Iran’s biggest-selling newspaper has waded into the Muhammad controversy by launching a competition to find the 12 "best" cartoons about the Holocaust.

Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor for Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper, said that the deliberately inflammatory contest would test out how committed Europeans were to the concept freedom of expression.

"The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons," he said.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said that victims of the Holocaust and their families were growing used to insults from Iran. "It's just very sad," she told Times Online.

Iran’s regime is supportive of Holocaust revisionist historians, who maintain that the slaughter of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War was invented or exaggerated to justify the creation of Israel on Palestinian territory.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad courted international denunciation recently when he argued for Israel to be "wiped off the map". The President's vitriolic attacks on Israel have further soured relations with the West, already at loggerheads over the republic's nuclear research programme.

Mr Mortazavi said that tomorrow's edition of the paper would invite cartoonists to enter the competition, with gold coins as prizes for the 12 winning artists -- the same number of cartoons that appeared in the conservative Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten lighting the touchpaper for fury which has swept around the Islamic world.

Last week the Iranian Foreign Ministry invited Tony Blair to Tehran to take part in a planned conference on the Holocaust. Mr Blair said that such a conference was "shocking, ridiculous, stupid". The Prime Minister responded by inviting Mr Ahmadinejad to witness the evidence of the Holocaust in the countries of Europe.

Public protests against the publication of the cartoons have been relatively calm in Iran, although a crowd of about 200 smashed the windows of the Austrian Embassy in Tehran today.

The protesters, chanting "God is Greatest" and "Europe, Europe, shame on you", smashed all the diplomatic mission’s windows with stones and then tried to hurl petrol bombs inside.

Iran has withdrawn its ambassador to Denmark and has said it plans to review trade ties with all countries where the cartoons were published.

Mr Ahmadinejad has criticised the argument of freedom of speech employed by European newspapers to justify publication of the cartoons.

"If your newspapers are free why do not they publish anything about the innocence of the Palestinians and protest against the crimes committed by the Zionists?" the Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.

Andrew Kaufman, chairman of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), said: "We deplore this despicable initiative to trivialise the brutality of the Holocaust that will cause enormous insensitivity to all survivors of Nazism."

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