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Moroccan wins holocaust cartoon contest


TEHRAN (Reuters) - A Moroccan won first prize on Wednesday in Iran's International Holocaust Cartoons Contest, which had sparked outrage in Israel, the West and among Jewish groups.

Iran's best-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, launched a competition in February to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.

The contest was a retaliation for last year's publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in Danish and other European newspapers that angered Muslims worldwide.

Presenting a prize to a representative of Moroccan cartoonist Abdellah Derkaoui, Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister Mohammad Hossein Saffar-Harandi praised Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has described the Holocaust as a "myth."

"Our president was the brave and freedom-seeking person who started this debate without being concerned about its consequences," Saffar-Harandi said.

Derkaoui's cartoon shows a crane with a Star of David sign, putting up blocks making a wall separating the Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, from Jerusalem. The wall has a gate, shown in the distance, that looks like one at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Jews were incarcerated and killed.

"The taboo is broken now. People should not think that by questioning the Holocaust, they are committing a crime," the minister said. The Moroccan cartoonist won $12,000.

Masoud Shojai-Tabatabai, head of the Cartoon House which helped organize the exhibition of entries, said the government was not financing the prizes but he did not say who was.

In September, while in Tehran, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the cartoon exhibition and said the Holocaust was an undeniable historical fact.

"We should be careful not to say anything that is used as an excuse for incitement to hatred or violence," he said.

The second prize, worth $8,000, went jointly to French and Brazilian cartoonists. The third-placed competitor was an Iranian cartoonist.

Shojai-Tabatabai did not reveal the French cartoonist's name. "You can call the French cartoonist 'Mr. X'. If I reveal his name, he may face imprisonment in France."

Organizers said some 1,193 drawings had been received from 62 countries including some European states where it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. Some 204 were on display.

The messages of the cartoons displayed were not always clear although several seemed to poke fun at the United States, Iran's arch-enemy.

The competition drew condemnation from the Israeli government, Jewish groups and the mayor of Paris. The United States called the idea "outrageous."

Israeli government spokesman Gideon Meir called on the international community to express for "such an anti-Semitic and inhuman event."

sniper420 wrote:High again guys! While i was on trip to Tokyo one of my colleagues showed me the article...... good synopsis of Iraq. Read it highly recommended

http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html

article wrote:You Have Made Me Your Human Bomb
by Edna Yaghi

I am the product of your tyranny. You have dissected the leftovers of my country into bits and pieces of shantytowns, ghettoes and concentrations camps. You have cut off my water supply and left me thirsty while you the Israelis bathe in cooled pools not far from where I live. You have uprooted my trees and desecrated my fields making sure I have no way to sustain myself or those who depend on me. You have cut off medical supplies that treat the wounded and at your checkpoints, you detain and humiliate Palestinians and prevent those who are in dire need of medical assistance to pass through causing my people who are your victims to die at your impromptu borders.

You assassinate my freedom fighters while explaining to the world that you are merely defending your own squatters. You shoot to kill little children who in defiance and courage wield small stones in the name of liberty against you the fiercely armed enemy.

You torture the children and resistance fighters you incarcerate and try to bribe or coerce my people into collaborating against one another. You bulldoze homes and you prevent me from earning a living. You kill me by remote control from your US made Apache helicopters and your settlers who squat on what you have left me of my land throw firebombs into my dwellings and on my passageways, attack my children and womenfolk with guns and clubs and hate.

You occupy my land and on my bloodstained hills station your tanks and armored jeeps in order to shoot off one by one little children playing in the streets.

You take over the Orient House, my one symbol of freedom that was donated by a man worth all Israelis, while at the same time you starve the orphans just across the street.

You shoot out my water tanks and you kill off Palestinian servicemen even though at the time of your brutal massacres, these servicemen were patrolling their land or simply eating their last supper. You cut off my electricity so you can assassinate me more easily in the dank shadows of your dark treachery.

You are cowards and you are afraid of little Palestinian children with stones. You never kill them single handedly. You roam in groups like packs of wild dogs and you are just as vicious if not more so.

You leave me and my people without hope and when you have driven me into a corner and deprived me of all that is human, I react with anger and bitterness. I strap explosives onto my body and search for a place to detonate myself. Yes, I kill your civilians, but this is the price you have to pay for taking away my inalienable rights, the rights that all men are entitled to for your demoniacal oppression of my people.

It is really very simple. God created all men equal and no man better than any other. Yet, somehow you have made it your protocol that Jews are better than all others and that you have the right to come to my land committing rape and plunder yet expect me to thank you for doing so.

Just the other day, a young boy was eating lunch. One of your settlers who came from America threw a firebomb into this boy’s house. His two brothers were killed immediately. But the one boy survived horribly disfigured. His name is Amar Emeera. His scars have turned a once beautiful child into a grotesque being that does not even look human. What did this child do to go through life so horribly disfigured?

You shoot babies point blank while swaddled in their parent’s arms in Palestinian cars going to weddings. You slay Palestinian children going to and from school and you slaughter Palestinian children when they fight your armies with their bare hands. One such child, Mohammed Abu Arrar was shot down and killed when he protested your occupation of his land. Palestinian relatives of the boy kissed his body laid out in his coffin before he was taken away to be buried in the Gaza Strip.

You kill unarmed Palestinian fathers on their way to buy school supplies and books for their children. You have even run out of excuses for the atrocities you continue to perpetrate. You shell the homes of Palestinian families, instantly killing the occupants and then claim that the action was friendly fire from the Palestinians even though the homes were far removed from the scene of the battle and even though remnants of your American made shells are scattered about the demolished homes of the innocent.

You collectively punish 3 million Palestinians half of whom are children who reside on what is left of their own land though you know full well that their only desire is to free themselves from your barbaric cruelty.

You tell the world that you want peace yet at every corner, at every instance, you are as far from peace as the earth is from a different universe speeding in an opposite direction.

You speak peace with the forked tongues of your warmongers and then pretend shock when finally a Palestinian human bomb blows himself up.

You will only be free of the threat of human bombs when you seek a just and comprehensive peace and when you end your occupation of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

Gay marriage now legally recognized in Israel

In a precedent-setting ruling, the High Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that five gay couples wedded outside of Israel can be registered as married couples.

A sweeping majority of six justices to one ruled that the civil marriages of five gay couples obtained in Toronto, Canada, can appear as married on the population registry.

The gay petitioners sought to force the state to give equal recognition to common law marriages of heterosexual couples to those of gay marriages, which can be performed in certain countries.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel that filed the petition on the behalf of the couples, argued before the court that the Interior Ministry's refusal to register them as married compromises their right to equality and to hold family life, and is based on "homophobe social perceptions."

The court rejected the position of the State Attorney, that states recognizing single-sex marriages cannot expect Israel to recognize such nuptial agreements drawn in these countries.

The state told the High Court that "Israel lacks the appropriate legal framework for such marriages," and therefore it cannot register them.

After the ruling was issued, the Civil Rights Association said it is "all the more important in the wake of the [recent] public turmoil stirred by the gay pride parade in Jerusalem."