The decision of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo to reprint the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in September incited another wave of violence in France, a repetition of what happened when these images were originally published in 2015. This time, the government responded to the attacks by projecting the cartoons on public buildings, while President Emmanuel Macron declared Islam is “in crisis” and promised to stamp out “Islamist separatism” in France.
Earlier in September, I had argued in an op-ed that it should be possible to condemn Muslims who kill people over the caricatures of the prophet, while also recognising they are meant to display epistemic mastery over Muslims, an already vulnerable minority in France and in Europe. I had also questioned that the insatiable need to keep on recycling such images is indeed an exercise in free speech.
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