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Calls to boycott French products are growing in the Arab world and beyond, after President Emmanuel Macron criticized Islamists and promised not to “give up cartoons” depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
Macron’s comments on Wednesday came in response to the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in a suburb outside Paris earlier this month.
Mr. Paty had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class he was leading on freedom of expression.
The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign about his choice of teaching materials.
It was the same images that unleashed a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original editor, in January 2015.
Muhammad cartoons are forbidden by Islam.
Yesterday, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said it condemned the “continued publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad under the pretext of freedom of expression” and any “discriminatory and deceptive attempt that seeks to link Islam with terrorism.”
He did not directly criticize Macron, although on Wednesday the French president also maintained that Paty was “assassinated because Islamists want our future.”
But the opposition Jordanian Islamic Action Front party asked the French president to apologize for his comments and urged citizens of the kingdom to boycott French products.
Such boycotts are already underway in Kuwait and Qatar.
Dozens of Kuwaiti stores are boycotting French products, with images on social media showing workers removing Kiri and Babybel French processed cheese from the shelves.
In Doha, workers removed shelves of French-made St Dalfour jams and Saf-Instant yeast at a branch of the Al Meera supermarket chain.
Al Meera competes with French supermarket chains Monoprix and Carrefour for market share in Qatar’s lucrative food sector.
Al Meera and another grocery operator, Souq Al Baladi, issued statements late on Friday saying they would remove French products from stores until further notice.
They did not explicitly mention Macron or cite his comments, but Al Meera’s statement said that customer comments “guided our actions.”
None of the operators responded to AFP’s requests for comment.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday criticized Macron for his policies towards Muslims, saying the French president needed “mind controls.”
“What can be said about a head of state who treats millions of members of different religious groups in this way? First of all, have mind controls,” Erdogan said in a televised speech.
France said it was calling its envoy to Turkey for inquiries after the comments.
Before Macron’s comments on Wednesday, he had already sparked a backlash in early October when he said that “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world.”
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