The official paper of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ran an anti-Semitic cartoon of Germany’s foreign minister on Tuesday, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The paper, called Javan, depicted German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas posing with a Nazi salute while wearing Star of David-rimmed glasses and a swastika armband.
Front page of IRGC daily Javan shows a caricature of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, and writes "the fascist expectation of Europe's envoy." Shows him giving Nazi salute, and wearing Nazi armband, glasses shaped in Star of David, and tie of US flag. pic.twitter.com/8zVwX2b0Jg
— Amir Toumaj (@AmirToumaj) June 11, 2019
Javan also had an editorial alongside the cartoon stating that “the stinking leftovers of Nazism and fascism have manifested themselves in the spirit of the weakest Europe in history.” Maas met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Tehran on June 10, where he urged the Iranian government to stay in the Iran nuclear deal.
Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper told the Post, “Why such desperation by Germany to save serial liar genocide wannabe tyrants in Tehran? Time to use peaceful sanctions to stand up to tyrants and stand up for people of Iran.”
Such anti-Semitic cartoons are not uncommon in Iran. On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2012, Iran aired cartoons depicted Jews concocting the Holocaust as a fictional tale in order to steal land from Palestinian Arabs. In 2010, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) compiled a series of similar Holocaust-denying cartoons from the Iranian Holocartoons website.
Additionally, in 2006, The New York Times reported on the Palestinian Contemporary Art Museum in Tehran featuring images of “a Jew with a very large nose” and “the word Holocaust” on the man’s chest as part of a Holocaust cartoon-drawing contest. Other images included “a vampire wearing a big Star of David drinking the blood of Palestinians” and “[former Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon dressed in a Nazi uniform, emblazoned not with swastikas but with the Star of David.”
