French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo unveiled a special edition on Monday to mark 10 years since an attack by Islamist gunmen on its offices killed its staff.
On the front page “Indestructible!” The headline featured a cartoon celebrating the existence of an atheist newspaper, while the inside four pages featured the results of a caricature contest to mock God and religious leaders.
“There is one virtue in satire that has enabled us to overcome these tragic years: optimism,” said an editorial by director Reiss, who survived the January 7, 2015 massacre that killed 12 people, including eight editorial staff. were killed.
“If you want to laugh, it means you want to live. Laughing, sarcasm and sarcasm are expressions of optimism. No matter what happens, dramatic or happy, the desire to laugh will never go away.”
The 2015 attack by two Paris-born brothers of Algerian origin was described as retaliation for Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish caricatures mocking Islam’s most revered figure, the Prophet Mohammed.
The massacre of some of France’s most famous cartoonists signaled the beginning of a horrific series of plots by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that claimed hundreds of lives in France and Western Europe over the following years.
The version unveiled to the media on Monday will be available for sale on Tuesday when a public commemoration is held by President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
The weekly had called on cartoonists to submit their “funniest and meanest” depictions of God in a particularly provocative and defiant competition for the special anniversary edition.
“Yes, we can laugh about God, especially if he exists,” said a headline on what the newspaper said were the best 40 entries out of more than 350 entries.
Along with some typically crude and sexually explicit images, one of them references the Prophet Mohammed with the caption “If I were to draw a sketch of someone who was drawing a sketch of someone who The person who is drawing the picture is drawing the picture of Mohammed, so is it okay?”
It depicts a cartoonist drawing an image of another cartoonist, who is working on an image of a cartoonist who is drawing a bearded figure that looks like Mohammed.
Another cartoon depicts the leaders of the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – as three-headed dogs.
survey results
This week’s edition also features a smaller version of one of the most famous and controversial front covers of 2005, featuring an image of Mohammed under the headline “Mohammed overwhelmed by fundamentalists”.
Mohammed can be seen covering his eyes and saying “It’s hard to be loved by idiots”.
It was created by Cabou, one of France’s most famous cartoonists, who was shot at close range 10 years ago when masked gunmen with AK-47 assault rifles burst into the newspaper’s heavily guarded offices.
The cartoon has been used in conjunction with a survey of attitudes towards press freedom, caricature and blasphemy in France, which was conducted by the IFOP survey group in collaboration with Charlie Hebdo.
It found that 76 percent of respondents believed that freedom of expression and the freedom to create caricatures are fundamental rights, while 62 percent thought that people have the right to mock religious beliefs.
The Charlie Hebdo murders sparked an outpouring of sympathy in a wave of “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) expressions of solidarity with its lost cartoonists, Cabou, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinsky, among others.
But it sparked questions and a furious reaction in some Muslim-majority countries against Charlie’s deliberately offensive, often crude humor, which is part of a long-standing French tradition of caricaturing.
Since its founding in 1970, it has regularly tested the limits of French hate-speech laws, which protect minorities but allow blasphemy and mockery of religion.
Defenders of free-speech in France see the ability to ridicule religion as a fundamental right acquired through centuries of struggle to escape the influence of the Catholic Church.
Critics say the weekly sometimes crosses the line into Islamophobia, pointing to some caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed published in the past that appear to link Islam to terrorism.
“The idea is not to publish anything, it’s to publish everything that makes people doubt, makes them think, makes them ask questions,” director Reiss, who survived the 2015 attack, told Le Monde. “Inspires for, does not become confined to ideology.” november.
In August the cover’s depiction of the Virgin Mary suffering from the mumps virus led to two legal complaints from Catholic organizations in France.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
