RUTHFULLY YOURS

rench magazine Charlie Hebdo has never been one to shrink in the face of Islamist threats. Having had its offices firebombed in the past, the ‘provocative’ outfit has taken the decision to publish for a third time cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

In response, it has been reported by Farsnews that an anti-Semitic cartoon festival on the Holocaust is being organised by state official Masud Schojai Tabatabai in Iran, as a form of revenge.

This is not a first. A cartoon festival was previously held in response to the Mohammed caricatures published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, thus indicating a worrying trend of anti-Semitism in Iran.

But there is little logic behind this anti-Semitic reaction – after all, Charlie Hebdo is stridently antireligious and often attacks Judaism. At a stretch, one might argue that the logic of the Iranian state officials follows that if a Western country breaks the taboos of the Islamist dictatorship, Iran is willing to break the taboo of Holocaust denial.

Yet the reality is that Schojai is acting within the anti-Semitic state doctrine when it comes to anti-Israeli propaganda.

Underlining the state doctrine has been the reaction to the Newtown massacre in the United States. Anti-Semitic Iranian propaganda has arbitrarily attributed the carnage at a school in Newtown directly to Jews.

For example, Haj Ali Mohammadi, the author of a contribution to the state-funded Iranian website qodsna.com, has argued that the Zionist-controlled media in the U.S. didn’t write up the true version of events. According to Mohammadi, it is crucial to note that the murderer of Newton, Adam Lanza, was a “Jew. He grew up in a Jewish family”.

It gets worse. The Qodsna article also notes that Lanza was suffering from Asperger syndrome, which, according to Mohammadi, is an illness very common among the “Western Jews”. The Ashkenazi Jews are the same Jews, who “suppress the Palestinians in the occupied territories”, the author continues. “Lanza was also an Ashkenazi Jew who hated the other. But no one has recognized his illness.”

In another article, also published by Qodsna, it was alleged that the “Zionist lobby in the U.S. puts pressure to enforce new gun laws.” Apparently, the rabbis of the Jewish communities in the U.S. have undertaken these steps now because Lanza was a Jew.

Making an even further leap, the author commented that the wrath of Americans is growing against Jews, not only because of events in Newtown but because many now allegedly see that the “Jews in Palestine behave like Nazis.”

It is not clear what evidence such an assertion is based on, but perhaps if the author takes Wayne Madsen – author of the Wayne Madsen Report who regularly writes reviews for the Iranian foreign station Presstv and who has also made the Israeli-Nazi comparison – as the voice of Middle America, it may explain a thing or two.

Wahied Wahdat-Hagh is a Senior Fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) in Brussels