Cartoon of dead Syrian toddler draws outrage

VANCOUVER — An inflammatory cartoon picturing a drowned Syrian toddler and predicting his future as a sex offender in Germany is “disgusting,” says the boy’s aunt.

Tima Kurdi said she was brought to tears when she saw the depiction of her two-year-old nephew Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body in the controversial French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The cartoon asks in French what would have become of the boy had he grown up. It shows two men running after screaming women with their tongues hanging out and hands outstretched above a caption that reads, also in French, bum grabbers in Germany. The drawing refers to a series of sex attacks allegedly committed by a large group of migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve.

The toddler drowned, along with his mother and older brother, while crossing the Mediterranean en route to Europe last September.

A photo of the boy’s body lying face down on a Turkish beach was published in newspapers and websites around the world and stoked global outrage over the Syrian refugee crisis.

“This is really painful, to use that innocent boy’s picture. It went too far,” Kurdi said in an interview on Thursday.

“We’re trying to move on. Why do they want to bring the pain back to us?”

The boy has been widely reported as being three years old, but Kurdi clarified on Thursday that he was two when he died.

Kurdi has been an outspoken advocate for Syrian refugees since the death of her extended family members. She helped sponsor her other brother, Mohammad, and his family, who arrived in Canada late last year.

Micheal Vonn of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said Charlie Hebdo is exercising its legal right to expression, and at the same time those decrying the publication are exercising that same right. Cara Zwibel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said that a society that values freedom of expression has to take the good with the bad.