I am surprised that the first Jewish / Israeli media professional who responded to this holocaust contest was not mentioned in the story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamshahri
Joel Leyden, of the Israel News Agency, responded with a search engine contest to assure that all seeking "Iran Holocaust Cartoons" would find the INA site # 1 on Google with factual notes placed in the holocaust cartoons. Leyden is of more potent mention because rather than starting another cartoon contest out of Israel for which Israel's enemies can recycle untouched holocaust cartoons, he and the rest of G-bombed the Iranian site. Join us in following Leyden's lead http://www.israelnewsagency.com/iranholocaustcartoonsisraelseo48480207.html

While I understand it is a standard and reliable outlet for the Iranian press to denigrate Jews, has anyone questioned the shaky link between cartoons of a religious figure and reference to a historical genocide? Wouldn't pictures of rabbis in various seedy postures be the equivalent here?

It couldn't be possible that the Holocaust is constantly referenced because it is a sort of win/win for those inspired by current Iranian rhetoric. If it was a fabrication, the victim myth they believe led to Israel's creation is wrong, and if it did happen, well...

What's wrong with questioning the Nazi genocide of European Jews? Israel denies the Armenian Holocaust. (And before anyone objects to using the term "Holocaust" to describe the Armenian genocide, remember that its first use to describe a genocide was by Winston Churchill to describe what the Young Turks did to the Armenians.) Former Israeli PM Perez even said what happened to the Armenians was "a tragedy, but not a genocide." This is as odious as Ahmadinejad questioning what the Nazis did to European Jewry. Yet the world's silence to this brazen act of Holocaust denial was deafening.

Maybe Israel can send a representative to Ahmadinejad's Tehran conference on the Nazi genocide of the Jews to give him pointers on how to successfully commit genocide denial. David Irving is not available anymore to represent Israel as he's finally admitted the truth. It's too bad Israel won't. Until then, the "alleged" genocide of the Jews is fair game.

The West needs to send a message to Iran's Anti-Semitic contest: more power to you! I'm shocked that anybody in the West, where freedom of speech is at LEAST higher than it is in Iran, would say anything else. Don't you realize that you're setting yourself up for the very caricature that Morley features on this web page, the hypocrite? Don't you see that if Iran has its contest, and we laugh, then we have proven our point and the Iranians have made themselves into the hypocrites?! Why didn't the West think of this contest on a mass scale first itself? I am shocked that Morley did not cite to a hundred people saying hooray to the Iranian contest. I'd join it myself if my boss wasn't making me work the weekend.

What's the point in trying to point out peoples wrongs? It only promotes defensiveness and Stifels communication. The various contests are ridiculous the fact that we feel the need to offend more people to prove a point is just redundant. The truth is that everyone sees the point that there is in-fact an offense here, and if there were no war in Iraq right now this would not be considered, "allegedly surrendering to an Islamic war of intimidation." It would be looked at for what it is without it having to go this far. Aside from any personal feelings do you think any of this would have occurred had there not been a war in Iraq right now? So is this all about freedom of speech of are their people involved getting some silent pleasure for being about to print the things that may have not been otherwise acceptable to print under different world conditions?

"Whether Bennett and Dershowitz would support an American newspaper that published the cartoons published by Hamshahri in the name of free expression is an open question."

Mr. Morley, instead of your snide comment implying that Bennet and Dershowitz might have double standards, why don't you just ask them? You're a reporter -- call them up and ask!

Good point, Mr. Untitled at 2:06:54 PM.

But to "Why so much time on this?": if you really think that I'd get involved because it would give me some "silent pleasure," think again. I support free speech because I believe that in the long run it leads to tolerance. If I did a caricature, I would not mean it and it would be obvious.

Responding to Mr. Untitled:
The the point is not whether you mean it or how odvious you make your a caricature. I believe in freedom of speech as well and I do agree that it leads to tolerance, but Freedom of Speech is a priveledge with priveledge comes responsiblity.
"why I published Those Cartoons" by Flemming Rose. published in The Post on February 19, 2006.
The article makes the point, "Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV".
I think this is the true intent behind freedom of speech to give people a voice, not daggers.

being a muslim i certainly would not mock at jesus since he is our prophet but what if i mock the saints? would it be funny then to read those caricatures? i dont think so....
so i would like you to empathise & stop this disgusting act.

