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‘The mullahs aren’t happy’: Charlie Hebdo magazine continues to infuriate Iran

The French satirical paper decided to double down after last week’s edition containing insulting caricatures of the Iranian leader infuriated the mullahcracy. 

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo published another set of cartoons poking fun at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Wednesday, undeterred by the Islamic regime’s anger over its previous week’s disrespectful pictures of Iran’s supreme leader.

“The mullahs aren’t happy. The caricatures of their supreme leader … do not seem to have made them laugh,” the paper’s editor, known as Riss, wrote in the new edition.

“Laughing at themselves has never been a strong point of tyrants,” he added.

Riss noted that there had been a cyber attack on the paper a few days after the edition came out.

“A digital attack doesn’t leave anyone dead, but it sets the tone,” he commented. “The mullah’s regime feels in such danger that it considers it vital to its existence to hack the website of a French newspaper. It is an honor in one sense, but above all proves that they feel their power is very fragile.”

Last month, Charlie Hebdo launched an international caricature competition called “Mullahs Get Out” that would feature Khamenei in particular. They called it a show of support for the anti-regime protestors who have continually taken to the streets throughout the Islamic republic after young Kurdish citizen Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in September by the morality police for not wearing her hijab properly.

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The winning pictures were featured in last week’s edition, published in honor of the eighth anniversary of the murder of 12 Charlie Hebdo employees in their Paris office by two Islamic radicals who were enraged after the paper had featured caricatures of Islam’s founder, Mohammed.

The editors placed a particularly graphic cartoon of Khamenei on the front page, and dozens of others inside – some of them vulgar. Many ripped Iran’s leader and his fellow clerics over the death sentences carried out against several demonstrators.

The Iranians were furious, calling in the French ambassador to protest.

“The insulting and indecent act of a French publication in publishing cartoons against the religious and political authority will not go without an effective and decisive response,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted while blaming the French government for the privately owned paper’s content.

While the minister did not spell out what that response would entail, Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad tweeted Tuesday that “Hossein Salami, the Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard Corps, threatened to kill those associated with Charlie Hebdo: ‘Muslims will take revenge sooner or later. And you may arrest the avengers, but the dead will not come back to life.’”