PA daily op-ed: Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of Muhammad is “inappropriate and incompatible with freedom of expression”
On Jan. 7, 2015, Muslim terrorists Cherif and Said Kouachi carried out a shooting attack at the Paris office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. 12 people were killed in the attack, which was a response to cartoons the magazine published about Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Op-ed by Hanan Bakir, regular columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida
“What happened to the Charlie Hebdo [magazine] was terrorism and a crime that does not serve any of the [Muslim] nation’s causes, which the perpetrators purport to care for. The exact opposite is the case, for the incident led to the immigration of French Jews to Palestine. This is the same method that the Zionist movement implemented: Carrying out a contained operation (i.e., terror attack) against a few Jews in order to make them immigrate to Palestine… Criticizing a religious ideology or the fundamentalist movements detrimental to religion is a legitimate right, included under [the heading of] freedom of expression. But mocking the Prophet or any symbol meaningful to a certain group is inappropriate and incompatible with the values of a secular state like France – for secular states guarantee freedom of belief and worship for all religions. The selective choice of issues to be included under [the heading] of freedom of expression amounts to its violation and slow destruction from the inside. [For example,] not only is it forbidden to touch the Holocaust, but some countries have [even] passed laws punishing those accused of Antisemitism, even though [David] Ben Gurion himself admitted that the Arabs were the first to consider the Holocaust an abominable crime.”
Op-ed by Hanan Bakir, regular columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida
“What happened to the Charlie Hebdo [magazine] was terrorism and a crime that does not serve any of the [Muslim] nation’s causes, which the perpetrators purport to care for. The exact opposite is the case, for the incident led to the immigration of French Jews to Palestine. This is the same method that the Zionist movement implemented: Carrying out a contained operation (i.e., terror attack) against a few Jews in order to make them immigrate to Palestine… Criticizing a religious ideology or the fundamentalist movements detrimental to religion is a legitimate right, included under [the heading of] freedom of expression. But mocking the Prophet or any symbol meaningful to a certain group is inappropriate and incompatible with the values of a secular state like France – for secular states guarantee freedom of belief and worship for all religions. The selective choice of issues to be included under [the heading] of freedom of expression amounts to its violation and slow destruction from the inside. [For example,] not only is it forbidden to touch the Holocaust, but some countries have [even] passed laws punishing those accused of Antisemitism, even though [David] Ben Gurion himself admitted that the Arabs were the first to consider the Holocaust an abominable crime.”