Dozens, and potentially much more, people live under the threat of a fatwa or an attack, forcing them to live under protection. Including several in France.
by
Like Salman Rushdie, injured Friday August 12 in the United States, how many are there, in the world, to live under the threat of a fatwa or an attack by a Sunni or Shiite fundamentalist? It is a figure impossible to establish, but this threat hovers over several tens, potentially thousands, of public or anonymous people, designated by name as targets or potentially referred to for their sole belonging to a newspaper, an institution or a confession.
The January 7, 2015 attack, against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, in the center of Paris, did not end the threat to the newspaper team. On the contrary. The security measures surrounding the members of the editorial staff and the premises of the satirical weekly remain very high. They are all the more so since Charlie Hebdo has been the subject of several calls for murder by al-Qaida since his republication, in early September 2020, of the caricatures of Mohammed in prelude to the trial of the attacks of January 2015. In the following days , a particularly virulent hatred campaign had been launched by Pakistani Islamist parties and by the Turkish Head of State, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On September 25, 2020, a young Pakistani refugee went on rue Nicolas-Appert, in the 11 e arrondissement of Paris, thinking that the premises of Charlie Hebdo were still there, and attacked two People with a butcher chopper thinking that they were journalists from the weekly. The following October 16, a young Russian of Chechen origin beheaded with a Samuel Paty knife, a professor of history-geography, at the exit of his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), after the latter was denounced on Social networks for having shown caricatures of the prophet in class.
This last attack, which caused a national amazement, considerably widened the potential targets of Sunni jihadist violence by extending it to all those showing caricatures and not only those who have designed or disseminated them. The Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, at the origin of the order of caricatures, and the twelve designers having carried out them-that having drawn the most controversial, Kurt Westergaard, died of natural causes on July 14, 2021-are obviously targets still under protection.
violent controversy in Pakistan
The Jyllands-Posten had placed this order by justifying it by the fact of fighting the fear of representing the prophet Mohammed since the assassination by bullets then to the stabbing weapon of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a fundamentalist in the countries- Bas, November 2, 2004, because of her short film on Islam, submission, produced with the collaboration of the author of Somali origin Ayaan Hirsi Ali, atheist and violently critical of Islam. The latter, now installed in the United States, is the subject of recurrent death threats.
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