Iranian Holocaust Cartoon Contests

A 2026 Ynet retrospective by historian Dina Porat placed the contests within Iran's broader use of Holocaust denial as a political instrument. Porat argued that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adopted overt Holocaust denial in 2005 and sought international support for it. Her account presented the purpose as undermining the historical narrative connecting the Holocaust to the establishment of Israel.[1]

The immediate trigger for the first major contest was the controversy over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper.[2] On February 6, 2006, Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor of Hamshahri — a national newspaper publicly owned by the city of Tehran — announced an international cartoon competition on the Holocaust, presenting it explicitly as a test of Western claims about freedom of expression.[3][2] The U.S. Department of State characterized the contest as a contrived "response" to the Danish cartoons and placed it within a broader pattern of antisemitic imagery in Iranian state-linked media.[4]

A solicitation notice appeared in Hamshahri on February 12, 2006, in both English and Arabic.[4] The newspaper received almost 1,200 submissions from more than 60 countries, including cartoons that denied or minimized the Holocaust.[3] In August 2006, Tehran's Saba Art and Cultural Institute opened an exhibition sponsored by President Ahmadinejad, displaying a selection of 200 cartoons.[3] A Ynet retrospective described the 2016 competition as Iran's third Holocaust-denial cartoon contest and said it drew broader international participation than earlier iterations.[1]

The U.S. Department of State separately reported that the 2006 Hamshahri contest received submissions from 204 participants.[4] This participant count is not directly comparable to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's figure of almost 1,200 submitted cartoons. The $12,000 prize — reported in one State Department account as approximately 111,000,000 rials — went to a Moroccan cartoonist for an image depicting an Israeli crane erecting a concrete-block wall around Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, with sections of a photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau incorporated into the blocks.[4][5]

State Department reports placed the contest within discussions of antisemitism, noting that Iranian anti-Israel policies and rhetoric had increasingly blurred distinctions among Zionism, Judaism, and the Israeli state and contributed to concern about the security of Iran's Jewish community.[5][6] The 2007 religious-freedom report also stated that the Iranian government sponsored an exhibition of the cartoons in Tehran on August 14, 2006.[5]

The 2016 contest was announced by Iranian authorities in January and framed by its organizers as an expression of free speech, invoking the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad as a precedent.[1] It received more than 864 submissions. Of those, 150 cartoons from 50 countries were accepted, and approximately one-fifth of all submissions were displayed when the exhibition opened in a Tehran gallery on May 14, 2016.[7][8]

The exhibition had two dominant themes: cartoons relating to the Holocaust and cartoons comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler. Photographs showed swastikas and other antisemitic imagery throughout.[7] The contest had two formal categories — cartoon and caricature — with three winners in each, and the World Jewish Congress reported total prize money of US$50,000.[8]

The winning cartoon, by French cartoonist Zeon, depicted what appeared to be the entrance gate of a Nazi-era death camp positioned atop a cash register containing six million in cash.[9] Zeon received an individual prize of US$12,000, and Iranian media reported that he had been arrested in France in 2015 for his "anti-Zionist" cartoons.[9] Brazilian-born Carlos Latuff, of Lebanese origin, placed second. The Ynet retrospective characterized his broader imagery as depicting Jews as satanic murderers.[1]

Organizer Masoud Shojai Tabatabaei insisted the event was not intended to deny or celebrate the Nazi Holocaust, but to draw attention to what he called "the big killings by the Zionist regime in Gaza and Palestine."[7] The World Jewish Congress reported that the opening was timed to coincide with Nakba Day.[8] The day after the winners were announced, the Iranian Cultural-Art Masaf Institute publicized a follow-on contest soliciting submissions about a "Zionist Caliphate," with themes including "Zionism, terrorism and racism" and "ISIL terrorism and genocide in the name of religion and to the benefit of the Zionists."[9]

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif denied Iranian government involvement in the 2016 contest. At a January 2016 meeting in France, French Jewish parliamentarian Meir Habib challenged Zarif directly over the competition. Zarif said it had not been organized by him or the Iranian government and attributed it to unidentified associations.[10] He also accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify the occupation of Palestinians and distinguished between opposition to Zionism and opposition to Jews.[10]

