Outrage over Charlie Hebdo’s cruel cartoon
CONTROVERSIAL French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo caused outrage yesterday with a sickening front page cartoon depicting the Queen kneeling on the Duchess of Sussex’s neck.
The headline next to the wild-eyed Monarch reads: Why Meghan Left Buckingham, and a speech bubble coming from the prone Duchess says: ‘Because I couldn’t breathe any more.’
The image references the death of unarmed black man George Floyd, 46, who screamed ‘I can’t breathe’ as a US police officer knelt on him, sparking the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.
The Paris-based publication drew widespread condemnation last night, with Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith saying: ‘This nasty cartoon trivialises George Floyd’s death to score cheap points. That’s not satire, that’s just dangerous.’
A spokesperson for Black Lives Matter described the front page as ‘nasty, crass, crude, racist and cheap satire, frankly not worth the paper it’s written on’.
And Dr Halima Begum, head of the UK race equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust, said Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon was ‘wrong on every level’, adding: ‘This doesn’t push boundaries, make anyone laugh or challenge racism. It demeans the issues and causes offence, across the board.’
Campaign group Black and Asian Lawyers For Justice tweeted that the cover was ‘outrageous, disgusting, fascistic racism’, adding that the magazine was ‘pimping George Floyd’s trauma for profit’.
In 2015, brothers Saad and Cherif Kouachi stormed the magazine’s Paris offices armed with Kalashnikovs and gunned down 12 people after it published images mocking the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
At the time millions of people around the world threw their support behind the publication and posted ‘Je Suis Charlie’ (I am Charlie) on social media. The magazine is now published from a secret headquarters in Paris.