Some of these publications openly attack Jews, while others take a softer approach, directing hatred toward “Zionists,” who are often used interchangeably with “Jews.” This strategy, of downplaying clearly antisemitic tropes and reframing them as anti-Zionist sentiment, has been adopted by Iranian regime-controlled media outlets before. Post-World War II Europe, the author argued, “endorsed the myth of the Holocaust” as an “excuse for cowardice and humiliation.”Ī drawing submitted to a Holocaust denial cartoon contest sponsored by Iran in 2015 (Screenshot)Īfter praising the leader of Nazi Germany, the author still sought to differentiate between Jews and Zionists, the latter of whom he called “the most insidious, deceitful, and harmful creatures discovered by the human species,” claiming they “are even despised by the Jews and Jews of the world.” He claimed that “the logic that Hitler showed by expelling them from Germany is that he is smarter and more courageous than all current European leaders.” Sahraei then moved on to direct his attacks on Israel, which only manages to “remain in the heart of the Islamic region,” he argued, due to “the coercive money that the United States and some major European countries… pay to this regime annually.” “When the media giants of the world are in the hands of Murdoch the Zionist and the like, we should expect to see the same spirit that we have talked about since the beginning of this era in the media affiliated with them,” he wrote. He went on to accuse Jews of “fabricating” history and urged readers to be aware of Jewish “historical exaggerations and media.” In an apparent reference to the recent sentencing by a German court of a 93-year-old woman to 12 months in prison for denying that Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust, Sahraei wrote that Jews “lie so much that they believe in themselves and are even afraid of an old woman denying the Holocaust and sentence her to prison.”

Holocaust remembrance day