The Guardian reports that French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo will this week release a special edition illustrated biography of the prophet Muhammad.

Its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, told Agence France-Presse that the Life of Muhammad would be "perfectly halal" because it was a compilation of all that had been written about the prophet in the past by Muslim writers and Charlie Hebdo had "simply put it into images".

As the Guardian points out: "Charlie Hebdo, which must sell 30,000 issues of its weekly magazine from news-stands to keep afloat, has routinely seen sales double or magazines sell out each time it has run controversial cartoons of Muhammad."

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Mehdi Hasan, political director of The Huffington Post UK, called for a crackdown on the culture of Islamophobia and argued freedom of speech was not an "absolute right" during a debate on Thursday.

Speaking opposite Times columnist David Aaronovitch at a HuffPost/Polis debate, on the right to offend, Mr Hasan argued free speech was being "fetishized" and claimed many free-speech campaigners in the west were guilty of "brazen hypocrisy. "

"We have a civic duty not to offend others," he told the a packed audience at the London School of Economics. How can you construct a civilised, cohesive society if we go round encouraging everyone to insult each other willy nilly?

"Yes we do have a right to offend but it's not the same as having a duty to be offensive. You have a responsibility not to go out of your way to piss people off. I have the right to fart in a lift, but I don't do it because it is offensive. Some people want the right to be offensive but then get cross when people are offended."

In what soon became a heated discussion, David Aaronovitch challenged his view that freedom of speech could be practised with discretion or restraint, telling Mr Hasan: "you cannot decide from your Olympian aerie what is good and not good." He argued that not being offended and being "less touchy" was the only way to live in harmony, saying "at a global level if we are going to get on we are going to have to put up with these things."

Mr Aaronovitch told the hall it was simply not practical to be offended in a world where social media allows offensive views to circulate with virulent intensity. "I simply cannot afford to be offended every time someone retweets something obnoxious," he said. "People need to get a thicker skin."

Mr Hasan argued that the debate about the right to offend in relation to the French cartoons and the US movie could not be divorced from the climate of Islamophobia, "depressingly rampant" in some parts of our society – especially the media.

"You can say things about Muslims which you can't say about any other group of people" he said. "For Muslims right now there is a huge sense of fear and insecurity. It is irresponsible to suggest we just need a thicker skin. This is a majority-minority debate. To pick on Muslims in France...Oh God, how brave you must be."

Mr Hasan told an audience member: "We crack down on anti-Semitism and we don't allow it to go mainstream in the same way Islamophobia is. I firmly believe this is a debate about racism too."

Huffington Post, 11 October 2012

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A French satirical magazine published nude cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed Wednesday, a move that could further inflame tensions after violent protests in the Muslim world over an anti-Islam film.

The cover of Charlie Hebdo shows a Muslim in a wheelchair being pushed by an Orthodox Jew under the title "Intouchables 2", referring to an award-winning French film about a poor black man who helps an aristocratic quadriplegic.

Another cartoon on the back page of the weekly magazine show a naked turbaned Mohammed exposing his posterior to a film director, a scene inspired by a 1963 film starring French film star Brigitte Bardot.

AFP, 19 September 2012

Presumably the message contained in the Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon is that satirists should have the right to abuse Jews as well as Muslims. I suppose this does at least have the merit of avoiding the hypocritical argument that Islamophobia is more acceptable than antisemitism.

Update:  See "Muslims decry French Mohammad cartoons as new insult", Reuters, 19 September 2012

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