cta-image

Donate

Donations from readers like you allow us to do what we do. Please help us continue our work with a monthly or one-time donation.

Donate Today
cta-image

Subscribe Today

Subscribe to receive daily or weekly MEMRI emails on the topics that most interest you.
Subscribe
cta-image

Request a Clip

Media, government, and academia can request a MEMRI clip or other MEMRI research, or ask to consult with or interview a MEMRI expert.
Request Clip
memri
Sep 20, 2006
Share Video:

Iranian TV Report on International Holocaust Cartoon Contest in Tehran

#1280 | 08:34
Source: IRINN TV (Iran)

Following are excerpts from an Iranian TV report on an Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest. The report aired on the Iranian news channel (IRINN) on September 20, 2006.

Reporter: In response to the Danish cartoonist who published a cartoon which was insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, the international exhibition of Holocaust [cartoons] was held in the Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art.

[...]

Exhibition curator Mas'oud Shoja'i Tabatabai: Following the inconceivable things we saw in the Danish press - the affront to the Prophet of Islam through insulting cartoons... In response, we have organized a contest, and planned it to revolve around three main themes. We announced the contest's regulations, so that cartoonists worldwide would respond to this [Danish] incident, and would present their opinions in a visual manner. Regarding these three issues... Our main issue is related to the boundaries of free speech in the West. We asked why so little attention is paid to the affront to divine religions, while we witness strange phenomena like the Holocaust. Anybody who has any doubt about this event, who denies it, or who offers a different interpretation of it is subject to heavy penalties.

[...]

This contest was held over the Internet, on the irancartoon.com website. By the deadline we set, 1,193 works of art had been submitted by artists from 61 countries. After being examined by five prominent cartoonists, 204 pieces were found to meet the contest's criteria, and to be displayed at the exhibition. Turkey and Brazil have the highest number of participants, following Iran.

[...]

Reporter: "Holocaust" is a Greek term. In Persian literature, the word means "mass burning," and its parallel in current Hebrew is Shoah.

After World War II, this term was introduced into the world's political and historical culture by a number of Jewish personalities and centers. Their claims were based on the theory that six million Jews were suffocated in gas chambers in the POW camps in Nazi Germany, and were then burnt in crematoria and turned into ashes. The extensive propaganda and repetition of the issue by Jewish groups and organizations, in films, plays, TV series, and many post-war novels led to this unique use of the term. The Zionist organizations emphasize that no other people or ethnic group has the right to use this term to refer to any event.

[...]

Mas'oud Shoja'i Tabatabai: After the very serious and accurate analysis of Mr. Robert Faurisson, who worked for 14 years on this research, and presented a very accurate study on one of these camps - the Auschwitz camp in Poland... He said that if we were to do a very simple calculation, [we would find] that even if they had worked intensively, in three shifts, in the same place, in order to carry out those alleged crimes - I mean the things the [Jews] described in such an exaggerated manner, and which are, in fact, a lie... The Third Reich would have had to exist for 15 years in order for the Holocaust to have taken place, in Auschwitz alone.

Reporter: If an historian or author uses the term "Holocaust" to denote the notorious, cruel massacre of hundreds of thousands of defenseless people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – people who were turned to ashes by America's nuclear bombing in the final days of World War II - he is immediately condemned and denounced by the Zionist circles, and is accused of using the term "Holocaust," which is the exclusive [property] of a certain ethnic group.

[...]

Even though the Zionists are conducting widespread propaganda in order to prove their belief that the Holocaust was real, today, free-thinking writers and researchers are beginning to whisper their denials of these claims around the world.

[...]

Visitor: In my opinion, this exhibition is very influential and enlightening. The variety of works of art displayed, and the highly influential and enlightening messages in this exhibition can be very useful and influential. They can enlighten us about the very unfortunate events, which are taking place in our world today.

Reporter: Very extensive efforts were made to keep the Holocaust alive as an historical fact. In addition to the production of books and films in many American and European countries, institutes and museums commemorating this issue were built.

[...]

Mas'oud Shoja'i Tabatabai: How come, thousands of kilometers away, the oppressed Palestinians are being attacked, and we are witnessing the massacre and displacement of millions of Palestinians?

Finally, we are concerned about contemporary holocausts - real holocausts that we are witnessing in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and so on.

[...]

Reporter: The Jews claim that the Nazis killed over six million of them in World War II, and they turned this into an historical event called the Holocaust. But how many of today's great scholars and authors know that the main planner of the Vietnam war, in which millions of innocent Vietnamese were killed, was an influential Jew in the American foreign policy decision-making center, called Walt Rostow?

Share this Clip: