In a statement, BJP said it respects all religions and ‘strongly denounces’ the insult of any religious personalities.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has sanctioned two party spokespersons following an international outcry over insulting comments the pair are reported to have made regarding Prophet Muhammad, according to party documents and local media.

BJP national spokeswoman Nupur Sharma was suspended from the party’s primary membership for comments made in a recent television debate, while the BJP’s Delhi media operation head Naveen Kumar Jindal was expelled, the Hindustan Times reported on Sunday.

“Apart from complaints that have been filed in India against the spokespersons, anger had also been building up in recent days in several Arab countries such as Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” the Times reported.

Sharma is reported to have insulted the prophet and his wife Aisha in a TV debate last week. Following an outcry over the comments made during the debate, Sharma’s colleague Jindal is reported to have posted a now-deleted tweet about the prophet that also angered many.

Jindal said on Twitter that he had questioned some comments made against Hindu gods: “I only questioned them but that does not mean I am against any religion,” Reuters news agency reported him saying.

In a tweet on Sunday, Sharma said that she had said some things in response to comments made about a Hindu god but it was never an “intention to hurt anyone’s religious feelings”, and that she wanted to “unconditionally withdraw my statement”.

In a subsequent tweet, Sharma said that a “security threat” had been made against her family.

pic.twitter.com/Cl0aAqkwgN

— Nupur Sharma (@NupurSharmaBJP) June 5, 2022

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L’article India: BJP sanctions spokespersons over Prophet Muhammad insults est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Selon la police, plus de 40.000 personnes participaient à cette marche organisée par un parti islamiste et qui a été stoppée avant de parvenir près de l’ambassade française dans la capitale du Bangladesh.

Des centaines de policiers avaient érigé des barrages en fil de fer barbelé pour bloquer les manifestants qui se sont dispersés sans violences.

M. Macron est devenu la cible de manifestations dans plusieurs pays après avoir promis que la France continuerait à défendre les caricatures du prophète Mahomet, lors d’un hommage national mercredi dernier à Samuel Paty, professeur décapité le 16 octobre pour en avoir montré certaines à ses élèves.

La manifestation, organisée par l’Islami Andolan Bangladesh (IAB), l’un des principaux partis islamistes bangladais, avait démarré devant la principale mosquée du pays, la mosquée nationale Baitul Mukarram dans le centre de la capitale.

Les manifestants scandaient des slogans appelant au «Boycott des produits français» et à «punir» M. Macron.

«Macron fait partie des quelques dirigeants qui adorent Satan», a déclaré à la foule rassemblée à la mosquée Baitul Mukarram un haut responsable de l’IAB, Ataur Rahman.

Il a appelé le gouvernement bangladais à «mettre dehors» l’ambassadeur français. Un autre dirigeant islamiste, Hasan Jamal, a pour sa part déclaré que les protestataires allaient «mettre à terre chaque brique» de l’ambassade si l’ambassadeur n’était pas renvoyé.

«La France est l’ennemi des musulmans. Ceux qui la représentent sont aussi nos ennemis», a affirmé Nesar Uddin, un jeune responsable de l’organisation.

Après l’arrêt de la manifestation, des protestataires ont continué à défiler dans des rues adjacentes en criant des slogans appelant au boycott de la France et assurant que «Macron va payer cher».

l’Arabie saoudite s’immisce dans le débat

L’Arabie saoudite s’est invitée, mardi, dans le débat entourant les caricatures du prophète Mohammed en France, affirmant rejeter les représentations «offensantes» de tous les prophètes de l’islam. «Le royaume d’Arabie saoudite réfute toute tentative de lier islam et terrorisme et dénonce les dessins outrageants» sans distinction du prophète représenté, a déclaré un représentant du ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Le pays, qui a vu la naissance de l’islam sur son territoire, est le dernier du monde musulman à dénoncer les caricatures diffusées par Charlie Hebdo, dont le droit à les publier a encore récemment été défendu par le président français Emmanuel Macron.

L’institution égyptienne Al-Azhar, l’un des lieux d’enseignement islamique les plus importants au monde, a aussi pris part à la dénonciation de ces dessins, soutenant qu’ »attaquer l’islam» est une étape d’une «campagne systématique» visant à «utiliser l’islam pour gagner des batailles politiques».

Les appels au boycott de produits français ont depuis pris de l’ampleur au Moyen-Orient. Au cours du week-end, des commerçants de Jordanie, du Koweït et du Qatar ont retiré de leurs étalages toutes leurs marchandises provenant de l’Hexagone.

Sur les réseaux sociaux également, des listes de marques françaises à bannir circulent, visant notamment Peugeot, Renault, Kiri, Babybel ou encore Danone.

Téhéran convoque un diplomate français

Téhéran a convoqué le numéro deux de l’ambassade de France en Iran pour protester contre l’ »insistance» de Paris à soutenir les caricatures du prophète Mahomet, a annoncé le ministère iranien des Affaires étrangères dans un communiqué mardi.

