In addition to Salman Rushdie, other fundamentalist threats to public or anonymous persons

Like Salman Rushdie, injured Friday, August 12 in the United States, how many in the world live under the threat of a fatwa or an attack from a Sunni or Shiite fundamentalist? It is an impossible figure to establish, but this threat hovers over several tens, potentially thousands, of public or anonymous people, designated by name as targets or potentially targeted solely for their membership of a newspaper, an institution or a denomination.

The attack of January 7, 2015, against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, in the center of Paris, did not put an end to the threat hanging over the newspaper team. On the contrary. The security measures surrounding the members of the editorial staff and the premises of the satirical weekly remain very high. They are all the more so Charlie Hebdo has been the subject of several calls for murder by Al-Qaeda since its republication, in early September 2020, of the cartoons of Mohammed as a prelude to trial of the January 2015 attacks. In the following days, a particularly virulent hate campaign was launched by Pakistani Islamist parties and by the Turkish head of state, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers “Charlie Hebdo” supports Salman Rushdie: “Nothing is sacred”

On September 25, 2020, a young pakistani refugee went to rue Nicolas-Appertin the 11^e arrondissement of Paris, thinking that the premises of Charlie Hebdo were still there, and attacked two people with a butcher’s cleaver, thinking they were journalists from the weekly. The following October 16, a young Russian of Chechen origin beheaded Samuel Paty with a knifea history and geography professor, leaving his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), after the latter had been denounced on social networks for showing caricatures of the prophet in class.

Read also: Salman Rushdie is “on the road to recovery”, says his agent, his family say they are “relieved”

This latest attack, which caused national amazement, considerably widened the potential targets of Sunni jihadist violence by extending it to all those showing the cartoons and not just those who designed or disseminated them. The Danish daily Jyllands-Postenwho commissioned the cartoons, and the twelve designers who produced them – the most controversial designer, Kurt Westergaard, died of natural causes on July 14, 2021 – are obviously targets still under protection.

Violent controversy in Pakistan

the Jyllands-Posten had placed this order justifying it by the fact of fighting against the fear of representing the Prophet Muhammad since the assassination by bullets then with knives of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a fundamentalist in the Netherlands on November 2, 2004, because of his short film on Islam, Submission, produced with the collaboration of the author of Somali origin Ayaan Hirsi Ali, atheist and violent critic of Islam. The latter, now based in the United States, is the subject of recurring death threats.

You have 38.62% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.