For sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam
A prominent Jordanian writer, who was on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam, has been shot dead outside a court in Amman where he was due to appear.
Nahed Hattar, 56, was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam after posting the cartoon on Facebook this year.
The cartoon, entitled The God of Daesh (Isis), depicted an Isis militant sitting next to two women and asking God to bring him a drink.
Hattar was arrested in August and released on bail early this month. On Sunday, he was shot in the head three times as he arrived for a hearing.
Because he shared a cartoon deemed “offensive” to Islam – to Islam, which is not a person and so cannot be offended. For sharing a cartoon on Facebook he was prosecuted and also murdered.
Saad Hattar, a cousin of the victim, said: “Nahed was accompanied with two brothers and a friend when he was shot. The brothers and the friend chased the killer and caught him and handed him over to the police.”
He said the family held Jordan’s prime minister, Hani al-Mulki, responsible for Hattar’s death. “The prime minister was the first one who incited against Nahed when he ordered his arrest and put him on trial for sharing the cartoon, and that ignited the public against him and led to his killing.”
Much like the way the government of Bangladesh keeps saying how terrible atheists are, thus igniting the public against them and encouraging all these murders.
In a statement, the family called on the government to hold accountable all those who had incited violence against Hattar. “Many fanatics wrote on social media calling for his killing and lynching, and the government did nothing against them,” they said.
The government prosecuted him for a cartoon dissing a fundamentalist form of a religion, and did nothing about people inciting murder.
Hattar had insisted that he had not meant to insult Islam by posting the cartoon, but wanted to expose how Isis “envisions God and heaven”. He accused his Islamist opponents of using the cartoon to settle scores with him.
A controversial figure on the left of Jordanian politics, Hattar has faced charges before, including for insulting the country’s king, Abdullah II. He has also been a prominent supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and advocated depriving Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their legal and civil rights.
Those last items seem dubious, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered.
Bonya Ahmed, again.
I’m not really clear why this writer was charged in the first place – by the sounds of it, the cartoon he shared wasn’t about Islam at all, it was mocking Isis’ claims to be pious. I wouldn’t have thought mocking Isis would be controversial with Jordanian authorities. Since the article mentions he was previously charged for insulting the king, I’m wondering if this was part of a longer running feud between him and the authorities.
I don’t get it either. There’s probably an explanation somewhere, but I haven’t seen it yet.
The cartoon should only have insulted Daesh… the point was that they are trying to make Islam serve them, and that is inappropriate.
Assad, and much of his inner circle, are Alawis, yet another very small minority sect in Islam. They are regarded as apostates by Daesh, and most other Sunnis.
The Syrian civil war quickly broke down into sectarian categories. The Shia, Alawi, Druze, etc. terrorized by the rise of Sunni anti-Assad groups, Iran leaning in with its anti-Sunni agenda….and downhill to hell from there.
I’ve never heard of Hattar before. But I suspect his anti-Daesh and ‘pro Assad’ stances are around this issue. And, since Jordan was created by carving a huge chunk off of the Palestinian Mandate and importing an Arabian king, the position of post 1948 refugees has always been a sore point.
Remember Black September? The movement was named for the civil war in Jordan, when the threat of Palestinians claiming political power in what they saw as part of their country was crushed with violence worthy of Assad or Daesh.