Turkish authorities on Monday arrested cartoonist Dogan Pehlevan for committing an “Islamophobic hate crime” by drawing a cartoon allegedly depicting Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya gleefully posted a video of police officers dragging a handcuffed Pehlevan down a flight of stairs.
“I once again curse those who try to sow discord by drawing caricatures of our Prophet Muhammad. The individual who drew this vile image, D.P., has been apprehended and taken into custody. These shameless people will be held accountable before the law,” the interior minister trumpeted.
Yerlikaya also shared videos of three other men getting dragged from their homes and tossed into police vans. The other men were reportedly fellow cartoonists who work for the weekly magazine Leman.
Leman published a Pehlevan cartoon after the end of the 12-Day War between Iran and Israel that showed two men shaking hands in the sky while missiles flew beneath them. The two men in the sky were shown amiably greeting each other according to Islamic fashion.
“Salam aleikum, I’m Mohammed,” one of them said.
“Aleikum salam, I’m Musa,” the other responded.
Pehlevan said his goal was to highlight “the suffering of a Muslim man killed in Israeli attacks,” and the publication insisted his cartoon “does not refer to the Prophet Muhammad in any way.” The idea was ostensibly to portray Muslim and Jewish victims of violence meeting peaceably in Heaven.
“In this work, the name of a Muslim who was killed in the bombardments of Israel is fictionalized as Mohammed. More than 200 million people in the Islamic world are named Mohammed,” Leman editor-in-chief Tuncay Akgun pointed out.
Moses is also regarded as a prophet in Islamic tradition, and is sometimes referred to by the name “Musa.”
Turkey’s Islamists begged to differ, as all depictions of Muhammad are considered blasphemous under sharia. Muslim extremists have used murderous violence against non-Muslim cartoonists in Europe and the United States to enforce this blasphemy law.
Turkey has one of the worst press freedom rankings in the world, frequently invoking laws against “inciting hatred” to suppress speech that displeases the government. Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said on Monday that Pehlevan and the other Leman cartoonists were under investigation for “incitement to hatred and enmity” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday condemned the cartoon as a “vile provocation.”
“We will not allow anyone to speak against our sacred values, no matter what. Those who show disrespect to our Prophet and other prophets will be held accountable before the law,” the authoritarian Turkish president declared.
Erdogan said all copies of the Leman issue containing the Pehlevan cartoon have been seized and the publication itself must face legal action.
“This has nothing to do with art, ideas, freedom of expression, or artistic freedom. In our view, this is a hate crime — an act of hostility directly targeting Islam, Prophet Moses, and our Prophet,” thundered Omer Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling AKP party.
A crowd of about two hundred protesters gathered outside the offices of Leman in Istanbul on Tuesday, defying a nominal ban on public gatherings. The demonstrators threw rocks at the building and fought with riot police.
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