The Islamic world’s anger at France deepened today as Turkey condemned a Charlie Hebdo cartoon showing its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan lifting a woman’s burka to look at her naked backside.
Erdogan called the cartoonists ‘scoundrels’ and accused the West of wanting to ‘relaunch the Crusades’ by attacking Islam after the image appeared on the front of this week’s magazine.
‘I don’t need to say anything to those scoundrels who insult my beloved prophet on such a scale,’ Erdogan said, calling it a ‘disgusting attack’.
Showing Erdogan in a T-shirt and underpants, the caricature has Erdogan saying ‘Ooh, the Prophet’ as he looks at the woman’s backside, and comes with the caption: ‘Erdogan – in private he’s very funny’.
A Charlie Hebdo cartoon showing the naked Prophet’s backside was the image which French school teacher Samuel Paty showed to his class in the lesson which led to his murder and beheading earlier this month.
French president Emmanuel Macron has staunchly defended free expression and the right to mock religion in the wake of the terror attack, but has become a target of anger in the Islamic world.
Turkey has vowed to take ‘legal, diplomatic actions’ in response to the cartoon while Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani also took aim at France today by warning that insulting the Prophet would encourage ‘violence and bloodshed’.
A Charlie Hebdo cartoon mocking Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured) has added to tensions between Ankara and Paris after the beheading of a French school teacher
Protesters in Ankara hold a demonstration against Macron after the French leader vowed that the country would continue to allow the cartoons which offend Muslims
Protesters took to the streets in India today, where people are seen calling for a boycott in Mumbai and accusing Macron of attacking Islam to distract from the coronavirus crisis
An anti-Macron banned hangs in front of a shop in an Arab neighbourhood of Jerusalem today
Rouhani said that ‘the West should understand that… insulting the Prophet is insulting all Muslims, all prophets, all human values, and trampling ethics’.
‘Insulting the prophet is no achievement. It’s immoral. It’s encouraging violence,’ Rouhani said in a televised speech during the weekly cabinet meeting.
‘It’s a surprise that this would come from those claiming culture and democracy, that they would somehow, even if unintentionally, encourage violence and bloodshed,’ he added.
Rouhani also called on the West to ‘stop interfering in Muslims’ internal affairs’ if it ‘truly seeks to achieve peace, equality, calm and security in today’s societies’.
European leaders have come to Macron’s defence in his row with Erdogan, with Britain’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab today calling on NATO allies to stand together in defence of tolerance and free speech.
‘The UK stands in solidarity with France and the French people in the wake of the appalling murder of Samuel Paty,’ Raab said in a veiled rebuke to Turkey.
Erdogan has accused the French leader of an ‘anti-Islam agenda’ and tangled with him on other issues including Syria and the Mediterranean.
The Ankara prosecutor’s office said it was launching an investigation into the publication of the cartoon.
‘French president Macron’s anti-Muslim agenda is bearing fruit,’ Erdogan’s top press aide Fahrettin Altun said today.
Altun said the image was a ‘most disgusting effort by this publication to spread its cultural racism and hatred’.
‘Charlie Hebdo just published a series of so-called cartoons full of despicable images purportedly of our President,’ he said.
Turkey’s vice president Fuat Oktay also condemned the ‘immoral publication’ by what he called an ‘incorrigible French rag’.
‘I call on the moral and conscientious international community to speak out against this disgrace,’ the vice president said.
Macron has vowed that France will stick to its secular traditions and laws guaranteeing freedom of speech which allow publications such as Charlie Hebdo to produce inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The French government has also shut down a Paris mosque and raided other Islamic associations in the wake of Paty’s killing in the Paris suburbs earlier this month.
Paty showed his students some of the cartoons in a lesson on free speech, leading to an online campaign against him which ended in his grisly murder.
An attack on Charlie Hebdo by jihadists in 2015 left 12 people dead, including some of its most famed cartoonists.
Tens of thousands of activists took to the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Tuesday in anger at Macron’s stance over the cartoons, and had to be blocked by police from reaching the French embassy
Emmanuel Macron has found himself demonised in Islamic countries as protests against his defence of Mohammed cartoons spreads. Hard-line Iranian newspaper Vatan-e Emrooz depicted him as a literal devil (left) while protesters burned images of him on the West Bank (right)
A Palestinian artist paints an anti-Macron mural in Gaza City today as anger grows in the Islamic world against the French president’s staunch defence of the offensive cartoons
A protester in Iraq carries a portrait of Macron and his wife, denouncing the French President for disrespecting the Prophet
An effigy of Macron with shoes tied around his neck – intended as a disrespectful gesture – is carried through the streets of Dhaka by protesters on Tuesday
Macron’s defence of Charlie Hebdo, and his recent comment that Islam worldwide is ‘in crisis’, have prompted Erdogan to urge Turks to boycott French products.
Macron’s stance has also sparked anti-France protests in Turkey and in other Muslim countries including Bangladesh.
Tehran summoned a senior French envoy, the charge d’affaires, and the Saudi foreign ministry posted on Twitter to denounce ‘the offensive cartoons of the Prophet’.
Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim slammed Macron’s comments on Islam being in crisis as ‘offensive’ and ‘unreasonable’, adding in a statement: ‘With freedom comes responsibility.’
Macron has also drawn fire in Pakistan and Morocco, while the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah have also spoken out against France.
The Paris Saint-Germain football team is due to play in Istanbul later today in a Champions League game against Basaksehir, a club with links to Erdogan’s regime.
PSG manager Thomas Tuchel said he would talk to his players about the political tensions before the game, which will be played in an empty ground because of Covid-19.
Previously, European leaders including German chancellor Angela Merkel had defended Macron after Erdogan suggested he needed ‘mental checks’.
‘They are defamatory comments that are completely unacceptable, particularly against the backdrop of the horrific murder of the French teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist fanatic,’ Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
A shopper walks past French products that have been hidden behind a plastic cover at a shelf in a supermarket in the Jordanian capital Amman
People burn an effigy of Macron over his comments on the Prophet Muhammad caricatures, in Karachi, Pakistan
Demonstrators shout slogans beside a burning effigy of Macron during a protest in Pakistan
Teacher Samuel Paty (left) was beheaded in the Paris suburbs after he shared cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class. The terrorist was killed by police (right)
On Tuesday, Dutch PM Mark Rutte came to the defence of his country’s far-right politician Geert Wilders after Erdogan brought 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.
Erdogan has a track record of using legal action against critics in Europe.
He brought a case in 2016 against German TV comic Jan Boehmermann, who read out a deliberately defamatory poem about the Turkish leader during his show as part of a skit designed to illustrate the boundaries of free speech.
The row put Merkel in the awkward position of signing off on criminal proceedings against the comic under an archaic law that was later struck from the German legal code.
Tensions between France and Turkey have mounted in recent months over Turkish actions in Syria, Libya and the Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh.