This weekend, the Islamic Republic will hold its third Holocaust-cartoon festival, with submissions vying to mock the Shoah, deny that it happened, or insult Jews and Israel more generally. When asked about the contest in an interview for the New Yorker, the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif insisted that it is run by an NGO and not sponsored by the government. Nikahang Kowsar, a cartoonist who fled Iran after receiving death threats for publishing work critical of the regime, sets the record straight:

The claim that the Iranian government doesn’t control this platform for spewing hate and denying the Holocaust is a pure lie, coming from a pathological liar [Zarif] whose previous absurd claim, exactly a year before this one, was “we do not jail people for their opinions.”

The director of the Iranian Cartoon House, a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, runs the contest according to rules set by the Culture and Arts Center, [part of the] Tehran municipal government. Cartoon House is not allowed to hold international competitions and contests without permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. . . . [T]he winners of this hate-fest are awarded prize money that is sent to them through the standard channels, controlled and monitored by the government.

Interestingly, the spokesman for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance denied Zarif’s claim.

Mr. Zarif is the darling of many American reporters, and he knows that most of them avoid scrutinizing whatever he spouts in order to secure another interview or even travel to Iran without facing any problems. . . . [T]he Islamic Republic has not only jailed but tortured, assassinated, and executed [citizens] for their opinions, including converts [from Islam], practitioners of the Baha’i faith, members of the LGBT community, and critics of the government.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”