French Muslims Sue
Magazine Over Cartoons
By REUTERS, from the
NYTimes on the Web, February 7, 2007
PARIS -- A French court case
shining light on the gray area where free speech and religious sensitivities
overlap opens on Wednesday when Muslim groups sue a satirical magazine that
published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.
The Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations accuse
Charlie Hebdo of inciting racial hatred by reprinting the Danish caricatures
that sparked violence in the Muslim world last year.
Politicians, intellectuals, secular Muslims and left-wing pressure groups have
lined up behind Charlie Hebdo, arguing that Muslim groups have no right to call
for limits on free speech.
"I just cannot imagine the consequences not only for France but for Denmark and
Europe if they lose the case," Fleming Rose, the Danish editor who first
published the cartoons, told a news conference with Charlie Hebdo publisher
Philippe Val.
"It would turn back the clock decades, ages."
However, an opinion poll on Tuesday showed 79 percent thought it unacceptable to
ridicule a religion publicly and 78 percent ruled out parodies of Jesus Christ,
Mohammad or Buddha.
"Are the French rediscovering the sacred?" asked the Catholic weekly Pelerin
which published the poll. "Are they renouncing the critical spirit that
has inspired a French tradition since Voltaire and the Enlightenment?"
The Paris court will hear the case on Wednesday and Thursday, and issue its
ruling at a later date.
The cartoons, originally published in 2005 in the Danish daily Jyllens-Posten,
provoked protests in the Muslim world that left 50 people dead. Several
European publications reprinted them as an affirmation of the right to free
speech.
SOLIDARITY
In an act of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, French newspaper Liberation printed
the contested cartoons once more on Wednesday: "It is not words which
wound, or pictures that kill. It is bombs," the daily said, calling the
trial "idiotic."
A televised debate between Charlie Hebdo publisher Val and Paris Grand Mosque
rector Dalil Boubakeur broke down in acrimony on Tuesday after they squabbled
over the limits of free speech.
"If we can't criticize religion anymore, there will be no women's rights, no
birth control and no gay rights," Val said in the raucous TV debate.
Boubakeur said the controversial cartoon showing Mohammad with a bomb in his
turban was not simply satire, but an insult against all Muslims by suggesting
they were all terrorists.
"We don't want censorship, we don't want the sacred to be protected by blasphemy
laws or medieval jurisdiction," he said.
Boubakeur said last week he wanted to show that reprinting the cartoons was a
provocation equal to acts of anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial, which are both
banned under French law.
Courts in France, which observes a strict separation of church and state in the
public sphere, have repeatedly defended free speech rights against religious
objections.
The Catholic Church failed in recent years to win court injunctions against a
film poster with a cross formed like a swastika and a fashion ad with scantily
clad women posing like Jesus and his Apostles in Da Vinci's painting The Last
Supper.
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