the cartoons do not insult Islam, that they insult only militant Islamism,” May said in a National Review Online symposium. “Yet surely that would be the most obvious interpretation of a cartoon showing Muhammad wearing a bomb in place of a turban. If such groups as al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas had not committed countless acts of violence in the name of Islam, such an image would make no sense.”
Iran's Holocaust cartoon contest received official condemnation from the Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish organization committed to remembering the Holocaust. Rabbi Marvin Hier, a center spokesman, said the newspaper's editors are “following the classic formula of Adolf Hitler, which says if there's a problem, it's the fault of the Jews.”
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