Charlie Hebdo Republishes Prophet Cartoons That Prompted Deadly 2015 Attack

a magazine that kept publishing after its offices were firebombed by Islamists in 2011, and kept publishing after nine staffers were murdered by Islamists in January.

French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo has come back into the spotlight once again after it republished a series of controversial cartoons of Prophet Mohammad. The move came in the week leading up to the trial of the 2015 shootings at the newspaper’s headquarters in Paris.

Charlie Hebdo Republishes Prophet Cartoons That Prompted Deadly 2015 Attack: All You Need to Know

French satirist newspaper Charlie Hebdo has chosen to republish a series of controversial cartoons of Prophet Mohammad in week leading up to trial of 2015 massacre in its Paris office that left 12 dead.

Why did Charlie Hebdo Offend Islam?

It all started when a series of 12 cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammad in various offensive positions first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005 — and then reprinted by Charlie Hebdo — the French satirist weekly, known for its rebellious, anti-establishment art- in 2006. One of the cartoons featured the Prophet wearing a bomb on his head with the words ‘All of that for this’ as the headline in French. The cartoons unleashed a storm of anger across the Muslim world, culminating in an attack on the paper’s employees in 2015. Cartoonist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, was one of the 12 who lost their lives in the massacre.

In 2015, Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris became the target of an Islamist shooting massacre after they published a series of highly controversial cartoons featuring Prophet Mohammad. On January 7, 2015, two brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage, killing 12 people including several celebrated cartoonists and staff present at the office. The gunmen, who claimed to have carried the attack out in the name of al-Qaeda, were eventually killed.

Among the cartoons, most of which were first published by a Danish newspaper in 2005 and then by Charlie Hebdo a year later, is one of Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse protruding.

“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 Charlie Hebdo’s best-known cartoonists, were killed when Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the magazine’s Paris offices on January 7, 2015 and sprayed the building with automatic gunfire.

After the 2006 publication of the cartoons, jihadists online warned the weekly would pay for its mockery. For Muslims, any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous.

Charlie doesn’t mock Muslim people; it mocks fundamentalism—the narrow, bigoted, superstitious version of Islam that lies behind rather a lot of violence against writers. In the West, that violence began with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for a handful of passages in The Satanic Verses that the Ayatollah Khomeini deemed grounds for death. Many of the writers targeted by fundamentalists have been Muslim themselves, among them the Bangladeshi writer and feminist Taslima Nasrin, the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, and, going back a bit in time, the Nobel Prize–winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, thousands of Algerian intellectuals, and doubtless many more. These attacks had nothing to do with supposedly racist insults from privileged white people, and everything to do with perceived deviations from orthodoxy.

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