Publisher shuts Turkey weekly over cartoon blasphemy

Members of Turkish police special forces stand guard at the police headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey on Friday. (Reuters)

ISTANBUL: The publisher of one of Turkey’s most prominent cartoon magazines on Friday shut down the weekly and fired all its staff after it published a cartoon of Prophet Moses deemed to be offensive.
“The decision has been taken for the magazine to be closed and all the staff laid off because of the distasteful cartoon,” the publishers said in a statement on the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
“The cartoon has disturbed society and disturbed us as a publishing company,” it said.
Girgir has since 2015 been published by the group of the Sozcu newspaper, a secular nationalist daily which is staunchly opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The publishers blamed the cartoon on a deliberate attempt to “put the company in a difficult situation” and said it would inform prosecutors of which employees were behind it.
A statement by the magazine, before the closure was announced, apologized for the cartoon, saying “it was not noticed before printing because of tiredness and insomnia.”
Two Turkish journalists from the Cumhuriyet daily were last year ordered to serve two years in jail for illustrating their columns with a blasphemous cartoon originally published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin tweeted after the publication of the Girgir cartoon that “this has nothing to do with freedom of speech or humor. This is immoral and a hate crime.”
The cartoon was also angrily condemned by the editor in chief of Istanbul’s Jewish weekly Shalom Ivo Molinas who tweeted: “What a disgrace! What disrespect!”