Iran: What cartoon? huh? (CS)

As reported in The Comics Journal no. 280, there is finally a winner for that Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest. Some Americans might have a dim recollection of this contest and how it was initiated in response to Danish cartoons depicting and lampooning Mohammad. In the U.S., the story about the contest was hardly a sidebar feature as it went up against reports of protests, riots and the burning of embassies across the Islamic world. It makes sense that we would forget about it in America.

What is strange, however, is that Iranians have forgotten about the contest too. Here was an issue Muslims seemed pretty worked up over and yet the winning cartoon was not published by any Iranian newspaper. TCJ shows reluctance to accept reports that "the entire affair [was] one that drew little-to-no interest from the Iranian public." And yet the winning cartoon didn't even run in the best-selling Iranian paper, Hamshahri, which sponsored the contest.

I didn't think the contest was such a bad idea. I thought it could have been an effective way to exercise some humor (rather than violence) within the situation. The winning results were (predictably) weak, and I suppose I was hoping for something more along the lines of what The Pain had to offer. But even more upsetting to me than what was chosen as a "good entry" is this lack of interest in the contest at all. It seems to indicate a disingenuous aspect to Islamic anger with the West, that there is much less frustration than advertised and without the incitement of this anger and violence from a handful of people, there would be room for more constructive ideas and methods for dealing with frustration. Or perhaps I'm reading far too much into something no one seems concerned with reading at all.