Israel News Agency To Post SEO Iran Holocaust Cartoons


By Israel News Agency Staff

Jerusalem----February 13.....In response to Iran's best-selling newspaper announcing a competition to find the best cartoons about the Holocaust, the Israel News Agency has begun to post the Holocaust cartoons.

"Iran is seeking any means to divert attention away from the fact that they are building nuclear weapons," said Joel Leyden, publisher of the Israel News Agency. "Iran states that they want to test the democratic limits of Western free speech by laughing at the Holocaust, and the INA is more than pleased to oblige in posting these cartoons. The only catch is that we are doing so with an educational, factual disclaimer inserted inside these Holocaust cartoons. It states: "Six Million Jews Were Gassed, Shot and Hung During the Holocaust. This cartoon does not promote 'free speech' rather it illustrates Islamic racist hate and incitement to violence against all other religions."

The Israel News Agency in posting these Holocaust cartoons from Iran, has launched an SEO - Internet search engine optimization marketing contest to prevent Iran and Islam terrorist groups news Websites from reaching top positions in Google. This is the first time that a SEO contest was created for a political and humanitarian cause. And the INA has secured Olympic gold in its quest to outrank any and all Arab and Islam Websites as when one searches for the key words: "iran holocaust cartoons" the Israel News Agency has secured a Google first place ranking.

The Israel News Agency uploaded four Holocaust cartoons from Iran today. One cartoon doubted that the murdered Holocaust victims were Jewish, another depicted Anne Frank in bed with Adolph Hitler.

"When I heard that a newspaper in Iran was now holding a cartoon contest on the Holocaust, I knew that SEO would be the most potent tool in combating it," said Joel Leyden, publisher of the Israel News Agency. "That 12 winners in Iran would have their Holocaust cartoons published and would receive two gold coins (worth about $140 each) as a prize, I cocked and loaded my keyboard. The words "disgusting" and "despicable" do not even begin to describe the barbaric response of how Iran reacted to cartoons of Mohammed coming from an irresponsible and insensitive newspaper in Denmark.
What really puzzles me is that the Arab media trashes Judaism almost daily in their newspapers and yet we do not hear Jews chanting death to Muslims. But still there is no way that Iran will be allowed to spit on the graves of over 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

Police fired tear gas and used sticks today to stop about 7,000 students protesting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from marching on the governor's residence in northwestern Pakistan. The Islam students had marched to several universities in Peshawar and hurled stones at a Christian school, breaking windows and causing other damage. They also threw stones at shops in the main business district, chanting “Down with America” and “Down with Denmark.”

There were no immediate reports of casualties, but an Associated Press reporter saw students carrying away a classmate with an injured leg. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf told journalists in the capital, Islamabad, on Monday that newspapers that have printed the caricatures were “being totally oblivious to the consequences for the world, for world peace and harmony.” “The most moderate Muslim will go to the street and talk against it because this hurts the sentiments of every Muslim,” he said. “Whether an extremist or a moderate or an ultramoderate, we will condemn it.”

Several large rallies have been held across Pakistan against the cartoons, which were first published in a Denmark newspaper in September. The cartoons have been reprinted in numerous publications in Europe and elsewhere in what publishers say is a show of solidarity for freedom of expression, setting off protests from Canada to Indonesia.

Some demonstrations have been violent, and the tension has noticeably increased anti-Western dialogue in the Muslim world. In the West Bank, hundreds of Palestinian children stomped on a Danish flag and shouted anti-Danish slogans Monday to protest the caricatures. The demonstration in Hebron was organized by a school affiliated with the Islamic terrorist group Hamas, which is poised to lead the next Palestinian government. Palestinians have held mass protests against the drawings in recent weeks, threatened to kidnap Europeans in Gaza and chased foreign observers out of Hebron. One of Iran largest newspapers opened a contest Monday seeking caricatures of the Holocaust. Hamshahri newspaper said it wanted to test whether the West extends its principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the cartoons of Islam's prophet. “We don't intend retaliation over the drawings of the prophet. We just want to show that freedom is restricted in the West,” said Davood Kazemi, executive manager of the contest and cartoon editor at the paper.


