by Matt Barr

Tit for whatever

You've heard that an Iranian newspaper is holding a contest and awarding gold coins for the 12 cartoons that lampoon as offensively as possible the Holocaust. Burned us! As others have argued, this is a splendid idea, since the only difference between this and the depictions of Muhammad that have destroyed buildings and set off calls for beheadings and mayhem is that one is offensive to Muslims and one is offensive to Jews.

Except not really.

Hamshahri newspaper’s art director Farid Murtazawi said the contest is a kind of response to the newspapers that published the caricatures. "They published caricatures insulting the Prophet Mohammed with the excuse of freedom of expression. “We will see whether they do what they say; whether they will reprint these pictures of the holocaust," Murtazawi said.

They published the caricatures to express an opinion about people who bomb, murder and mutilate people in the name of Islam. You may think countering that by satirizing the ruthless forcible relocation, malnourishment, abuse, rape and extermination of six million people is tit for tat, but if so it's because you hate Jews, not because you've thought it through.

I'm holding my own contest. I will award a no-prize to the best cartoon satirizing the Japanese vaporized by the Hiroshima bomb, victims of Darfur genocide, and Americans killed on September 11. 'Cuz it's exACTly the same thing as an editorial cartoon about terrorism!

I'm sure Jyllands-Posten will run these, too, since they're running into one another over there to publish Iran's award-winning Holocaust comedy.

If anyone is making the point that editorial cartoons about terrorism are, in terms of subject matter, perfectly legitimate and of a vastly different kind and character than baldfaced Jew-baiting, I'm missing it. Why?

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