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Calls to boycott French products are growing in the Arab world and beyond, after President Emmanuel Macron criticized Islamists and vowed 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 after he showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class I was leading on freedom of expression.
The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign for his choice of lesson material – the same images that set off a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original editor, in January. of 2015.
Muhammad cartoons are forbidden by Islam.
On Saturday, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said it condemns 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.
These types of 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, an AFP correspondent saw workers stripping shelves of French-made St. Dalfour jams and Saf-Instant yeast at a branch of the Al Meera supermarket chain on Saturday.
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 Friday saying they would withdraw 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.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president and a top Qatari ally, criticized Macron for his policies toward Muslims on Saturday, 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.
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.”
Nayef Falah Mubarak Al-Hajraf, secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, called Macron’s words “irresponsible” on Friday, saying they would “increase the spread of a culture of hatred.”
On the same day, the University of Qatar wrote on Twitter that, following “the deliberate abuse of Islam and its symbols,” the French Cultural Week would be postponed indefinitely, in a context in which 2020 is the year of France-Qatar culture.
Many Jordanians have changed their Facebook profiles to add the message “Respect Muhammad, the Prophet of Allah (God).”
In Jaffa, a mostly Arab city close to Tel Aviv, about 200 people protested Saturday night in front of the residence of the French ambassador to Israel after evening prayers.
gw-al / dwo
