New York-area Jews reacted with disgust and resignation to an Iranian newspaper's solicitation of cartoons mocking the Holocaust in response to demeaning caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper.
"Once again, we've been turned into conspirators," said Abraham Foxman, executive director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League. "We thought initially that this is a conflict that doesn't impact us because we don't have a dog in the hunt. But very quickly, we became not only the dog in the hunt, but the hunt itself."
The newspaper, Hamshahri, one of Iran's top five dailies, announced a Holocaust cartoon contest earlier this week titled "What is the Limit of Western Freedom of Expression?" to bolster its claim that the West has one standard for depictions of Muslims and another for speech deemed anti-Semitic or which denies the Holocaust.
"This is aimed at finding the truth," Hamshahri editor Mohammad Reza Za'eri said in a news conference Tuesday in Iran. Za'eri denied the contest was in retaliation for the Danish and other newspapers' publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, which has triggered worldwide protests, including the burning of European embassies.
For many area Jews, the retaliatory cartoons are nothing to get excited about: Middle Eastern newspapers routinely print cartoons depicting Jews as pigs, dogs and devils, and deny the Holocaust. What is worrisome, they said, is that this latest iteration occurs in the context of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's calls for Israel's destruction and his pursuit of a nuclear program believed to include weapons.
"It's a lot more serious to have the president of Iran saying that they want to wipe Israel off the planet than for them to sponsor a cartoon contest," said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City. "In general, we don't take cartoons so seriously. We have more important things to worry about."
Rabbi Jerome Davidson of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck said he felt regret about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad because "no religion wants to see its sacred symbols caricatured." But he said he cannot abide by violent protests -- or the justification of Holocaust denial.
"The very countries that are objecting so vehemently," Davidson said, "are those that continually portray Jews as caricatures, drawing on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Semitic expressions that go back to the Middle Ages, without any hesitation. So there is a double standard."
Foxman said the Iranian contest is not surprising in the context of growing preoccupation in some Muslim circles with so-called Zionist conspiracies. "We've only recently turned the corner on the Sept. 11 attacks being blamed on Jews and Israelis, as well as almost every other terrorist attack, whether in London, Madrid, Bali or Egypt."
