Last week the NYT ran a story on an exhibition of “International Holocaust Cartoon Contest” “winners” in a Tehran gallery. The reason for this exhibition is supposedly to highlight hyprocrisy “that in the West it is all right to insult religion but impermissible to question the Holocaust.”

If that were true it would be an improvement: the Times article includes a photo of three of the “winning” cartoons. The Times has never printed the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons as far as I know.

But some Iranians have demonstrated, rather weakly, that they support the idea of free speech and consider allowing some speech and prohibiting other speech hypocritical. The obvious next step is for these same to prove that they are not hyprocrites by displaying the Muhammad cartoons. However, I expect they’ll need to be egged on, and here’s an opportunity for an enterprising gallery owner elsewhere — put in an offer to run the IHCC show, preferably alongside the Muhammad cartoons and Holocaust photographs. Gallery owners, imagine the free publicity!

Here’s my “contribution”:

Photo accompanying the NYT story by Shawn Baldwin overlaid with Muhammad cutout from one of the Muhammad cartoons. In the Muhammad cartoon this cutout is taken from Muhammad stands in front of — two Muslim women covered in black!

I learned one interesting thing from the NYT story. There is a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament.