This week, the French magazine showed the winners of a cartoon competition it had organized a month earlier, intended to show support for the protests that the Iranian regime is trying to put down in a bloody way. You can see, among other things, how Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, threatens to drown in blood and grabs a gallows as a life preserver, naked women who stone him to death and a woman in heels who urinates on him.
“Insulting and indecent,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian responded on Twitter, threatening a counter-reaction, the nature of which he did not clarify. “We will not allow the French government to cross the border, they have definitely chosen the wrong path.”
A government spokesman said Iran “will not accept in any way the insult to its Islamic, religious and national values”. He said Tehran held the French government responsible for “this heinous, insulting and unjustified act”.
???? #MullahsGetOut | On December 8, we launched a cartoon contest of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A month later and after more than 300 drawings received (as well as thousands of threats), here is our selection of winners! https://t.co/oZ9T3Ri0v9
— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) January 4, 2023
The protests Charlie Hebdo is responding to began in September, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She died under suspicious circumstances in police custody after being arrested for not complying with the dress code for wearing headscarves. The drawings criticize the course of events and “defy the authority that the supposed supreme leader claims to have, as do several of his servants and executioners,” editor Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, writes in the magazine.
Charlie Hebdo – champion of free speech according to its proponents and unnecessarily hurtful according to critics – often draws the wrath of the Islamic world. For example, in 2005 it published a controversial Danish cartoon in which the prophet Mohammed was depicted wearing a bomb as a turban. Ten years later, two terrorists on behalf of IS committed an attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve employees.
The regime in Iran strongly opposes cartoons and writing that it considers offensive. Particularly infamous is the fatwa issued by the then Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989: an order to kill the British author Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. This book, according to Khomeini, was blasphemous. Rushdie was stabbed in New York last year, Iran denies involvement.