Tue 01 September 2020:
The French satirical newspaper whose Paris offices were attacked in 2015 is reprinting the controversial caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad that the gunmen who opened fire on its editorial staff cited as their motivation.
“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau wrote in a piece to accompany the front cover that will be published in print on Wednesday.
Twelve people, including some of the magazine’s best-known cartoonists, were killed when Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the Paris HQ of the satirical magazine on Jan. 7, 2015, and sprayed the building with automatic gunfire.
Blasphemy
The caricatures re-published this week were first printed in 2006 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, setting off sometimes violent protests by Muslims who believe depicting the Prophet is blasphemy.
Charlie Hebdo, infamous for its irreverence, regularly caricatures religious leaders from various faiths and republished them soon afterwards.
Laurent Sourisseau, the paper’s director and one of the few staff to have survived the attack, named each of the victims in a foreword to this week’s edition.
“Rare are those who, five years later, dare oppose the demands that are still so pressing from religions in general, and some in particular,” wrote Sourisseau, also known as Riss.
The decision to republish the controversial caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad will be seen by some as a defiant gesture in defence of free expression. But others may see it as a renewed provocation by a magazine that has long courted controversy with its satirical attacks on religion. For Muslims, any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous.
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