September 3, 2021
Tabatabai says Serbia has refused to give him a visa because of his work producing exhibitions of Holocaust denial cartoons.
Speaking to the Mehr news agency August 8, he said he had been invited to preside over the jury of the 21st Kragujevac Salon of Antiwar Cartoons in Serbia.
He said the organizers sent him a plane ticket to Serbia and made all the arrangements for his attendance. However, the Serbian embassy then told him he had no chance to get a visa.
“I was very badly treated by the staff at the Embassy of Serbia in Tehran today,” Shojaei-Tabatabai said. “They refused to give any explanation and even didn’t allow me to enter the embassy,” he said.
“For me, paying respect to an Iranian is more important than anything and, due to the Holocaust issues and political reasons, I expected such treatment,” Shojaei-Tabatabai said.
His comments seemed to embarrass the embassy and, two weeks later, the cartoonist was invited to the embassy and given a Serbian visa.
Shojaei-Tabatabai previously organized the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest.
He said, “We do not seek to deny the Holocaust, but mean to portray the oppression of the Palestinians and say that we believe the Zionist regime has been the root of all the difficulties the Palestinians have been through.” However, a great many of the cartoons on display ridiculed the idea that there had ever been a mass killing of Jews in Germany.
The idea for the cartoon contests emerged after the 2005 cartoons ridiculing Islam and the Prophet Muham-mad were printed in Jyllands Posten, a Danish daily.