Can't your childlike minds grasp this: Free Speech is a RIGHT not a mere privilege, period.

The Iranian holocaust draws near. Iran funds Hamas. Iran fans the flames of fundamentalist Islam across Europe. Iran builds a nuclear bomb. Iran states its intention to annhiliate Israel.

Well, that is as smart as throwing stones at tanks. One day soon Israel will retaliate. And the world will quietly thank her.

Bye bye Iran. And thanks for all the memories.

Thought you might like to know the definition.

Priviledge: a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor

Right:1 : qualities (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority) that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit moral approval
2 : something to which one has a just claim: as a : the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled

Get it, Got it, DONE!!!

Now that both contests have finished the great newspapers of the world - The LA and NY Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Sun-Times, The London Times, all of them should get together and pick one day and simultaneeously publish ALL the cartoons. That would be a great day for freedom of the press.

Nice attempt to disparage Dershowitz and Bennett for correctly calling the Post (and other papers) out for their cowardly decision not to reprint the Danish cartoon. When your paper grows a set, then you can question them.

Isn't it so funny how the former official and the law professor can call for the republication of offensive cartoons a matter of national security. Could they not find some other words than regurgitating the same government line of 'they hate our way of life" which is not even the reason given by Osama for his 2001 attack of America.

May not be completely relevant, but talk about double standards: THE MAYOR of LONDON placed ON SUSPENSION for DARING to ask a rhetorical question that OFFENDED A JEW!! Unbefreakinglievable!!! Until we "grow a pair" and start standing up to "God's Chosen Racists" we are asking for BIG trouble.

Here's Ken Livingstone's (London's Mayor) view a year ago from The Guardian. This guy's right on the money. (Sorry, I lost the link)

More comment | Special report: politics in London

Comment

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This is about Israel, not anti-semitism

Not to speak out against this injustice would not only be wrong. It would ignore the threat it poses to us all

Ken Livingstone
Friday March 4, 2005
The Guardian

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.

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No serious commentator has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard reporter outside City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted on these pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century".
The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.

As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north London eruv.

Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.

Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the policies of successive Israeli governments.

To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict. There are more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel's jails.

To obscure these truths, those around Israel's present government have resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of objective information but in reality selectively translates material from Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.

Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.

They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.

· Ken Livingstone is the London mayor

The Joooos are out to get Red Ken!
The Joooooooos!!!!!
The Jooooooooooooooos!!!!!!
It's the Joooooooooooooooos!!!!!!

Duh:

"Can't your childlike minds grasp this: Free Speech is a RIGHT not a mere privilege, period."

It is not about being childlike but having a different mindset period. You cannot, for example, expect certain cultures to stop eating what you would consider man's best friend just because you think the practice is revolting. Minds are changed by indulging in polite and patient dialogue and discourse, hallmarks of what the West would call "civilized society". Childish sniping like this only inflames the other side. Lead by example.

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Cartoon species, drawing to an end.

Could someone please remind me why we should care what Dershowitz, the torture advocate, and Bennett, the compulsive gambler, have to say about any of this? These two men are utterly discredited. Why the Post pays them the time of day is beyond me.

otherside123.blogspot.com
www.onlinejournal.com
www.takingaim.info

www.wsws.org

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

February 25-26, 2006 -- White House "finds" missing Cheney e-mails.

The White House turned over to CIA Leakgate Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald some 250 pages of e-mails from 2003 that it originally claimed were somehow deleted or lost. The e-mails reportedly demonstrate that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were squarely behind and coordinated efforts to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and reveal the identity of his covert CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, to the media. The e-mails are said to implicate Cheney and his key staffers in potential criminal wrongdoing involving the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's identity and those of her Brewster Jennings & Associates covert colleagues.

The White House said it "discovered" the missing e-mails two weeks ago and turned them over to Fitzgerald. However, three and a half weeks ago, WMR was contacted by an anonymous source who claimed to have intimate knowledge of how the "EOP" (Executive Office of the President) archived older e-mail and other documents. The source said that it is EOP policy to send archival documents to an underground Federal Support Center at 5321 Riggs Road in Olney, Maryland for safekeeping.

Were missing Cheney e-mails trucked to secret White House underground facility in Maryland? Insider said yes.

