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The French satirical magazine drew the wrath of Turkey with a crude cartoon of Erdogan. The cartoon dispute is entering a new round. In the end, it will probably benefit the magazine itself above all.
After the Islamist murder of teacher Samuel Paty, who showed the controversial cartoons of Muhammad in class, a drawing of “Charlie Hebdo” is projected on a public building in Toulouse.
Outrage was expected, and it was probably intentional. Following the publication of a new cartoon of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo”, Ankara announced “legal and diplomatic measures”. The Turkish prosecution immediately opened an investigation against the French magazine on Wednesday, as Erdogan spoke of a “crusade against Islam” and an attack on the religious values of Muslims.
The drawing on the cover of the new edition of “Charlie Hebdo” shows Erdogan in his underwear in an armchair with a can in his hand, lifting the dress of a veiled woman and exposing her bare bottom. “Uh, the prophet,” he says in a sandwich. The title of the cartoon is: “Erdogan is a lot of fun in his private life.” Unsurprisingly, the Turkish president, who is generally sensitive to criticism, did not find this funny at all.
Its communications director, Fahrettin Altun, spoke of a disgusting attempt to incite “cultural racism and hatred.” French President Emmanuel Macron’s “anti-Muslim agenda” is apparently bearing fruit, Altun wrote on Twitter. Erdogan had previously been outraged that Macron had endorsed the publication of the Muhammad cartoons by “Charlie Hebdo” after a young Islamist murdered a teacher who had shown the controversial drawings in class.
A deliberate violation of feelings.
Erdogan complained on Monday that Muslims in Europe were being lynched as Jews before the Holocaust and called on the Turks to boycott French products. As transparent as this attempt is to exploit the controversy surrounding the cartoons to portray himself as a defender of Muslims against the supposedly anti-Islamic West, “Charlie Hebdo’s” response seems questionable.
The magazine has been a symbol of press freedom since the attack on its Paris editorial in January 2015 in which two radical Islamists wanted to retaliate for the publication of the Prophet’s cartoons. Their right to criticize Islam and its prophets has been vehemently defended by French media and politics. Anything else would ultimately mean giving in to pressure from the terrorists.
However, with the original cartoons of Muhammad, the question arose as to whether everything that is allowed to be has to be. The drawings, first published by the Danish newspaper “Jyllands Posten”, always aimed to test the limits of freedom of expression. They have always been intended to be a provocation. Therefore, many Muslims perceived it as a deliberate violation of their feelings and reacted sensitively accordingly.
The cartoon does not provide any new information.
The now published Erdogan cartoon, drawn in the magazine’s trademark rough-and-tumble style, is something different. The Turkish president is not the Islamic prophet and he is certainly not a saint. You have to put up with criticism. However, the cartoon does not contain any criticism. It is a provocation for the sake of provocation, which does not lead to any new knowledge and does not advance the debate in any way.
It was clear that Erdogan would not only ignore this provocation. After all, in recent years he has already dragged thousands of people to court for “insulting.” It can be assumed that “Charlie Hebdo” wanted exactly the controversy that the magazine is now receiving. Who it is useful for is another question. In the end, the magazine is like Erdogan: the dispute it provoked mainly serves its own interests.
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