Drawing a cartoon of Muhammad must never be a crime

A violent mob descended on the office of a small political magazine in Istanbul on Monday. A bar where its writers and staffers meet was vandalised. Its editor and three other staff have now been arrested and remanded in custody, too. No prizes for guessing the ‘crime’ perpetrated by LeMan in its most recent edition.

Those four journalists at LeMan, a satirical, left-wing weekly, are currently in jail for publishing a cartoon of what appears to be the prophet Muhammad on 26 June. Specifically, it shows ‘Muhammad’ shaking hands with ‘Moses’, in the sky, as missiles fly in opposite directions beneath them. The cartoon was supposed to celebrate the end of the 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran (the cartoonists deny it depicts the prophet at all). Instead, it will almost certainly result in the magazine being outlawed, confirming Turkey’s status as an Islamic autocracy in all but name.

There is much to find disturbing in these events. Istanbul is Turkey’s most liberal city, and until recently was seen as one of the last bastions of a beleaguered Turkish secularism. Yet even here, the mob shouting ‘Tooth for tooth, blood for blood, revenge, revenge’ numbered in the hundreds. Certainly, it far outstripped those who were prepared to stand up for the right of freedom of expression. Further protests demanding punishment for LeMan and its staff broke out across the city in the days that followed.

Just as sickening has been the response of Turkey’s leaders. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems to enjoy nothing more than jailing political opponents – a pleasure clearly enhanced when he can use the pretext of protecting his precious Islam. Following the arrests, he crowed about Le Man’s ‘vile provocation’ and its assault on Islam’s ‘sacred values’. ‘Those who show disrespect to our prophet and other prophets will be held accountable before the law’, he said. Turkey’s interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, proudly tweeted the arrest of the magazine’s director, who had ‘the audacity to depict our prophet’. The video shows an old man getting dragged out of his home by a gang of police officers.

Once, the jailing of journalists for the ‘crime’ of blasphemy in a nominally secular country, one that is a NATO member and aspiring to join the European Union, would have been met with condemnation in the West. Not today. UK foreign secretary David Lammy was even happy to tuck his legs under the same table as Erdoğan on Monday, not long after LeMan was purged by his police forces. Lammy obsequiously described Turkey as a ‘key NATO ally’ and a ‘strategic partner’ of the UK.

In fairness to Lammy, it would have been hypocritical for him to lecture Turkey’s autocrat on free speech and secularism. After all, only last month, a man was convicted for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Hamit Coskun was prosecuted by the British authorities for essentially the same reason as those journalists in Turkey. It was to punish him for blasphemy against Islam.

Once uncorked, Islamic intolerance can be a very dangerous thing. And nothing, it seems, provokes quite as much outrage as political cartoons of the prophet. Just ask the surviving members of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, whose colleagues were slain over a Muhammad cartoon. Or ask the loved ones of the late French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, or the now exiled religious-studies teacher from Batley Grammar School in Yorkshire, both of whom showed those Charlie Hebdo drawings as part of their lessons.

Every schoolboy eventually learns that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. Sadly, Western democracies – especially their supposedly ‘liberal’ elites – have often cowered when hotheads claiming to stand for the ‘religion of peace’ either demand censorship, resort to threats of violence or simply murder alleged blasphemers. By rewarding that intimidation, by caving in to Islamist demands, the West betrays moderate and secular voices in a religion that desperately needs them.

The ringing silence in the West over the LeMan arrests shows that we are repeating the same mistake. But it is never too late to stand up for free expression. The offending cartoon can be found here. Share it far and wide.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.