The satirical magazine announces the winners and warns that “religious intolerance has not yet said the last word”
The government of Iran on Wednesday labeled “insult” the decision by the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ to open a caricature contest of the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The insulting and indecent act of a French publication depicting caricatures of religious and political authority will not go without an effective and decisive response,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hosein Amirabdolahian said in a post on his Twitter account.
“We will not allow the French government to cross the border. They have definitely gone down the wrong path,” he said, recalling that Iranian authorities had previously put “Charlie Hebdo” on their sanctions list.
The satirical magazine announced on Dec. 8 an “international competition to create caricatures of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” describing it as “a symbol of backward thinking, narrow-mindedness and intolerance of religious power.”
In this sense, he asked cartoonists to “support Iranians fighting for freedom by ridiculing their religious leader from another era and pushing him into historical obscurity.” “Ayatollah (Ruhollah) Khomeini’s political ambition to create an Islamic Republic has come to an end, showing the absurdity of trying to run a modern society with religious precepts,” he said. For this reason, Charlie Hebdo pointed out that “the freedom to which all men aspire is incompatible with the archaic nature of religious thought and its submission to all so-called spiritual authority, of which Khamenei is the most deplorable example.”
‘Charlie Hebdo’ announced a selection of winning cartoons on Wednesday, highlighting on its account on the social network Twitter that it has received “more than 300 drawings and thousands of threats” in recent weeks.
The magazine entered the international arena after the publication in 2006 of some cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which originally appeared in the Danish newspaper ‘Jyllands-Posten’. In 2015, the headquarters was the target of an attack that left twelve dead.
For this reason, the magazine published an editorial explaining that the contest “is also a way of remembering that the reasons why cartoonists and editors of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ were murdered years ago are sadly still relevant today.” “Those who refuse to submit to the precepts of religions risk paying with their lives,” he lamented.
“The caricatures of the supreme guide we have received are the continuation of what the murdered ‘Charlie Hebdo’ cartoonists have always denounced,” he argued, emphasizing that “religious intolerance has not yet said the last word ‘.
“The designs we have received come from the four corners of the world, demonstrating to those who still doubt the universal dimension of caricature and respect for freedom in the face of religious arbitrariness,” said the magazine, adding that , as there is no prize for this competition, no positions have been awarded to the winners.
In this way, he has pointed out that adopting that decision “would have undervalued the rest of the drawings” and wondered “what reward would equate to the value of saying ‘no’ to religious tyrants”. “There is something that no one can buy or give away for the good reason that it is priceless: freedom, simply,” he stressed.
Source: La Verdad
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