In response to the Danish cartoon scandal, Iran's Hamshari Daily (a newspaper owned by Tehran City Council) announced that it would hold an international cartoon competition on the theme of the holocaust. Farid Mortazavi, Hamshari's graphics editor said that the competition was designed to test the West's commitment to freedom of speech.
The cartoons have been on show in Tehran for three weeks but, rather satisfyingly, the exhibition has proved to be a flop with Iranians. London's Independent reports that the exhibition drew "only three hundred visitors a day in its first week and now attracts just fifty people a day."
The response from the west also, has also been less than the organisers might have hoped, considering the blaze of international publicity in which the contest was announced.
Protests outside embassies, boycotts, even angry letters to the papers have all failed to materialise. In fact, the only world figure to have even been bothered to condemn the cartoons was UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who could not really avoid the issue due to being in Tehran.
The cartoons have also been reprinted by at least one Israeli news agency: taking up the organisers challenge to prove their commitment to free speech by doing so.
You can view the cartoons online at www.irancartoon.com. [Note: if you receive a 'service unavailable' message try again, either Iranian internet infrastructure is not what it could be, or evil western censors are preventing you from accessing it, depending on your political views].
Having viewed the cartoons myself, I must say that some of them are not all that shocking; many are merely an expression of support for the Palestinian people – a sentiment that has much popular support in western body politics if not governments.
Viewing the website's guestbook, or the comments left by readers after individual cartoons, reveals that most of the exhibitions supporters have the same lunatic views on the history of the holocaust and modern politics as president Ahmadinejad. Messages like "great work – the next step is to wipe Israel off the map", are not uncommon.
So if you have five minutes to kill, why not have your commitment to freedom of speech tested and view the cartoons online? Perhaps after viewing them you may be spurred on to go and protest outside your local Iranian embassy – or go make a cup of tea and resign a set of tasteless images to the dustbin of your memory. Two sugars in mine please.