A cartoon of our own:
Muslims can dish it out, but can't take it.

The Iran government on Sunday rejected an accusation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that it has fanned violent protests over the caricatures and demanded an apology, saying that could reduce growing tension. Rice, meanwhile, said Iran and Syria should be urging their citizens to remain calm – not encouraging violence like the attacks on Western diplomatic missions in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Nearly a dozen people were killed in protests in Afghanistan.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the drawings as “insensitive and rather offensive,” but he called for dialogue. “Right now there's megaphone diplomacy,” Annan told Denmark's national broadcaster DR. “And I think we should turn off the megaphones and begin to talk quietly to each other.”

The Israel News Agency is asking every SEO advertising marketing professional to create Web pages and optimize the keywords: "Iran Holocaust Cartoon Contest" in order to prevent the Iran newspapers, the enemies of Israel, the Jews, the Christians and Western democracy from attaining a high Google and Google News position. The SEO contestants will wrap these keywords around their comments of how Iran has sponsored Islam suicide bombing terror attacks against innocent men, women and children in Israel. Iran directly funds the activities of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbullah.

"SEO Internet marketing contests are held almost every day marketing casino and other commercial Web sites," said Leyden. "It's time we used SEO Internet marketing against Islamic terrorists, those in Iran who wish to "wipe Israel off the map" and turn democracy's key principle of freedom of speech against those of us living in the US, England, France, Denmark, Israel, Turkey, Spain and other Western nations."

Iran made Holocaust denial government policy when Iran foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said in December that remarks made by the Iran president that the Nazi mass murder of Jews during World War II was a "myth" was the official Iranian government's position on the issue. "The words of [president] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and on Israel are not personal opinions, nor isolated statements but they express the view of the Iran government," Mottaki said. Ahmadinejad made the Holocaust remarks after stating in October that Israel should be "wiped off the map." "The Palestinians or Islamic nations can not be forced to pay for the injustices the Europeans believe they committed against the Jews," the minister said speaking at Tehran airport after a visit to Pakistan.

As Iran happily collects Holocaust cartoons for a newspaper contest, Iran officials have sent a letter to the United Nations saying it wanted the organization to "remove by mid-month any seals and surveillance systems on their uranium enrichment plant, parts of which were still being monitored by international inspectors." The Los Angeles Times reports the letter also said that Iran would end all voluntary compliance with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran had been voluntarily complying with a set of rules that allowed for inspections on short notice on many facilities that are a part of Iran's nuclear energy program. Now that access to these facilities will end.

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were "life unworthy of life."

During the era of the Holocaust, the Nazis also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that the Third Reich would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, close to two out of every three European Jews had been killed as part of the "Final Solution", the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.

Although Jews were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled people were murdered in the Euthanasia Program. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Nazis persecuted and murdered millions of other people. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet citizens for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, homosexuals and others deemed to be behaving in a socially unacceptable way were persecuted.

Yad Veshem Israel museum in Jerusalem has a SHOAH Resource Center consisting of a comprehensive database on the Holocaust including photographs, artifacts, testimonies, documents, maps, diaries, research papers, and The Holocaust memorial center includes a chronology - a timeline of the events of the Holocaust with over 300 events and brief entries on each. A bibliography which lists over 200 books in English that are generally regarded by scholars and teachers as important in the study of the Holocaust. And documents of the Holocaust - a comprehensive collection of over 200 documents on the destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union.

As Iran focuses on securing Holocaust cartoons, the EU’s executive office today warned Iran that attempts to boycott Danish goods or cancel trade contracts with European countries would lead to a further rupture in already cool relations. The EU was trying to confirm comments made by Iran’s president that the country should boycott Danish products in protest of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, said EU spokesman Johannes Laitenberger. “A boycott of Danish goods is by definition a boycott of European goods,” Laitenberger said. “A boycott hurts the economic interests of all parties, also those who are boycotting and can damage the growing trade links between the EU and the countries concerned.”

