BICOM

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif has appeared to defend a contest in Iran in which cartoonists are asked to create work that denies the Holocaust.

The annual competition, which was introduced by former-President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad and is sponsored by the Tehran Municipality, offers a prize of tens of thousands of pounds. Prior to this year’s competition, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sent an official complaint to Iran over the contest. Nonetheless, Holocaust denial is commonplace among many Iranian leaders. On the eve of this year’s International Holocaust Memorial Day, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a video clip which questioned whether the Holocaust is “reality or not.”

Zarif, who is considered a relative moderate, headed Iran’s negotiations of July’s accord with the international community over Tehran’s nuclear programme. He recently said that he is in daily contact with US Secretary of State John Kerry. However, in an interview this week with the New Yorker, Zarif was pressed on the annual Holocaust denial cartoon contest. Rather than criticise the contest or its content, Zarif countered “Why does the United States have the Ku Klux Klan?… Is the government of the United States responsible for the fact that there are racially hateful organizations in the United States?”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that Zarif is the “master of double-speak” and that his claims that Iranian authorities “don’t control this contest is farcical. This is a country where you can be put in prison for liking something of Facebook, where the intelligence ministry monitors every tweet and every blog.”

Ira Forman, the US State Department’s special envoy to combat and monitor anti-Semitism commented, “We’re really concerned this contest is used as a platform for Holocaust denial…and anti-Semitic speech.”