Le premier conseiller Florent Aydalot a été convoqué lundi «pour protester contre l’insistance des autorités françaises à soutenir la publication des caricatures insultant le Prophète», selon le communiqué.

Le ministère a dénoncé «le comportement inacceptable des autorités françaises qui ont heurté les sentiments de millions de musulmans en Europe et dans le monde», soulignant «que toute insulte et tout manque de respect envers le Prophète de l’islam et les valeurs de l’islam (étaient) fermement condamnés».

Ce communiqué fait suite aux déclarations du président français Emmanuel Macron après l’assassinat le 16 octobre près de Paris du professeur Samuel Paty par un extrémiste russe d’origine tchétchène.

M. Macron a déclaré que la France «n’abandonnera(it) pas les caricatures», publiées pour la première fois par le magazine satirique Charlie Hebdo, et que le professeur avait été «tué parce qu’il incarnait la République».

Plusieurs journaux iraniens ont critiqué M. Macron en première page mardi. Le quotidien ultraconservateur Kayhan a demandé que l’ambassadeur de France soit «expulsé» d’Iran, estimant que ce serait «la moindre des choses à faire en réponse à l’insolence de Macron».

Le quotidien Javan a titré en une «Le Mal» sur une photo de M. Macron, souriant.

Le ministre iranien des Affaires étrangères Mohammad Javad Zarif avait indiqué lundi que les remarques de M. Macron ne faisaient qu’alimenter «l’extrémisme» et qu’insulter tous les musulmans «pour les crimes odieux de ces extrémistes» était un «abus opportuniste de la liberté d’expression».

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L’article Appel au boycott de produits français: des dizaines de milliers de Bangladais manifestent contre la France, Téhéran convoque un diplomate français est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is at it, again: it has chosen to republish the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad which provoked a violent attack against it in 2015. The editors say it is « essential » to reprint these on the eve of the trial of the perpetrators of that violence.

A decade earlier, in 2005, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten also published a dozen defamatory cartoons of the prophet which it then republished three years later.

It was the printing of these cartoons that ultimately provoked some Muslims to resort to violence and, as is customary, it was their backlash that became the nub of the « cartoon controversy ».

The original affront to Muslim religious sensibilities was swallowed up by assertions of the cartoonists’ right to free speech and to engage in humour. In fact, in most critics’ views, it was not just the cartoonists who were victimised by « Islamic rage, » but also the principle of free speech itself.

However, it should be possible to condemn violence by Muslims without giving a free pass to those who defame and vilify their religion, their prophet and their scripture. Yet, this rarely happens.

Instead, the Muslim-baiting intelligentsia relies on precisely its own vilifications to incite the violence which it then feigns to be horrified and surprised by. I say feigns because, by now, pretty much everyone knows that, goaded to a point, some Muslims will respond violently to caricatures of their prophet as a terrorist, among other things. I also say feigns because provocateurs require such a response to anathematise all Muslims as a threat to European identities and values.

If it is easy enough to understand why some Muslims respond violently to derogatory tropes about Islam, the prophet and the Quran, what does it say about those who compulsively keep recycling these? I have speculated about this need at length elsewhere but will make only some brief points here.

First, it is difficult to see how anyone – not only a Muslim – could find a cartoon of the prophet as a terrorist/suicide bomber amusing without also treating terrorism itself lightly. After all, how many of us can laugh at a cartoon of a suicide bomber, irrespective of who that person is supposed to be? As for the purported irony of such representations of the prophet, what is satirical about these, when Muslims are already viewed as born terrorists-in-the-making?

Second, European vilifications of the prophet and Islam have a much older pedigree than free speech and have nothing to do with humour. To be precise, they have their roots in medieval Europe and the changing self-conceptions of Christians over a millennium.

For instance, Tomas Mastnak, a historian of the Crusades, argues that it was in the mid-ninth century when Western unity began to express itself as Christendom, that Muslims also came to be seen as the « normative enemies » of Christianity. Until then, they had been viewed as just another pagan group and generally ignored – even the Muslim conquest of southern Spain did not make it into leading chronicles.

Over time though, Europe’s Christians came to see in Islam not just a « sinister conspiracy against Christianity [but] that total negation of [it] … which would mark the contrivances of Antichrist ». This is how Robert Southern describes it in his book Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages and he attributes this suspicion to the « strong desire not to know [Islam] for fear of contamination ».

Instead, he says, even the Christians who lived in « the middle of Islam » (Muslim-ruled Andalusia) looked to the Bible to explain it, which is how they came to consider it the Antichrist. In short, according to Southern, it was ignorance and the fear of contamination that made « the existence of Islam the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom ».

Given this history, it is not surprising that medieval Christians would also portray the prophet as a heathen idol, the devil, Mahound (as in Salam Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), an imposter, and the Antichrist. He appears in such guises from the Crusades to the Reformation, with his representation as a religious imposter, reaching its literary apotheosis in Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in which he is confined to the eighth circle of hell.

