Hamshari Iran's best selling newspaper (according to The Guardian), owned by Teheran city council, has announced it will print cartoons satirising the Holocaust; the paper has announced an international competition is to be launched to find the most suitable cartoons. The Iranian government has also instituted a complete trade ban on Danish products in response to the publication of the infamous Mohammed cartoons in newspaper Jyllands Posten.

Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor of Hamshari, stated that the objective of this initiative is to test the free speech argument used by Western newspapers to defend the printing of the Mohammed cartoons. Mortazavi said the following: "The western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons."

The most recent European newspaper to publish the Mohammed cartoons was Austria's Kleine Zeitung; the Austrian embassy in Teheran has since been attacked.

Source: Media Guardian