As the Danish cartoon saga continues to gather steam, an Iranian paper has announced a contest for cartoons mocking the Holocaust in retaliation for the satirical drawings of Mohammed that were published last year. Implying a hypocritical attitude in the West about the role of free speech—i.e., it’s OK to make fun of Muslims but not Jews—the government controlled publication announced the contest after hundreds of demonstrators threw stones at the Danish embassy in Tehran.

Slate’s Michael Kinsley has suggested that this simply isn’t the case, in fact, that it is the exact opposite of the case:

Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more telling if the factual premise was accurate. But it is not. In fact, it is nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more common in the West, including the United States, than criticizing the United States—except for criticizing Israel. A few Western countries have stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the Holocaust, but that hasn't stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a literary industry and cultural phenomenon

He goes on to say that while American freedom of speech allows a free-for-all against the Jews, it has bunched itself up in knots trying to be “sensitive” to the touchy sensibilities of Muslims, e.g., the Times failing to publish the cartoons or government officials pandering to political correctness with bland statements about Islam being a religion of peace and toleration.

Not to try to over interpret this whole affair, but there’s another double standard at work as well. The Danish cartoons that started this whole mess seemed more critical of the religion of Islam than Muslims themselves: they satirized the figure of Muhammad or the Islamic understanding of paradise (virgins galore!). True, the most notorious caricature, Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, implied that Muslims were given to violence and terrorism, something they haven’t necessarily helped to disprove lately. But protestors seemed more alarmed at the doctrinal nature of the satire—the representation of the prophet—than what it said about everyday Muslims.

With this in mind, joking around about the Holocaust wouldn’t be an equivalent type of offense. The Holocaust is something that happened to the Jewish people, it’s not a belief or a practice. Thinking about it, it doesn’t reflect poorly on them but on the Europeans that carried it out. More appropriate—if you want to grant the Ayatollahs their tit-for-tat logic—would be criticisms of Jewish religious practices (those funny hats? those silly haircuts?) or even the shopworn stereotypes (usurious, money-grubbing Shylocks?) which, by the way, is the standard fare of much of the Arab press anyway.

None of this will wash though. Whether because of Israel or longstanding cultural prejudices, anti-Semitism paranoia in the Muslim world seems to have a long shelf life.