The mullahs in Iran have come up with a great way to point out Western hypocrisy. Last week, USA Today carried this AP dispatch from Tehran, Iran:

An exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust opened this week, reflecting Iran’s response to last year’s Muslim outrage over a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.

The display, showing 204 entries from Iran and abroad, was strongly influenced by the views of Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who drew widespread condemnation last year for calling the Holocaust a “myth” and saying Israel should be destroyed.

One cartoon by Indonesian Tony Thomdean shows the Statue of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in its left hand and giving a Nazi-style salute with the other.

So far, it sounds like the kind of thing you might find at a left-wing protest here in the United States. And I can’t recall the expression of such sentiments ever resulting in a murderous backlash of rioting.

[The exhibit] came following worldwide protests by Muslims against the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Many Muslims considered the cartoons a violation of traditions prohibiting images of their prophet.

[Iranian newspaper] Hamshahri said it wanted to test the West’s tolerance for drawings about the Nazi killing of 6 million Jews in World War II.

I’m sure we’ll handle it just fine. In fact, the folks behind these cartoons might just end up getting hired as professors.

And in other news related to Iran’s interesting definition of tolerance:

Human rights groups and concerned individuals worldwide are demanding an end to stoning executions in Iran - and right now are pressuring the head of the Islamic nation’s judiciary to lift the death sentence against a 34-year-old mother of two young children.

Malak Ghorbany was sentenced to death June 28 by a court in the Iranian city of Urmia after being found guilty of committing “adultery.”

Under Iran’s strict Sharia law, women sentenced to execution by stoning have their hands bound behind their back. They are wrapped from head to toe in sheets before being seated in a pit. The ditch is filled up to their breasts with dirt, and the soil is packed tightly before people assemble to execute the woman by pitching rocks at her head and upper body.

Article 104 of the Iranian Penal Code states that the stones used for execution should “not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes, nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones.”

Ironically, the court sentenced the woman’s brother Abu Bakr Ghorbany and husband Mohammad Daneshfar to only six years in jail for killing her lover. According to Sharia law, murder carries a lesser penalty than “crimes against chastity.”

Stonings decreased after international pressure on former reformist President Mohammad Khatami in the late ’90s. And Ayatollah Shahroudi, the current head of Iran’s judiciary, issued a ruling to judges ordering a moratorium on execution by stoning in December 2002. But the brutal killings have continued and the practice was never abolished from the penal code of the Islamic Republic. In May, two other women, Abbas Hajizadeh and Mahboubeh Mohammadi, were executed for committing adultery, with more than 100 members of the Revolutionary Guards and Bassij Forces participating in the stoning.

Iranian tolerance. Catch the feeling!