HOLOCAUST CARTOON

The winning entry in the Iranian sponsored holocaust cartoon competition shows, in the background, the dome of the rock (al Masjid al Aqsa, built on the site of the Temple after the Muslim conquerors took Jerusalem), and in the foreground a crane placing segments of the terrorist-separation barrier, on which is painted the universally recognized vista of the approach to Auschwitz.


We can guess what message the Moroccan artist (Abdullah Derkaoui) intended, and we pretty much know what the Iranian judges thought they saw.


But there is more to it than that. Much much more.


Let us construe.


As follows:

The dome in the distance is the permanent scar left by centuries of Muslim violence and tyranny, while the wall in the foreground is a reminder that the same brutality and barbarism that led to the holocaust not only survives but thrives among the Arabs on the eastern side of the wall.


Would the Muslims want to repeat the holocaust?


There is no doubt that they would - their media, their intellectuals, and their leaders have made that more than clear. Anti-Semitic drivel from their side is such a flood of venom in so many flavours, that the only way to deal with it, in the short-term, is to close ones' ears and close off the source. Doing otherwise would leave one weeping at the amount of evil in the world, and asphyxiating on the smoke-clouds of burning hatred roilling forth from their cities.

They hate, they hate with a passion, they seem incapable of passion other than hate.


The fact that the wall has stopped them from sending their less-gifted children with bomb-belts to blow up buses no doubt leaves much of their society frustrated. All that is left for them is fond-daydreaming of what the Europeans did and what the Iranians promise.

Auschwitz on the wall perfectly represents the frustrated bloodlust of millions, for whom the world is too small and too filled with people who do not acknowledge their claims to superiority and total ownership; it represents decades of murderous propaganda, and billions of dollars wasted by petro-sheikhs and despots who would rather pay for terrorist acts beyond their borders than libraries inside their own capitols.

Auschwitz on the wall represents the complete failure of Arab societies to achieve anything of note in the eight decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire. They've quarreled with each other, fought with each other, betrayed each other, and murdered each other.
And at each turn, they've blamed everyone but each other.


Now there's a picture of Auschwitz on a wall facing them, like a remonstrance, or a reminder of their failings. And tens of millions of them have immigrated into the Western lands, trying to get away from themselves. Europe and America are awash with bitter refuse from all the Arab lands, who saw no future in Fez, or Cairo, or Damascus.


Thank you, Abdullah Derkaoui, for so ably illustrating the ghastly void that is your society, the sad and dismal bankruptcy of your culture, and the dashed hopes and dreary hatreds of your people. Nothing better shows the perversion and destructiveness that lives among the souls lost to Islam.


And also, thanks go out to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose pettiness and loss of contact with reality made this illustration possible, and whose government so perfectly demonstrates why vigilance is still necessary, why the struggle for civilization must still be fought, and why each generation will still have enemies to quell.


I would also thank the Prophet Muhammad, whose dreams and nightmares ultimately made all of this possible - but he's been dead for centuries, and we cannot form any real impression of his character, as we gratefully know so little about him. Other than that he took a nine-year old as wife - an act that in our age and in our society would stamp him as depraved, but which was probably quite normal and fashionable in Mecca and Medina during that dark age.

In any case, it is not entirely fitting to speak ill of the long-dead.