Written by 
A French magazine, which ridiculed the Prophet Mohammed in cartoons, is threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a California-made video mocking him.
The drawings in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
Riot police were deployed to protect the paper’s Paris offices after the issue hit news-stands.
Police detained a young man in southern France on Thursday on suspicion that he was planning a revenge attack on the staff of the magazine.
Anti-terrorism magistrates near the Mediterranean port city of Toulon questioned the 18-year-old after he threatened in a message on Facebook to cut the throats of anyone he could find at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a judicial source said.
The suspect had no police record but he was already known to security services, the source said, without giving further details.
Police in France are on high alert for attacks by Islamist militants. They were criticized for failing to stop an al-Qaeda-inspired gunman shooting dead seven people in March, including three Jewish children, in the southern city of Toulouse. The shooter, Mohamed Merah, had been interviewed by police after returning from a visit to Afghanistan and had a violent criminal record.
It featured several caricatures of the Prophet in what the publishers said was an attempt to poke fun at the furor over the film.
The French government, which had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons, said it was shutting embassies and schools in 20 countries as a precaution on Friday, when protests sometimes break out after Muslim prayers.
In Tunisia, French schools were shut down from Wednesday until next Monday after the ruling Islamists branded the cartoons a “new attack” on their religion.
The shutdown also came into force early in Egypt, where schools were to close for the weekend from Thursday, according to AFP.
Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Araby called the drawings outrageous but said those who were offended by them should “use peaceful means to express their firm rejection.”
Tunisia’s ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called an act of “aggression’ against Mohammed but urged Muslims not to fall into a trap intended to “derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West.”
In the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles, one person was slightly hurt when two masked men threw a small explosive device through the window of a kosher supermarket. Police said it was too early to link the incident to the cartoons. One small local Muslim group filed a legal complaint against the weekly but there were no reports of reaction on the streets of France, according to Reuters.
In France, a joint statement by Catholic bishop Michel Dubost and Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the French Muslim Council, defended the right to freedom of expression under the cherished French principles of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”
“But freedom endangers itself if it forgets fraternity and respect for everyone’s equal right to dignity,” they added.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called the publication of the cartoons a provocation.
“We saw what happened last week in Libya and in other countries such as Afghanistan,” he told a regular news conference. “We have to call on all to behave responsibly.”
France’s ambassador to Iran sent French citizens there a message urging them to exercise great caution, especially on Friday, and around diplomatic missions and places of worship.
But Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Stephane Charbonnier, rejected the criticism. “We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” he said.
“It shows the climate. Everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want: to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave,” he told Reuters.
Charlie Hebdo is no stranger to controversy. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammed, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since.
Speaking outside his offices in an eastern neighborhood with many residents of North African origin, Charbonnier said he had not received any threats over the latest cartoons. In a message on its Twitter account, Charlie Hebdo said its website had been hacked, but referred readers to a blog it also uses.
In 2005, Danish cartoons of the Prophet sparked a wave of protests across the Muslim world in which at least 50 died.
France is already on alert for attacks by al-Qaeda on French interests in West Africa.
A diplomatic source said this week that Paris had recently foiled attacks on economic and diplomatic targets and had credible evidence that more were planned.
–
