First there were the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005 for breaking a taboo against portraying Prophet Mohammed. In 2010, the creators of the South Park TV show faced death threats and January brought the brutal attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Earlier this month in the US state of Texas, two gunmen were shot dead after they opened fire at a cartoon contest at which participants were drawing caricatures of the prophet.
Clearly then, cartoons seem to rile people up, a lesson that Iran seems to have learnt well: it jailed a cartoonist just this week after she depicted the country's leaders as animals. Ironically, Iran has launched a cartoon competition of its own. The Independent reports that the Tehran Municipality has organised a cartoon competition that aims to generate work that mocks the Islamic State, the radical Islamist group that has seized large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.
Here are some of the cartoons.
Anti-#ISIS cartoon exhibition opened in Tehran #Iran, 280 work from 40 countries displayed. http://t.co/WA7RZfxMQZ pic.twitter.com/nV9ZVho0eY
— Golnaz Esfandiari (@GEsfandiari) May 24, 2015
Anti-#ISIS cartoon exhibition opened in Tehran #Iran @ http://t.co/DqMqs26xMK #cartoonz #داعش pic.twitter.com/Rs4VbnszKs
— Renkian (@_Skendong) May 26, 2015
Iran holds anti-ISIS cartoon contest (Taking the war to the next level...) pic.twitter.com/oquQtNaSKg
— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) May 26, 2015
Iranian cartoon contest links US, Israel to ISIS http://t.co/KJTmkZspUE pic.twitter.com/x4EFgTPCbx
— ✡MAGID מגיד ✡ (@idf1980israel) May 25, 2015
Cartoon and caricature contest held in ... https://t.co/tvzjUpeTTG via @PressTV #PressTV | https://t.co/OlQAT2mevR pic.twitter.com/2s37ANJNfX
— Eddy ☭ (@eddyElGallo) May 25, 2015
There is an inherent paradox in this exercise, since many people would characterise Iran itself as an extremist, Islamist state. That said, the Islamic State extreme creed characterises all Shia Muslims as heretics and its forces have done their best to not only wipe out Shias but also destroy Shia shrines and places of worship. This, of course, means that there is no love lost between the Shia state of Iran and the IS.
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