The death toll for the day rose further when two car bombs exploded and insurgents mounted two mortar attacks killing

The death toll for the day rose further when two car bombs exploded and insurgents mounted two mortar attacks, killing at least 32 people and injuring dozens of others.
Two American soldiers have also been killed this week, one on Monday from enemy action in the restive Anbar province, the other on Tuesday by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the US military command reported yesterday.Police said 60 of the bodies were found overnight scattered around Baghdad, with the majority dumped in predominantly Sunni neighbourhoods.In the capital, a car bomb near the traffic police building killed at least 19 people and wounded 62.. Police in Baghdad found the bodies yesterday of 65 men who had been tortured and shot before being dumped around the city. Iranian newspapers responded by playing on his supposed friendship with an Israeli cartoonist.Officials said that the exhibition championed freedom of speech, but yesterday they closed Iran’s most popular reformist newspaper. One alleged offence was its publication of a cartoon which appeared to show President Ahmadinejad as a donkey.. However, the US cartoonist David Baldinger said that his drawing “in no way ridiculed the Holocaust”.The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, condemned the exhibition when he visited Iran at the beginning of the month He said the Holocaust was “undeniable”.

The Jew held a placard saying “Mohamed cartoon” and the drowning man held a sign saying “Holocaust” Iran’s Jewish community had a mixed reaction. “Iranian Jews didn’t pay much attention,” said Haroun Yashayaie, the former head of Tehran’s Jewish community. “Iranians as a whole are not very sensitive to the issue of the Holocaust.”But a Jewish student said: “This regime is crazy Everybody knows the Holocaust happened. Over the past year things have become more difficult and this exhibition shows they do not care what we think.”The cartoons included US, European, Brazilian, Korean and Chinese entries. The angry response of Westerners to President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial this spring caught many Iranians off guard, while Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohamed provoked outrage in the Muslim world.A Moroccan entry by Hossein Abed showed Death riding a skeletal horse, clutching a pencil and sporting a Nazi armband His cloak was made of the Danish flag.

Another drawing showed an orthodox Jew pressing the face of another man into a lake labelled “freedom of expression”. Others focused on the suffering of Palestinians.Thousands of foreigners have visited the exhibition’s website at www.irancartoon , some of them engaging in angry debate. A conference on the Holocaust is planned in Tehran for October. It is also likely to garner more attention outside Iran than in the country.The exhibition followed a Holocaust cartoon competition designed to show Western double standards in freedom of speech.

Others accep-ted the Holocaust happened, but said it was being used to justify Western brutality in the Middle East. An entry byAlessandro Gatto, an Italian, showed an Arab looking forlornly from behind prison bars, which morphed into the stripes of a concentration camp jacket. “I don’t know why some say it didn’t happen.”
Shahram Rezaei, an Iranian cartoonist, drew Nazi soldiers laying a paper chain in a mass grave, implying that they were faking the deaths of Jews.Some depictions drew heavily upon anti-Semitic stereotypes. An exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust, some suggesting it was fabricated or exaggerated, has been a flop in Tehran. It drew audiences of fewer than 300 a day in its first week and now, three weeks after sparking international furore when it opened, attracts just 50 people a day. Most of those approached in central Tehran said they had not heard of the exhibition and insisted the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis was a historical fact. “I’m sure the Holocaust was true – I’ve heard all about it from newspapers and television,” said a housewife from a religious family.