WMR passed this "tip" on to those who have "back channel" communications with Fitzgerald's office with an emphasis that the anonymous source appeared to have a very good working knowledge of White House document handling and archival procedures. The anonymous source suggested that Fitzgerald and a team of FBI agents show up unannounced at the Olney facility and simply seize the e-mails in question. WMR held the information on the possible whereabouts of the missing e-mails so not to alert the White House political operatives of their existence and location.

In any event, except for some e-mails for which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is claiming executive privilege, most of the the "missing" 2003 smoking gun e-mails involving Cheney's office have been found and these may prove to be as politically damaging to the Bush White House as the Watergate tapes proved to be for Richard Nixon.

How is it that a decision by CHRISTIAN editors to print cartoons offensive to MOSLEMS has -- what else is new -- been twisted and manipulated to shift focus/antipathy onto the Jews? And so many of you (see above) are buying into the manipulation?

To answer your question Sarah, the Muslims believe that there is a double-standard in Europe where it is considered freedom of speech to portray their Prophet as a radical terrorist (whether or not it had a double-meaning) but yet, it is illegal in most of Europe to even question the holocuast.

So, in essence, they're saying "Hey, why protect the Jews so much when you can bash us all you want ?"

Personally, I think freedom of speech should be universal. If someone wants to deny the holocaust, then so be it. Just don't listen to them. By making something illegal, you make it more provocative and thus, create an environment where people become curious and the topic gains a wider audience. Hey, if it is illegal, there must be something that they don't want us to know.

Do I believe the Holocaust happened ?? Yes. You cannot refute the the eyewitness testimony from SURVIVORS that number in the 300,000+. But should it be illegal to deny it? Absolutely not.

Similarily, there should be complete freedom to publish cartoons mocking other people's religions. When you start picking and choosing what is considered freedom of speech and what is not, then you become a hypocrite. And when you start mocking something just to be stupid and without a point, then people will stop reading your material.

It would make more sense if they had gone after the Christians, but, it is much, MUCH more controversial to offend a Jew today than it is a Christian. They're just going for the shock value. They're ignorant.

I should add...

As an American-born Iranian, I just find it disgraceful to see how low any society would go in its quest for offending one another.

This should go without saying, but, I just hope that people truly understand that the government of Iran does NOT represent the Iranian people. The current Iranian government is composed of Arab mullah's - hardly representative of the Aryan population. (Indo-Iranian Aryan)

It would be scarce to find any true Iranian who would view the holocaust cartoons as actually being tasteful.

THERE IS INDEED DOUBLE STANDARD. IF THERE IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR P-R-O-V-C-A-T-I-V-E CARTOONS, THEN THERE SHOULD BE FOR QUESTIONSING H-O-L-O-H-O-A-X.

PLEASE READ THE C-O-M-P-L-I-C-I-T-Y OF JEWS IN HOLOCAUST in this free book at:

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/resources/onlinebooks/Holocaust_Victims_Accuse.pdf

The ONLY relevant HOLOCAUST in NORTH AMERICA
is the HOLOCAUST of THE N_A_T_I_V_E Americans,
the HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI and Hawaiians.

The JEWISH HOLOCAUST is the problem of EUROPE.
The BOSNIAN HOLOCAUST is the problem of EUROPE.

THEY are stifling discussion of their (EUROPEAN) crimes against humanity by stifling discussion of their holocausts.

They must pay for their crimes out of their own pocket and their own territory.

The position of the Torah believing Jews of Neturei Karta is the only valid position.

Read www.nkusa.org for YOUR OWN BENEFIT and intelligence.

Theres a good reason why the denial of the holocaust (or better: the propagation of this idea) is a crime in Germany. And if our government wasn´t so p.c. they would grab the next iranian diplomat setting foot on german ground and let him rott in jail. That would be a just answer to the provacation in my opinion and fresh meat for our bored prisoners.

I condemn the both cartoons. but the root cause of terrorism is america and israel. america has dual policy one for the muslim world and other for their friends....
america and israel will cut what they............. in near future

I support Iran's right to display those cartoons. They are absolutely right - if the western world can print offensive cartoons and say it is freedom of speech, then the same thing applies to Iran. We can't pick and choose which speech is protected. Denying the holocaust is not a crime in Iran.

Don't you guys get it?? If we laugh at their cartoons after they almost started WWIII over ours, we win!!!