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Laughing Cow doesn’t have much to laugh at right now. The popular triangular shaped French melted cheese, La vache qui rit (French: The Laughing Cow), stood at the breakfast table of Arab households, now in political exile. In Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan, dozens of retailers and consumer cooperatives removed French dairy products from refrigerated shelves over the weekend. Since then, photos and videos of empty supermarket shelves have flooded the Arab network.
On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan further fueled the discussion by asking his compatriots to stop buying French products. Over the weekend, his remarks sparked political explosions. Erdoğan called French President Emmanuel Macron a case of illness and advised him to have it examined. Next, France called its ambassador from Ankara. The calls for boycotts in the Arab world came after Macron announced last week that France would also not do so without cartoons of Muhammad in the future.
In mid-October, an 18-year-old Islamist beheaded teacher Samuel Paty, who showed these cartoons in his class. After Paty’s assassination, Macron announced that he would take stronger action against radical Islamism. On Sunday, Macron spoke on Twitter: You will never give in, he wrote in Arabic. Hate speech is not accepted and reasonable debate is defended. In the Islamic world, images of prophets in human form are prohibited. On Sunday, the great imam of Azhar University in Cairo, which is highly respected in the Islamic world, warned against engaging Islam in political debates. It will not be accepted that “our religious symbols are victims of election campaigns in the political arena,” Ahmed el-Tayeb tweeted.
Since the weekend, tens of thousands of tweets have been gathered under the Arabic hashtag “In addition to the Prophet”, listing French products, all crossed out in thick red paint: perfume brands, luxury labels and supermarket chains like Carrefour must be boycotted. Demonstrations have been announced in some Arab countries. Qatar University in Doha announced that it would indefinitely postpone French Culture Week. Above all, the statement by former Egyptian soccer star Mohamed Abo Treka is currently circulating online. In it he said that there was a big difference between the reactions of the Arab states and those of the Arab population. This time everyone could do something, Abo Treka said on a talk show. So far, for the most part, there have been no reactions from Islamic states. Only Morocco, Jordan and Pakistan condemned the publication of the cartoons.
The French Foreign Ministry is now calling for an end to boycott calls. The statements are being instrumentalized and politicized by a radical minority. In recent years, Muhammad cartoons have repeatedly caused a stir in the Islamic world. The trigger at that time was the Danish newspaper cartoons. Jyllands-Posten. Many now fear that a new dispute over the cartoons is imminent. This time it seems to start at the supermarket.