The World Jewish Congress reported, however, that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had identified the organizing bodies as the Owj Media & Cultural Institute and the Sarsheshmeh Cultural Center and described them as directly linked to and funded by Iranian government organs, including the Revolutionary Guards.[8] The museum's timeline also records cooperation with Iran's Ministry of Culture, the participation of a ministry official in the awards ceremony, and a ministry spokesperson's support for programs intended to address the Holocaust.[3] In February 2015, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, called on the UN to condemn an earlier Iranian Holocaust-denial cartoon exhibition.[11]

The 2016 exhibition drew condemnation from governments and international bodies. German Foreign Office spokesman Martin Schaefer stated that Holocaust victims "must not be abandoned to ridicule" and that the exhibition "sows hatred and deepens divisions."[8] UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova also criticized it, warning that mockery of the genocide could foster hatred and incite violence, racism, and anger.[8]

Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, acknowledged that humor can expose hypocrisy and attract younger audiences' attention, but argued that Holocaust cartoons and contests around them "clearly cross the line." He maintained that humor does not eliminate the need for sensitivity and that the Holocaust is not a subject for humor.[12]

In February 2006, shortly after Hamshahri announced its contest, the Israeli Jewish publishing company Dimona Comix announced its own "anti-Semitic cartoon contest," explicitly framed as a satirical response to the Iranian competition.[12] Amitai Sandy, identified as the artist and publisher behind Dimona Comix, described the contest's aim as producing "the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!"[12]

The Israeli contest was open to Jews only and was intended as an ironic counterpoint to Iran's international Holocaust cartoon competition.[13] Sandy participated and later referred to his entries as "my anti-Semitic caricatures," saying the experience taught him that people could take a joke.[13] The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs also noted the contest in a discussion of the Muhammad-cartoon controversy, characterizing its launch as "ill-advised" but providing no details about its entries, judging, or outcome.[14]

A separate incident involved BADIL, a Palestinian NGO, whose 2010 "Al-Awda Awards" winners were announced on May 5, 2010, at ceremonies in Ramallah and Gaza. The awards were part of a campaign commemorating what Palestinians call the Nakba of 1948.[15] In the "Best Caricature" category, a cartoon that received second place and a $600 prize was subsequently identified as antisemitic by NGO Monitor.[15]

NGO Monitor described the cartoon as depicting a Jewish man in traditional Hasidic clothing, with sidelocks and a hooked nose, standing over a dead Arab child while holding a blood-dripping pitchfork. Dead and dying Arab children and skulls surrounded him on a platform marked "1948" and bearing a Star of David.[15] NGO Monitor assessed the imagery as invoking blood-libel accusations and portraying Israel's establishment as murderous.[15]

After NGO Monitor raised the matter with DanChurchAid (DCA), a BADIL partner, the image was removed from portions of BADIL's website. By October 2010, it had been removed entirely and replaced with a disclaimer.[15] DCA stated that it had not funded the Al-Awda Awards and had been unaware of the cartoon.[15] A regional DCA representative agreed that the image was antisemitic and called it "a misjudgment or error on behalf of Badil management." DCA General Director Henrik Stubjkaer said the partnership had enabled DCA to criticize the poster and secure its removal.[15] There was no indication that the award itself was withdrawn.[15]

Prize reports for the 2016 contest describe different scopes rather than a demonstrated contradiction. The World Jewish Congress reported total prize money of US$50,000 across six winner positions, while the ADL reported that Zeon received an individual prize of US$12,000. The available accounts do not provide a complete allocation of the total prize fund.[8][9]

State Department reports also use different labels for the timing of the 2006 contest, describing it respectively as occurring in mid-2006 and in the fall of 2006.[4][5] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum separately dates the announcement to February 6 and the exhibition to August, suggesting that the labels may refer to different stages of the contest rather than a single event date.[3]

The Iranian government's relationship to the 2016 contest remains disputed. Zarif denied state involvement, while the World Jewish Congress, citing findings attributed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, reported that the organizing bodies were linked to and funded by Iranian government organs.[8][10] The organizers framed the exhibitions as free-speech exercises. By contrast, the ADL described antisemitic imagery at the exhibition, the State Department situated the 2006 competition within state-sponsored antisemitic media, and the Ynet retrospective characterized the 2016 event as a Holocaust-denial contest.[7][4][1]