Mick Hartley

The French editor accused of insulting Muslims by reprinting the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been acquitted:

A French court has ruled in favour of weekly Charlie Hebdo, rejecting accusations by Islamic groups who said it incited hatred against Muslims.

The cartoons were covered by freedom of expression laws and were not an attack on Islam, but fundamentalists, it said.

It’s good news, of course, but if the publication of the cartoons was protected by the right to freedom of expression, why would it matter if they were or were not an attack on Islam?

The editor, Philippe Val, provides some background:

As you may recall, the original “Danish cartoons” were published in September 2005 in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten without provoking any great interest. But later that year, Danish fundamentalist imams went on a Middle East tour to denounce what they claimed was anti-Muslim racism in Denmark. To support their argument, they brought with them not only the 12 cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten, but others with clear racist overtones, which ended up sparking all the trouble. The whole story was started by a kind of manipulation of public opinion in countries like Egypt, Yemen and Sudan, where official illiteracy is as high as 80%.

Turmoil broke out in the Middle East. Huge protests were held in Syria and Iran, organized mostly by the police, since any protest unauthorized by the government is forbidden in those dictatorships. The Danish embassy in Lebanon was burned down, which is an act of war. Danish companies were attacked in many Muslim countries, without this unduly disturbing the other member countries of the European Union. Quite the contrary: Many people said that Jyllands-Posten was a xenophobic paper, which is untrue, and that Denmark was a racist country, which is equally untrue. (During the last war, when the Nazis asked the Danish to hand over the Jews, the Danes were the only ones in Europe, along with Bulgarians, to refuse.)

In February of last year, the director of the daily France Soir, Jacques Lefranc, decided to publish the cartoons in France. He was immediately fired. It was in protest against Mr. Lefranc’s firing that I in turn decided to publish the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo. Our front-page headline was “Mohammed Overwhelmed by Extremists,” and had a drawing by Cabu of the prophet, covering his eyes with his hands and crying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” I invited my colleagues from the daily and weekly press to republish the Danish cartoons, too. Most of them published some of them; only L’Express did in full.

Before publication, I was pressured not to go ahead and summoned to the Hôtel Matignon to see the prime minister’s chief of staff; I refused to go. The next day, summary proceedings were initiated by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France to stop this issue of Charlie Hebdo from hitting newsstands. The government encouraged them, but their suit was dismissed.

After the cartoons appeared, the Muslim groups attacked me by filing suit against me on racism charges. President Jacques Chirac, who campaigned for this just-completed trial, offered them the services of his own personal lawyer, Francis Szpiner. Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque, who always took orders from the Élysée, was apparently not convinced this case was necessary; he told me as much several times. But Mr. Boubakeur was under pressure from the fundamentalists at the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France), who had come to dominate the French Council of Muslim Worship, which he heads, and Mr. Chirac. Why? Only he knows. We can only guess. Probably to nurture his friendships in the Middle East and win arms contracts for France, while at home playing to Muslim public opinion that’s supposedly in thrall to fundamentalism.