Argentina’s Muslims denounce Holocaust cartoon

A Holocaust-themed cartoon in an Argentinean newspaper has brought the country’s Muslim and Jewish residents closer together.

In a new letter to the Jewish community, the Islamic Center of the Argentinean Republic has expressed its “emphatic rejection of the supposedly humorous” comic strip, in which Hitler tells a DJ at a Nazi concentration camp to play relaxing music “so the soap will turn out better.”

Pagina 12, the newspaper that published the cartoon, released an apology last week following protests by Buenos Aires’ Jewish community, while a group of 140 artists released their own letter expressing support for cartoonist Gustavo Sala and claiming the protests were an attack on free speech.

The letter from the Islamic group, signed by its president and general secretary, called the cartoon “grotesque and perverse,” claiming it reflected its creator’s “sick and dangerous mind.”

The letter praised Argentina as a place where “Jews, Christians and Muslims have always lived and [still] live in exemplary co-existence.”