Turkey on Tuesday accused the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo of “cultural racism” over a cartoon on the cover of its latest issue that mocks President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “We condemn this very disgusting effort by this publication to spread its racism and cultural hatred,” Erdogan’s chief press aide Fahrettin Altun tweeted.
“French President Macron’s anti-Muslim agenda is paying off! Charlie Hebdo has just published a series of so-called cartoons filled with allegedly despicable images of our president.”
The cover cartoon for Wednesday’s edition of Charlie Hebdo, posted online Tuesday night, shows Erdogan in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, drinking a can of beer and lifting the skirt of a woman wearing a hijab to reveal his bare butt.
“Oh, the prophet!” says the character in a speech bubble, while the title proclaims “Erdogan: in private, it’s a lot of fun.”
Charlie Hebdo’s intervention came during a growing war of words between Erdogan, Macron and other European leaders after the beheading of French school teacher Samuel Paty by an alleged Islamist attacker this month.
Macron vowed that France would adhere to its secular traditions and free speech laws that allow publications like the virulently anti-religious Charlie Hebdo to produce cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Paty showed some of the weekly’s earlier work satirizing the prophet in a class on freedom of expression, leading to an online campaign against him and the gruesome murder before the start of school holidays on October 16.
An attack on Charlie Hebdo by jihadists in 2015 left 12 dead, including some of its most famous cartoonists.
Macron’s defense of Charlie Hebdo, and his recent comment that Islam around the world is “in crisis”, has led Erdogan to urge the Turks to boycott French products amid a wave of protests against France in Muslim majority countries.
Early Tuesday, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte had come out in defense of his country’s far-right politician Geert Wilders after Erdogan took legal action against him.
Wilders had shared a cartoon of the Turkish president wearing an Ottoman hat shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse on Twitter. “I have a message for President Erdogan and that message is simple: in the Netherlands, freedom of expression is one of our highest values,” Rutte said.
Previously, European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had defended Macron after Erdogan suggested he needed “mind controls.” “They are slanderous comments that are completely unacceptable, particularly in the context of the horrific murder of French professor Samuel Paty by an Islamist fanatic,” said Steffen Seibert, a spokeswoman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Erdogan has a history of using legal action against critics in Europe.
He filed a case in 2016 against German television comedian Jan Boehmermann, who read a deliberately defamatory poem about the Turkish leader during his show as part of a parody designed to illustrate the limits of free speech.
The dispute put Merkel in the uncomfortable position of signing a criminal case against comics under an archaic lese majesty law that was later removed from the German legal code.
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