The remaining staff of the French satirical magazine is putting out a special edition in reaction to the murder of 12 of its staff and the worldwide reaction to that tragedy.
Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad French satirical magazine’s surviving columnist says cover is a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week
The front cover of Wednesday’s edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the first since last week’s attack on its Paris offices that left 12 people dead, is a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
The cover shows the prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign reading “Je suis Charlie” in sympathy with the dead journalists. The headline says “All is forgiven”.
Zineb El Rhazoui, a surviving columnist at Charlie Hebdo magazine who worked on the new issue, said the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week, saying she did not feel hate towards Chérif and Saïd Kouachi despite their deadly attack on the magazine, and urged Muslims to accept humour.
“We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today
A record 3m copies are to be printed, in 16 languages, after the massacre triggered a worldwide debate on free speech and brought more than 4 million people on to the streets of France in a unity march on Sunday.
This is in contrast to their normal press run of 60 thousand copies. It will be distributed in other languages in addition to French and be available online.
While the management of the magazine is making a specific statement about their intent in producing this edition, other people have different reactions to it.
Omer el-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: “My reaction to the cartoon is disgust, but tending more to annoyance as well because I feel that what’s happening here is not that different from what we witnessed back in 2005 with the Danish cartoons when media outlets went into a cycle of just publishing the cartoons just to show defiance. And what that caused is more offence.”
Speaking on Today, he said causing offence “just for the purpose of offending” was not freedom of speech.
Any material dealing with the highly sensitive topics of religion and race almost inevitably gets caught up in some controversy. When the producers of the material use the devices and traditions of political satire, the level of reaction and debate is very likely to increase. Sarcasm, irony and satire are concepts that are more easily communicated with the nuances of speech and body language. The intent is more easily misinterpreted on text and the whole enterprise is usually fairly specific to the culture in which it is produced.
There is a large amount of support in western nations for the right of publications to print material that is considered offensive by some portion of the population. When some of the offended individuals react with violence the whole becomes a cause celebre as it certainly has in this situation. The conflict between Muslims communities in Europe and other communities with which the coexist is likely to continue.