PARIS – The French satirical magazine – Charlie Hebdo – has sparked another controversy for a new cartoon portraying Aylan Kurdi – the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned last year – as a grown man sexually harrassing assault a woman.
Charlie Hebdo says this drowned baby Syrian refugee would have grown up to sexually harass German women. The caption on the cartoon translates as: “What would Aylan have grown up to be? An ass-groper in Germany.”
The drawing was issued after German authorities said that nearly all the suspects in a rash of New Year’s Eve violence against women in Cologne were “of foreign origin”. Police said on late Sunday that more than a week on from New Year’s Eve, some 516 complaints had been lodged, including 40 per cent that were related to sexual assault. Witnesses described terrifying scenes of hundreds of women running a gauntlet of groping hands, lewd insults and robberies in the mob violence.
Germany’s interior ministry had indicated that nearly all of the men involve in the attacks in Cologne were migrants.
Aylan Kurdi drowned along with his mother and his five-year-old brother Galip, after a dinghy they were travelling in capsized off a beach close to the resort town of Bodrum. Like thousands of other refugees and migrants, they’d had been trying to reach the Greek island of Kos.
A photograph of Aylan’s lifeless body on the beach became an iconic emblem of Europe’s growing migration crisis, and prompted an outpouring of sympathy for refugees.
Twitter users have condemned the latest controversial Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon of as ‘racist’, ‘tasteless’ and ‘unbelievably sick’. “I’m ashamed that I once even felt sympathy with Charlie Hebdo. The people who make these cartoons have proven that humanity died with Aylan,” A user tweeted.
Disgusting cartoon in Charlie Hebdo “what would’ve become of Aylan had he grown up? A groper,” Another user said.