TEHRAN (AFP) - An international contest of cartoons on the Holocaust opened in Tehran in response to the publication in Western papers last September of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
"We staged this fair to explore the limits of freedom Westerners believe in," Masoud Shojai, head of the country's "Iran Cartoon" association and the fair organizer, said.
"They can freely write anything they like about our prophet, but if one raises doubts about the Holocaust he is either fined or sent to prison," he added.
"Though we do not deny that fact that Jews were killed in the (second world) war, why should the Palestinians pay for it?" Shojai told the opening ceremony of the month-long fair in Tehran's Palestine Contemporary Art Museum.
He added that around 1,100 cartoons were submitted by participants from more than 60 countries and that more than 200 are on show.
He said the top three cartoons will be announced on September 2, with the winners being awarded prizes of 12,000, 8,000 and 5,000 dollars respectively.
Shojai did not elaborate on the source of the prize money, but emphasized that it did not come from any governmental body.
The fair is being staged by Iran Cartoon and the country's largest selling newspaper Hamshahri newspaper, which is published by Tehran's conservative municipality.
The contest was announced in February in a tit-for-tat move after caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed were first printed in Denmark and then picked up and published worldwide, enraging Muslims.
Iran's fiercely anti-Israeli regime is supportive of so-called Holocaust revisionists, who maintain that the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews and other groups during World War II was either invented or exaggerated.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has also prompted international anger by dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel.
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It will be intersting to see if Jews riot, attack Muslim businesses and call for the eradication of Iran in reaction to these cartoons in a manner similar to the Muslim outrage earlier this year. I'm gonna say probably not, but if they do will Al-jezera excuse the bahavior explaining that the cartoons incited Jewish anger and was justified.
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