International Holocaust Cartoon Competition
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The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest (also called the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition) was a 2006 cartoon competition sponsored by the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri, which the paper said was intended to test whether Western defenses of free speech would extend to cartoons about the Holocaust. The contest was organized as a direct response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy of 2005–2006, in which a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad had drawn international protest; Hamshahri argued that the same Western commentators who defended those cartoons as protected speech would condemn comparable cartoons about the Holocaust, and framed the contest as an exposure of that inconsistency.[1]
2006 competition
Hamshahris graphics editor, Farid Mortazavi, announced the competition on February 6, 2006, offering cash prizes for the best submitted cartoons on the subject of the Holocaust. The competition drew international condemnation, including from the United States State Department, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who criticized it as an exploitation of antisemitic imagery under the guise of a free-speech argument.[2] Hamshahris editors maintained that the contest was not intended to mock the Holocaust itself but to make a point about perceived double standards in how Western media treated religiously or ethnically sensitive caricature.
Of the entries, a cartoon by the Moroccan cartoonist Abdellah Derkaoui was awarded first prize, and a cartoon by the Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff was awarded second prize. Both drew further criticism from Jewish organizations and press-freedom groups, who characterized the contest's output as antisemitic rather than as legitimate satire or social commentary.
2015–2016 follow-up
In January 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the magazine's subsequent decision to publish further cartoons of Muhammad, Iranian organizers announced a second edition of the contest. Selected cartoons from this round were exhibited in Tehran beginning in May 2016. The renewed contest drew similar international criticism, including from UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova, and was widely covered by international media as an example of state-sponsored antisemitic content presented as commentary on Western free-speech norms.[3]
Reception
The contest and its results have been consistently described by human-rights organizations, Jewish advocacy groups, and mainstream news coverage as antisemitic rather than as a genuine free-speech exercise, on the grounds that mocking the Holocaust — a documented historical genocide — is categorically different from satirizing a living religious figure, and that the contest served Iranian state interests in promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Israel sentiment rather than any coherent argument about press freedom.