BBC on Iranian Cartoon Contest

The contest is now underway, and this might be a good opportunity to make some obvious points:

A leading Iranian newspaper has launched a competition asking people to submit cartoons about the Holocaust.

The Hamshahri daily says the competition is to test the boundaries of free speech for Westerners.

What is so striking about this is the incredible cluelessness it represents about the West. It is ironic that the contest will not test the boundaries of free-speech at all. It will be very easy to print the results of the contest because hate speech laws, however misguided they may be, only prevent one from engaging in actual hate speech--discussing someone else's hate speech is fine, even in Europe. And, of course, actual neo-Nazi propganda is tolerated in the US.

If the cartoon controversy lasts long enough to keep the Iranian cartoons newsworthy, they will be published. And the same laws in Europe that punish actual Holocaust denial will continue to protect Muslims from real anti-Muslim hate speech. If a European newspaper published an article that advocated, say, deporting all Muslims, then the publisher would be subject to criminal action, as Muslims would want him to be. And this is essentially the state of affairs that columnists for media organizations like Aljazeera, never mind Iranians, are denouncing as representing some sort of double-standard favoring Jews. More cluelessness:

The newspaper said that Westerners used free speech to attack Muslim beliefs but did not permit debate on other subjects.

"This attack comes despite the fact that it is an unforgiven crime in the West to debate and critique many issues including the domineering system, looting and crimes perpetrated by the US and Israel, as well as alleged historical events like the Holocaust," the newspaper said.

Right, nobody in the European press ever criticizes the US or Israel, and historians are not allowed to study the Holocaust. It is not just that Iran sees the Jews through the lens of neo-Nazi propganda--you would think that they get all their information about the West in general from the Journal of Historical Review or Zundelsite.

Tags: cartoons, Prophet-cartoons, Denmark, Islam, Iran