Protest Against Reprint: Thousands Against “Charlie Hebdo” Cartoons

Thousands of Muslims have taken to the streets in various Islamic countries to protest against the French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo”. The reissue of the Muhammad cartoons infuriates her.

The reissue of controversial cartoons of Muhammad in the French satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” has sparked protests in many Islamic countries. Thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan after the government harshly criticized the reprint of the cartoons. Insulting religion is punishable by the death penalty under Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws. 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.

There were also protests in Turkey, Egypt and Iran. Tehran condemned the cartoons as “provocation.” The cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2005, were 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. Images of the prophet are fundamentally forbidden in Islam.

Sold out in a day

According to the “Charlie Hebdo” editorial team, the special edition sold out in one day. On the occasion of the beginning of the trial of the alleged assistants in the attack on the editorial team on January 7, 2015, the satirical newspaper reprinted the cartoons of that week. The Islamists who carried out the attack on the Paris satire newspaper and a Jewish supermarket, killing twelve people, had justified their act with cartoons.

The newspaper had distributed 200,000 copies to newsstands on Wednesday, the day the trial began. It is three times the normal edition. But the copies sold out quickly. 200,000 copies were reprinted by Saturday.

“We never give up”

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.” “We follow the assumption that some people are not aware of the cartoons, some were not even born when they were published by Charlie in 2006, and they need to understand why the attacks occurred,” said a cartoonist by 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.