In a move strongly reminiscent of the Jewish people’s Purim epoch, the Iranian government is preparing for a festival counting down to Israel’s demise.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Tehran is preparing for a festival to showcase anti-Israel sentiments in both traditional and high-tech media with prizes for the winners.

The “imminent collapse of the Zionist regime” is the subject of the Hourglass Festival, a supposedly international event touted at a press conference held by its organizers on Tuesday.

The press conference’s timing could be considered apt, as Israel will be celebrating the holiday of Purim on Wednesday evening, Thursday and Friday, a festival that celebrates the Jewish people’s thwarting of Persian viceroy Haman’s plan to annihilate the Jews some 2,300 years ago.

At the press conference, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Secretary General of the International Conference on Supporting Palestinian Intifada, said that the Iranian regime believes that Israel will collapse within the next 25 years, but that meanwhile Israel is purposefully keeping the region in an era of instability. Therefore, to combat this “Zionist aggression,” Iran is hosting the Hourglass Festival as a means to display and promote anti-Israel art and multimedia creations while the sand runs out of the timer, he claimed.

This festival’s theme isn’t new to Tehran, however. Already in June 2017, Iran unveiled a digital clock in its capital counting down the days to what it says will be the destruction of Israel in 2040.

The Iranian organizers have set up a website for the event. Inexplicably, the name of the festival on the site is also written in Hebrew.

The various subjects of artwork include titles such as Israel and oppression, Islamophobia, and terrorism promotion, as well as “Israel, a fake, racist and colonialist regime.” Prize money for the winners of each category are modest four-figure sums.

From posters and caricatures to apps, podcasts and video clips, the range of acceptable artistic works is quite large, presumably to entice the greatest number of anti-Israel submissions.

The closing ceremony will fittingly be held on International Quds Day in April, when anti-Israel rallies are often held in Arab and Muslim cities across the Middle East. Iranians march on that day under banners such as “Death to Israel, Death to America.”

It is unclear whether the festival will replace Iran’s traditional International Holocaust Cartoon contest, the theme of which is unadulterated Holocaust denial. Hundreds of drawings have been sent to be judged each year, with the winner taking home as much as $50,000.

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