The Myth of the Holocaust

Those evil Iranians are at it again. "Iran cartoon show mocks Holocaust" proclaims Robert Tait in the Observer, before describing some of the pictures on view: "Ariel Sharon, the incapacitated former Israeli Prime Minister, is wearing an SS uniform. A man with Jewish side locks is depicted as a vampire drinking from a container marked 'Palestinian blood'. An Arab figure is impaled to the ground by the absurdly long nose of a man in a black hat characteristic of orthodox Jews and marked 'Holocaust'." These are "among the results of a competition run by the country's biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, to find the 'cleverest' cartoons satirising the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Second World War."

Tait's second paragraph notes with admirable objectivity: "At their worst, the images conform to lurid western stereotypes of Iran as a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as evoked by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's dismissal of the Holocaust as a 'myth'." Our quarrel is not with ordinary Iranians, but with the evil Ahmadinejad, as I am sure the Observer will remind them when the bombs begin to fall. It should be remembered that there is a difference between a myth and a fiction. A myth is a narrative which encapsulates a tradition, such as the Trojan War, the career of King Arthur or the Book of Genesis. A fiction is simply a story that is untrue, like The Da Vinci Code, or that one about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

It is perhaps notable that Tait does not quote Hamshahri's criteria beyond the word "cleverest", since the cartoons he describes - presumably, given the lurid moral indignation on display, the worst he could find - have very little to do with satirising the slaughter of six million Jews. Since it is unlikely that many Iranians consider Ariel Sharon a paragon of peace and compassion, it seems possible that his depiction in SS uniform might be satirising Sharon rather than whitewashing the Nazis. Since Israel vaunts its exclusionary status as the Jewish state, it hardly seems rational to criticise cartoonists for portraying Israeli aggression against the Palestinians as Jewish aggression. And, since the standard Imperial Humanitarian response to any criticism of Israeli actions is to press the Holocaust button good and hard, it hardly seems surprising that there is some cynicism in the Middle East about the ways in which the Holocaust is used; the ways in which the history of the Holocaust is simplified and distorted to suit a particular point of view; in other words, the myth of the Holocaust.