‘Charlie Hebdo’ cartoons linked Islam to terrorism, academic says

Some of the cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo and the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten "made the unmistakable statement that the religion created by the Prophet [Mohammed] had inherent links to terrorism," a Trinity Professor of Law has stated.

Professor Neville Cox said some of the cartoons were merely blasphemous under the usual definition of that term in that they treated the Prophet Mohammed in an irreverant manner.

But others published by both Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten could be construed as coming under the UN definition of blasphemy of religion because they linked a quarter of the world's population with terrorism.

He also questioned the motivation behind the Je Suis Charlie campaign. “Pourquoi Je Suis Charlie? I don’t know. I don’t like seeing grief and I don’t like seeing violence, but what is this principal and what does it say about the relationship betwen western liberal orthodoxy and Islam?”

Prof Cox was speaking at a public meeting in Trinity College Dublin to discuss the fallout from the terrorist shootings in both France and Denmark.

Prof Cox asked if the freedoms suggest by the Je Suis Charlie campaign amounted to “freedom to engage in hate speech, or are we simply saying that satire must always trump where religion is at stake.

"I can't even see that being the case given that, and quite rightly in my view in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the French Government stood up for free speech at the expense of religious intolerance and said they were going to come down really hard on anti-semetic speech."

Prof Cox said he was really conflicted about the issues arising from Charlie Hebdo.

Western societies, he said, allowed free speech to be restricted where a group was targeted through negative stereotyping, leaving individuals “open to threat”.

He cited the author on religion, Karen Armstrong, who stated that when "Muslims, at a generalisation level, see blasphemy and defamation of religion, they see in it a triumphalist hatred which in their view the west has had for Islam since the time of the Crusades."

Prof Cox asked if western attitudes to Islam was simply an “ inability to understand an idelogy which has different types of claims on people, which is intangible and which is growing.”

Dr Roja Fazaeli from TCD's Department of Near Eastern Studies said there was a tendency to see all Muslims as being essentially the same and to define Muslims by their religion alone.

She said Muslims were treated the way Irish Catholics were treated in the United States by Nativists who regarded them as undemocratic and uncivilised.