France: Huge demand expected for Charlie Hebdo issue

The initial edition of Charlie Hebdo to emerge since the terror attack on the French magazine’s offices is expected to generate record request at the same time as it hits newsstands on Wednesday, defiantly featuring the Prophet Mohammed on its cover.

The appropriate issue will have an initial print run of 1m, with an extra 2m expected in the coming days, to be distributed across a country that is still tense and fearful and where 10,000 troops have been deployed to protect vulnerable sites.

“We normally sell about four copies [of Charlie Hebdo] a week,” said Philippe Piochelle, who works at a newsagents in central Paris. “But I am expecting request for maybe 100 or 200 tomorrow. The question will be getting enough copies.”
The paper’s distributors, MLP, said 27,000 French press outlets will stock the journal, against 20,000 normally. It said everyone will get at least a dozen copies, and some will be given hundreds.

The cover of the issue, which was released on Monday night, shows a crying Prophet Mohammed holding a sign saying “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), with the words “Tout est pardonné” (“All is forgiven”) above it on a green background.

“The only idea originally had been to draw Mohammed and write ‘I am Charlie’,” explained Renald Luzier, the designer of the cover, at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday afternoon at the offices of French daily Libération.
“I looked at him and he was crying. And again I wrote ‘All is forgiven’, and I was crying. And again we had found our bloody front page,” he said, visibly choking up as he spoke, surrounded by colleagues and security guards.

Holding a copy of the new magazine, he added: “Just look at this Mohammed – he is so much additional sympathetic than the one who is brandished [by extremists].”

Gérard Biard, editor-in-chief, said editions would be available in Arabic, English and Spanish, inclunding French for two weeks, with further editions planned in Italian and Turkish. The journal usually has a print run of around 60,000 copies.

Before in the day Zineb El Rhazoui, a columnist who worked on the new issue, said the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week.
“We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Several newspapers in France have reprinted Wednesday’s front cover, inclunding Le Monde and Libération. The Guardian and the Independent in the UK, El País in Spain and Bild in Germany have as well carried it. The Wall Street Journal has run the cartoon but the New York Times has not. The Financial Times is publishing the image because of its news price.

Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish an extra picture of the Prophet Mohammed has been strongly criticised in some nations.
Shawki Allam, Egypt’s grand mufti, who is the country’s most senior religious scholar issuing religious edicts, said on Tuesday that publishing such cartoons was an “unjustified provocation to the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims around the world”.

The magazine’s actions, he said, “did not serve coexistence and dialogue between civilisations . . . and deepened feelings of hatred between Muslims and others”.
A radical Sunni cleric in the UK went further, describing the depiction of the Prophet Mohammed “an act of war”. Anjem Choudary, a lecturer in shariah law, who was arrested in September on suspicion of encouraging terrorism, said that, in a shariah court, such an offence would carry capital punishment.

At least three UK magazine wholesalers have said they will distribute the magazine. Comag and Menzies Distribution said they did not have any concerns about security.

Additional than 3.7m people marched in the streets of Paris and across France on Sunday in a display of solidarity with the magazine in the face of the attacks. A lot of waved “Je Suis Charlie” signs.