Saturday 6 October 2007

"Holocust" "under constraction", Iranian scholarship

http://www.holocaust.ir/
"Holocust" cartoon exhibition – Teheran Aug. 14-Sept. 13, 2006
Spanish newspaper ABC, had an article Contest of Horrors (El concurso de los horrores):
"We are holding the Holocaust contest because we believe in freedom of speech. It is not our intention to insult anyone. This is a contest for caricatures in good taste, amusing and intelligent. I want to find out whether they are going to be published in the West”, said Mohammed Reza Zaherí, the ideologue behind the contest."

In Iran, there was widespread opposition to the infamous contest. "Major Iranian cartoonists did not participate and will not even visit the exhibition. "I am not interested in the least. Furthermore, if I went my visit could be interpreted, among artists, as an endorsement of this campaign. For that reason. I do not even wish to talk about the theme. To counter to something terrible with something even more terrible is pure folly. From what I have heard, most drawings are vulgar and insulting", indicated Hadi Heidari, a cartoonist who works for the reformist daily Etemad-e-Mel-li (National Confidence) and of the artists in the Islamic Republic who has been awarded most prizes."



Entry by Brussels cartoonist Ben Heine: "Welcome home". Luckily, only a handful of European cartoonists participated in the contest.

1 comment:

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Yeah, well, whatever tickles them...