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PARIS (AP) – He has been attacked time and again, threatened, bombed and beaten in an attack that killed a dozen staff members, but the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo continues to poke fun at Islamic extremism.
The newspaper’s many critics around the world say its newsroom is attacking Islam itself; people who work for Charlie Hebdo say they are denouncing intolerance, oppression and a political form of Islam that threatens democracy. But with free speech as its creed, the publication systematically pushes the limits of French laws against hate speech with often sexually explicit cartoons that confront or offend almost everyone.
His decision to publish new cartoons this week ridiculing his opponents in the Islamic world formed the backdrop for another attack on Thursday in France, where three people were fatally attacked in a church.
Charlie Hebdo has lampooned dead migrant children, virus victims, dying drug addicts, world leaders, neo-Nazis, popes, bishops, Jewish leaders, and other religious, political and entertainment figures. This week’s issue features a cartoon of the funeral of a beheaded teacher, showing officers carrying two coffins, one for the body and one for the head.
Since a trial opened last month over the 2015 attack that killed 12 of its cartoonists, the newspaper has chronicled the proceedings daily and devoted nearly half of its weekly front pages to poking fun at Islamic extremism.
“We need energetic actions to stop Islamism, but also to condemn the smallest gesture, the smallest intolerant or hateful word towards the French of immigrant origin. Because France is not divided between Muslims and non-Muslims, between believers and non-believers, between people with French roots and French people of immigrant origin, ”said this week’s editorial by Charlie Hebdo editor, who goes by the name Riss. “No, France is divided between democrats and undemocrats”,
The circulation of the newspaper is small, and many French find it disgusting or extreme, but they defend their right to exist.
The newspaper provoked ire by reprinting cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, originally published by a Danish magazine in 2005 and republished the following year by Charlie Hebdo. Those cartoons were seen as sacrilegious in Islam, and many Muslims around the world were genuinely hurt by them, but condemned the violence that has emerged in response.
In 2011, Charlie Hebdo’s offices were bombed after it published a bogus issue that “invited” the prophet to be its guest editor. His cartoon was on the cover.
A year later, the newspaper published more drawings of Muhammad amid an uproar over an anti-Muslim film. The cartoons showed Muhammad naked and in degrading or pornographic poses. The French government defended freedom of expression even when it rebuked Charlie Hebdo for stoking tensions.
In January 2015, two French-born Al Qaeda extremists, angered by the cartoons, stormed his newsroom and killed 12 people, including the editor-in-chief and several cartoonists.
Charlie Hebdo has not backed down. On the day the trial for that 2015 attack opened, the original cartoons of the prophet were reprinted.
Weeks later, a young Pakistani stabbed two people in front of Charlie Hebdo’s former offices, citing the republished cartoons. On October 16, a Chechen refugee beheaded a teacher on the outskirts of Paris who had shown the cartoons to his class, for a debate on freedom of expression.
In response, French President Emmanuel Macron staunchly defended Charlie Hebdo’s freedom to print cartoons and spoke out against Islamism, sparking protests and calls for boycotts across the Muslim world, as well as calls for violence against France from some extremist voices.
Sonia Mejri, the disenchanted French widow of the Islamic State commander who recruited one of the 2015 attackers, testified from jail during the trial. At the end of his testimony, he sent a message to the Charlie Hebdo reporters, including those sitting in the courtroom.
“Do not stop. It is important. It’s really what they hate the most, ”Mejri said. “You represent freedom. What they want is to create discomfort in society ”.
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