Back to Gabrielle Goldwater's Reports
PARIS -- A gang of young Muslims wielding iron
rods has forced a Paris cafe to censor an exhibition of cartoons ridiculing
religion, the owners of the establishment said on Friday.
Some 50
drawings by well-known French cartoonists were installed in the Mer a Boire cafe
in the working-class Belleville neighborhood of northeast Paris, as part of an
avowedly atheist show entitled, "Neither god nor god".
The collection
targeted all religions - including Islam - but there were no representations of
the Prophet Mohammed such as sparked the recent crisis between the West and the
Islamic world, according to Marianne who is one of the cafe's three owners.
"We used to give glasses of water to a group of local boys aged between
10 and 12 who played football across the street. On Tuesday a few came in, flung
the water on the ground and accused us of being racists," said Marianne, who did
not wish to give her family name. "Later more of them came back with sticks and
iron rods and tried to smash the pictures. They managed it with a few of them.
With the customers we chased them away, but they kept coming back," she said.
Later the cafe-owners were approached by a group of older youths. "They
said they did not approve of what the youngsters had done. But what we were
doing was unacceptable, too. They warned us that if we didn't take down the
cartoons they would call in the Muslim Brothers who would burn the cafe down,"
said Marianne. "They kept saying: 'This is our home. You cannot act like this
here'," she said.
Refusing to dismantle the exhibition, the owners have
placed white sheets of paper inscribed with the word 'censored' over the
cartoons that were targeted by the gang.
"To take down the cartoons
would have been a surrender. But on the other hand we cannot expose ourselves to
this kind of violence. This way you can still see the pictures if you lift the
paper," said Marianne.
One of the cartoons that aroused the wrath of the
youths was a bar scene, in which the barman offers a drink to an obviously
inebriated man who says "God is great". The caption is: "The sixth pillar of
Islam. The bar pillar." In France a "bar pillar" is a barfly or drunk.
The aim of the exhibition was to poke fun at all religions, according to
cartoonists who took part.
"Putting on this type of show in this place
was not in the least a provocation. Unless you think that freedom of expression
in itself is a provocation," the cartoonist Charb told Le Parisien
newspaper.
The Belleville neighborhood of Paris' 20th arrondissement
is racially-mixed, with a large population of North African origin, but Marianne
said that there were few outward signs of religious extremism.
"There
are areas near here which do have a reputation for Islamists. But here it's
different. These are street gangs for whom religion has become a kind of mark of
identity," she said.
The owners of the Mer a Boire, which means "the sea
you can drink" and opened in September, have filed suit with the police.