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KUWAIT / PARIS (Reuters) – Kuwait’s retail cooperatives have recalled French products in a boycott over the use of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a French school class on freedom of expression whose teacher was beheaded by a Chechen teenager.
In Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s largest economy, a hashtag calling for a boycott of French supermarket retailer Carrefour was the second most trending on Sunday.
The French Foreign Ministry said that there had been calls for a boycott of French products, particularly food products, in several Middle Eastern countries, as well as calls for demonstrations against France over the cartoons.
Muslims see any description of the Prophet as blasphemous.
“These calls for a boycott are unfounded and must stop immediately, as well as all attacks against our country, which are being driven by a radical minority,” the ministry said.
The ministry also called on the authorities to speak out against such boycott actions to help French companies and ensure the safety of French citizens.
In Kuwait, the non-governmental Union of Consumer Cooperative Societies, which groups more than 70 establishments, issued the boycott directive in a circular dated October 23. Several cooperatives visited by Reuters on Sunday had cleared the shelves of items such as hair and beauty products made by French companies.
The union chief, Fahd Al-Kishti, told Reuters that the products had been recalled in response to “repeated insults” against the Prophet.
Cooperatives, some the size of hypermarkets, have government-subsidized commodities and account for a large part of retail trade in Kuwait. Kuwait’s imports from France amounted to 255 million dinars in 2019, according to the Kuwait Central Bureau of Statistics.
Kuwait’s foreign minister, who met with the French ambassador on Sunday, condemned the October 16 murder as a heinous crime, but emphasized the need to avoid insulting religion in official and political comments that “inflame hatred, enmity and racism, “the ministry tweeted.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan also said Sunday that President Emmanuel Macron had “attacked Islam” by encouraging the display of the cartoons.
Macron said on Twitter that France respected all differences in a spirit of peace, but did not accept hate speech and advocated reasonable debate. “We will never give up,” Macron said.
France recalled its ambassador to Turkey on Saturday after Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that Macron, who this month declared war on “Islamist separatism”, needed mental help because of his attitude toward Muslims.
The beheading, in which the attacker was shot and killed, echoed the 2015 Islamist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after it republished the cartoons.
After a Danish newspaper first published the cartoons in 2005, protests and boycotts of Danish products spread throughout the Islamic world.
(Information by Ahmed Hagagy in Kuwait, Marwa Rashad in Riyadh and Geert De Clercq in Paris; written by Ghaida Ghantous; edited by Alison Williams and Raissa Kasolowsky)
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