Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
# Cologne
Too far? Charlie Hebdo asks if drowned toddler Aylan Kurdi would've become a sex attacker
The magazine has published a cartoon in response to the sex assaults in Germany.
CHARLIE HEBDO HAS published a cartoon asking whether dead Syrian child Aylan Kurdi would have grown up to become a sexual predator.
The cartoon is a response to the spate of sexual assaults in Cologne that have been blamed on men from an Arabic and North African background.
It features a mock-up of Kurdi. The drowned three-year-old boy whose lifeless body on a beach in Turkey sparked worldwide shock at the extent of the refugee problem.
In the cartoon, Charlie Hebdo shows two men, who are made to look like monkeys, chasing two women. In the corner is a drawing of Kurdi.
The caption reads, ”what would Aylan have become if he’d grown up? An ass groper in Germany”.
Whoops!
We couldn't find this Tweet
It’s provoked a strong reaction online with, with even the dead child’s auntie taking to Twitter to describe it as “disgusting”.
Speaking to CBC from her home in Canada, she says her advice is to ignore the cartoon.
It’s disgusting, but everyone has their opinion. They like to express their feelings, and they’ve done it before. I hope they won’t do it again.
Others’s however, say that it shouldn’t be ignored and that the satirical magazine have gone too far.
Others have defended the magazine’s right to publish the cartoon.
It’s also been argued that Charlie Hebdo is actually defending migrants by showing how preposterous it is to argue that refugee immigration in Germany will increase sex attacks.
The cartoon was part of a series of three cartoons under the heading, ‘France isn’t what people say’. It also features a cartoon of one of the murder scenes following the Charlie Hebdo massacre last year.
The cartoon could therefore be taken as saying that France, as a nation, would not ask whether Kurdi would’ve become a sex attacker.
It’s not the first time Charlie Hebdo has used the image of the dead child in one of its cartoons, in September they published another cartoon featuring his image and the text “so near his goal”.
Read: Charlie Hebdo publishes controversial cartoon of drowned Syrian toddler >
Read: Fine Gael councillor says drowned Syrian 3-year-old and family “were not fleeing for their lives” >
