NOVANEWS
Over 300 artists from Iran and countries such as France, China sent in entries for controversial competition. Hundreds of people from Iran and around the globe submitted entries for the Islamic Republic’s Second International Holocaust Cartoon Contest.
“839 artworks have also been sent to the secretariat, 686 of them have been sent to the cartoon section and 153 more are related to caricature section,” Secretary Masud Shojaei-Tabatabaii told the semi-official Fars News Agency, marking the second time since 2006 that the country has held the contest.
Organizers launched the cartoon contest centered on the theme of Holocaust in late January in response to French satirical magazine racist Islamophobic Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed peace upon him.
The winner of the contest will receive a $12,000 cash prize and their cartoon will be shown at the Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. Second and third place finalists will receive $8,000 and $5,000, respectively.
The first such contest was held in 2006, following Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’spublication of cartoons depicting Mohammed. At the time, it drew 1,200 submissions from all over the world.
Moroccan artist Abdellah Derkaoui won the contest with a cartoon depicting a crane emblazoned with a Star of David constructing a wall around Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. The wall formed a black-and-white photograph of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
