The Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, in collaboration with Iran's House of Cartoon and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex, will host the Second International Holocaust Cartoons Contest.

For the shocking contest, participating cartoonists are tasked with creating artwork that makes fun of the Holocaust. The winning entry will be displayed at the Palestine Museum and the artist will be awarded $12,000 in prize money.

The contest, originally hosted back in the year 2006, was revived in large part as a protest against Charlie Hebdo. "The 2nd International Holocaust Cartoons Contest has been organized in protest against French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo's recent publication of the cartoons insulting Prophet Muhammad," according to organizers, as indicated in a Fox News report.

The winning entry in the 2006 contest featured an image of an Israeli crane constructing a wall on the Auschwitz death camp. The barrier is depicted as blocking off the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine located in Jerusalem.

Marisa Danson, a representative of Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, expressed outrage at the news. "Although the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed in Charlie Hebdo has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or the Holocaust, the Iranian regime insists on making a distorted and direct connection between the two. The manipulative, intentional distortion of the Holocaust desecrates the memory of both victims and survivors, and suggests strongly that the Iranian regime has yet to overcome the politics of hate," she said.

The Iranian government is known to have expressed its doubts regarding the existence of the Holocaust, or, at the very least, raised the possibility that accounts of it had been extremely exaggerated.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, suggested that the contest is Iran's way of showing defiance against Western values. He explained that the Holocaust is a prime example of man's inhumanity against its fellow man, and for Iran to question its legitimacy is a sign of great disrespect towards the Western world.