Two centuries later, he reappears as an Antichrist in the work of German reformist Martin Luther, who of course, believed the pope and the Catholic Church were much worse. A century later, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, lauded as the father of international law, was still calling him « a robber » and declaring that, in contrast to the Christians, who « were men who feared God, and led innocent lives … they who first embraced Mahometanism were robbers, and men void of humanity and piety ».

With the coming of the Enlightenment, the prophet’s critics also began assailing him in secular language, as the « worst type of … fanatic » (French writer Voltaire) and « the greatest enemy of reason who ever lived » (German philosopher Immanuel Kant).

Such depictions did not, however, portend a change in his representation as the antithesis of European civilisation. If he was no longer called an Antichrist, in European minds, he was still thought to be outside reason and rationality. This is why I see the cartoons of the prophet as a terrorist to be just a secularisation of the figure of the Antichrist.

Both images serve, equally powerfully, to locate him and, by extension, Islam and Muslims as Europe’s natural enemies. This is why reducing the cartoons to just an issue of free speech obscures their historical and ideological genealogy.

Lastly, (free) speech is conducive not only to critique, humour, honesty, and dissent but also to assertions of dominance and enactments of power. Though power is enacted differently, its exercise is « inseparable from its display », as American writer Saidiya Hartman argues in her book Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

In the context of slavery in North America, for instance, being able to represent power was « essential to reproducing domination ». As an example, Hartman notes that a slave-holder’s « display of mastery [over a slave] was just as important as the legal title to slave property ». This display usually involved demonstrating the slave holder’s « dominion and the captive’s abasement, » publicly. It also took the less obtrusive form of organising « innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery » as a way for the dominant classes « to establish their dominion » over the enslaved and dominated.

Borrowing from Hartman, I want to suggest that, today, some Westerners seek to demonstrate and reproduce their dominion over Muslims by caricaturing and maligning our sacred symbols at will. They are thus able to achieve epistemically what they cannot physically or legally. Even if this displacement from the physical to the psychological signifies the limits of Western power, speech is integral to its display. This is why derogatory caricatures of the prophet function as spectacles of mastery and as an ideological means to bolster intra-Western unity against Muslims.

It is as much to such enactments of mastery as it is to the content of specific attacks that Muslims like myself react angrily, and what we condemn is not the idea that people should be free to speak but the use of speech to dominate and degrade the already marginal or vulnerable. Defending domination in the name of freedom just confirms that not all conceptions of freedom are equally worth defending

Asma Barlas is a retired professor of politics in New York

L’article Reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is not about free speech est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Move comes a day before 13 men and one woman – accused of assisting the 2015 attackers of the newspaper – go on trial.

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.

The move was announced on Tuesday, a day before 13 men and a woman accused of providing the attackers with weapons and logistics go on trial on charges of terrorism on Wednesday.

In an editorial this week accompanying the offensive caricatures, the paper said the drawings « belong to history, and history cannot be rewritten nor erased ».

The January 2015 attacks against Charlie Hebdo and, two days later, a kosher supermarket, touched off a wave of killings claimed by the ISIL (ISIS) armed group across Europe.

Seventeen people died in the attacks – 12 of them at the editorial offices – along with all three attackers.

The attackers, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, claimed their attack on the newspaper in the name of al-Qaeda. As they left the scene at Charlie Hebdo, they killed a wounded policeman and drove away.

Two days later, a prison acquaintance of theirs stormed a kosher supermarket on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, claiming allegiance to ISIL. Four hostages were killed during the attack.

The Kouachi brothers had by then holed up in a printing office with another hostage. All three attackers died in near-simultaneous police raids.

The supermarket attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, also killed a young policewoman.

Blasphemy

The decision to republish the cartoons 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 publication that has long courted controversy with its satirical attacks on religion.

The caricatures re-published this week were first printed in 2006 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, setting off sometimes violent protests by some Muslims who found the depictions offensive.

The Prophet Muhammad is deeply revered by Muslims and any kind of visual depiction is forbidden. The caricatures were perceived as linking him with terrorism. 

Charlie Hebdo, infamous for its irreverence and accused by critics of racism, regularly caricatures religious leaders from various faiths and republished them soon afterwards.

The paper’s Paris offices were firebombed in 2011 and its editorial leadership placed under police protection, which remains in place to this day.

‘Ignore’

Laurent Sourisseau, the newspaper’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 president of the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM), Mohammed Moussaoui, urged people to « ignore » the cartoons, while condemning violence.

The suspects, who go on trial from 08:00 GMT on Wednesday, are accused of providing various degrees of logistical support to the killers.

The trial had been delayed several months with most French courtrooms closed over the coronavirus epidemic.

The court in Paris will sit until November 10 and, in a first for a terrorism trial, proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given public interest.

National anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard dismissed the idea that it was just « little helpers » going on trial since the three gunmen were now dead.

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L’article France: Charlie Hebdo reprints offensive Prophet caricatures est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.