Battleangel

The results are in. Not quite as offensive as one could have hoped or suspected. Nor did the contest elicit much public interest in Iran or anywhere else for that matter.

The US and Israel were of course quick to denounce the idea as “outrageous”, “an anti-Semitic and inhuman event” and added that Iran had “joined the obscene chorus of Holocaust denial”. I guess one could find far less palatable comments as well. And in some small way it is probably used to build a case for the slaughter of Iranians in the all but inevitable military intervention that these two rogue states have been actively urging for years now and that has been more or less preordained since 1979. The western world may not riot and turn to burning flags and effigies, but then again its response is all the more deceitful and devastating.

First of all, none of the winning cartoons come even close to anything that could remotely be called “Holocaust denial”. A diminishing number could be construed as revisionist but that is all. In fact, most of them express an idea that has been popularized by Norman Finkelstein in the “Holocaust Industry”. Namely that regardless of the details of the actual Holocaust (which we may well debate until the end of days) its memory has been hijacked, misused to facilitate the protection of Israel (not to mention the US which enjoys indirect protection) and — lest we forget — international extortion. Now that is simply a fact and should be of concern to anyone who claims to truly cherish that memory. But please keep ruining it by crying wolf and see if I care. Plus, AP and other sources didn’t fail to once again distort reality by claiming Ahmadinejad had previously “denied” the Holocaust (when too using a Holocaust Industry perspective) and other similar fantasies such as the wiping of maps etc. But I guess that if these cartoons and other forms of legitimate criticism are “denial” then anything goes. Please do keep crying wolf.

Second, even if said cartoons were offensive (which they are not, it’s just that we have been conditioned to think so) I don’t recall hearing that much western outrage over the Danish cartoons last year. When the protests against the Danish cartoons finally took a more public turn early this year (some six months later), almost everyone were falling over themselves to denounce the denouncers, suggesting that the Muslim world needed to be more tolerant. So how about some tolerance now?

Bottom line: The contest was a complete success in that it elicited a response that shows a clear and present hypocrisy over the issues involved. So in both cartoon controversies the Muslim world in general was effectively painted as the villain. Now that speaks plenty of the agenda that is at work here.