The Brussels-based Conference of European Rabbis (CER) denounced the idea of Holocaust cartoons coming from Iran and urged the Muslim world to do likewise. Iran daily paper said the contest was designed to test the boundaries of free speech. In Paris, CER President Joseph Sitruk, who is also Chief Rabbi of France, said: "The Iranian regime has plummeted to new depths if it regards the deaths of six million Jews as a matter for humor or to score cheap political points. "Sadly, we are not surprised by this action," he said, recalling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's calls last year for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and his dismissal of the Holocaust as a myth. In a statement issued by the CER, which represents chief rabbis from over 40 European countries, Sitruk said the Iranian government menaced Jews and the whole international community. Sitruk noted that European religious leaders had condemned the publication of images likely to offend believers' feelings.

"This is a test for the Muslim world to react immediately to condemn their own co-religionists in Iran for such obscene behavior as we condemned those who sought to insult them," he said.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he saw the initiative by Iran's largest-selling paper as an extension of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's campaign of virulent anti-Israeli rhetoric. "Any attempt to mock or to in any way denigrate the horror that was the Holocaust is simply outrageous," McCormack said.

Iran Hamshahri newspaper announced the competition over cartoons depicting the Nazi slaughter of Jews before and during World War II as a reprisal for Western papers printing satirical images of Mohammed. McCormack reiterated US support for freedom of expression throughout the world, including in Iran. But he saw no comparison between the plans by Hamshahri and the move by a Danish paper to run the Mohammed cartoons. "I don't think that anybody would draw any equivalences between, quote/unquote, 'freedom of the press' in Iran and freedom of the press in Western Europe or the United States," he said.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in response to the controversy stemming from the twelve cartoons depicting Mohammed featured in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and reprinted in other Europe newspapers: ADL is opposed to religious, racial and ethnic stereotyping in the media. The ADL said that it found some of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten troubling, particularly the direct linkage of Mohammad and violence. "At the same time, we are gravely concerned by the extreme violent reaction these cartoons have generated in Muslim communities in Europe, and particularly in the Middle East. It is certainly the right of individuals and governments to express their disagreement with these depictions. However, the use of violence, threats, boycotts and other extreme reactions are highly inappropriate and bode ill for future debates involving Islam, democracy and free speech."

The ADL statement concluded: "what has been overlooked in the controversy is the fact that despicable anti-Jewish caricatures appear daily in newspapers across the Arab and Muslim world. In a democratic society, newspapers need to be free to publish controversial content without fear of censorship or intimidation of their writers and editors. At the same time, newspapers and all media outlets should to take into account the sensitivities of racial, ethnic and religious groups."

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights and educational organization, condemned the proposed cartoons contest. "They're following the classic formula of Adolf Hitler, which says if there's a problem, it's the fault of the Jews," said Rabbi Marvin Hier from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The Islamic demonstrations over the Muhammad cartoons so far have caused five deaths and many injuries.

American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday that anger sparked by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could spin out of control and urged governments, especially Iran and Syria, to "act responsibly".

"If governments do not act responsibly, we could face a sense of outrage that spins out of control and particularly if people continue to incite it," she said on the ABC television program This Week. "It is well known that Iran and Syria bring protesters into the streets when they wish, to make a point," she said. Rice said Washington had lodged a complaint in which they told Damascus, "these are incited riots, and they need to be controlled".

"This is a test for SEO professionals in every democratic nation who have a rich background in public relations, marketing and advertising HTML SEO programming to make their mark and illustrate their power," said Leyden. "On-line news sites do not optimize their news stories with search engine optimization SEO technology and as a result their stories get lost in cyberspace. Rather than SEO the keywords "seraphim proudleduck", SEO PR professionals should now concentrate on "iran holocaust cartoons" and bury the racist Iran information PR war of incitement among Muslims world-wide."

With the Associated Press

 

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