[ad_1]
Muhammad cartoons reprinted: strong protests in Muslim countries
| Reading time: 3 minutes
Trial of alleged accomplices of the murderer begins
Five years after the attack on the satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo”, the trial of eleven alleged accomplices of the murderers begins. In January 2015, Islamists broke into the “Charlie Hebdo” newsroom and killed twelve people.
During the trial for the attack on the “Charlie Hebdo” newsroom, the satirical newspaper reprinted the famous cartoons of Muhammad. In Muslim countries, on the other hand, people took to the streets.
reThe reissue of controversial Muhammad cartoons in the French satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” sparked protests in many Islamic countries on Friday. Thousands of people took to the streets in anti-French demonstrations in Pakistan after the government harshly criticized the reprint of the cartoons. According to the editorial team, all copies of the special edition were sold out in one day.
On the occasion of the start of the trial of the alleged aides in the “Charlie Hebdo” attack, the satirical newspaper reprinted the cartoons this week, making it a target for Islamists. The Islamists who carried out the attack on the Paris satirical newspaper on January 7, 2015, killing twelve people, had justified their act with cartoons.
The drawings show, among other things, the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb instead of a turban on his head. “We will never give up,” wrote the newspaper’s editor, Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, in an accompanying text. Reprinting the cartoons is “significant.”
“All this for that”: the special edition with the reprinted cartoons
Source: Getty Images / Marc Piasecki
“We follow the assumption that some people were not aware of the cartoons, some were not even born when Charlie published them in 2006, and they need to understand why the attacks occurred,” said a cartoonist with the stage name “Juin.” AFP news agency. The strong demand “shows that we are supported, that freedom of expression, secularism and the right to blasphemy are not old-fashioned values and that they have the support of the French public who bought this edition,” Juin said.
The newspaper had distributed 200,000 copies, three times the normal circulation, to newsstands by Wednesday, but the copies sold out quickly. 200,000 copies were reprinted by Saturday.
While the satirical newspaper was happy about its success, the action sparked violent protests in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Egypt. “We have to send a strong message to the French that this lack of respect for our beloved Prophet will not be tolerated,” protester Mohammad Ansari said during a demonstration in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. The demonstrations were led by the Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, which has organized large and often violent protests in the past over alleged profanity.
Images of the prophet are forbidden in Islam. Insulting religion can be punishable by death under strict Pakistani anti-blasphemy laws. For the Iranian government, the cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2005, represent an “insult” to the more than one billion Muslims around the world. Any disrespectful portrayal of Muhammad or other prophets is “absolutely unacceptable,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Thursday night.
Tehreek-e-Labbaik Islamist Party Supporters Protest “Charlie Hebdo” in Pakistan
What: dpa / KM Chaudry
Call for a boycott of French products during a protest in Pakistan
Source: AFP / AAMIR QURESHI
Demonstration in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi
Source: AFP / AAMIR QURESHI
Protesters run over a French flag
Source: AFP / ARIF ALI
French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, defended freedom of expression in his country. This also includes the right to blasphemy, the 42-year-old said in Paris on Friday. In his speech on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the so-called Third Republic at the Pantheon in Paris, Macron made explicit reference to the trial of “Charlie Hebdo”. The prevailing secularism in France guarantees the “freedom to believe or not to believe”. As a Frenchman, you defend the right to make someone laugh and the freedom to ridicule or caricature. The head of state had already defended the right to blasphemy earlier in the week during a trip to the Middle East.
The trial of 14 alleged accomplices of the attackers opened in Paris on Wednesday, who in addition to the editorial team of “Charlie Hebdo” had also attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
