Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame says the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, went overboard, provoking a bloody terror attack, in the name of ‘freedom of press’.
On January 7, twelve people, including ten journalists, were murdered in their offices by Islamic terrorists in Paris after Charlie Hebdo published a satirical cartoon mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
“If you know that people are going to be outraged by that [provocative cartoons]… say well, let me wait for another time…maybe I shouldn’t do it,” Kagame said.
He said the magazine ignored over a Billion Muslims worship Mohamed
as their prophet.
“We are not talking about tens of millions of people; we are talking about billions of people,” he said on Thursday while addressing journalists.
Kagame, had earlier sent his heartfelt condolences to the victims of the attack that outraged the world.
He categorized the outrage in three parts. First, he said, “Who would not be offended, angry [at the offensive cartoons]?”
But, he added, “There are a lot more questions than answers when you have people walking in a room and gunning people down as a way of dealing with the problem.”
Secondly, he said, “who wouldn’t be happy to enjoy the freedoms; including press freedoms, people being able to express themselves the way they want, the way they think that suits their expressions?”
“Who wouldn’t be angry that this is being attacked?”
Number three, he said is more complex, because it is a mixture of the two extremes; is people’s beliefs, which he said in a free world, they should be entitled to.
On one side, he said, “we have diehards of freedom of press and expression and on the other, he added, “the diehards of religious extreme beliefs, who I guess are going to be the minority in this case.”
Yet, Kagame strongly condemns the terror attacks, and supports freedom of expression, but said the majority of the world is just “caught up”.
The world being crashed between different kinds of extremists’ stances, he said.
Meanwhile, Charlie Hebdo’s latest issue has enraged even more Muslims, with another cartoon of Mohammad saying, “Je Suis Charlie” on the Front Page.
For Kagame these are the kinds of extremes that have left the world being “sucked in..with one using the other for their different ends.”
“People need to sober up and find means of dealing with these extreme positions.”
President Paul Kagame Adressing Journalists Thursday. He observed that France’s Charlie Hebdo Magazine Team are just comedians not Professional Journalists.
