A senior Iranian legal expert says the West uses religious hate-mongering as a tool to foment extremism and terrorism in other countries.
Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who is also a former spokesman for Iran’s Constitutional Council, made the remark in a Monday tweet in reaction to recent sacrilegious cartoons by France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, which took aim at Iran’s national and religious values.
“Religious hate-mongering is the West’s political tool to create violence, extremism and terrorism,” he said.
نفرتپراکنی دینی ابزار سیاست غرب در ایجاد خشونت، افراطیگری و تروریسم است. از همین رو تصویب قطعنامههای شورای حقوق بشر و مجمع عمومی سازمان ملل متحد در ممنوعیت توهین به مقدسات دینی با رای مخالف رژیم های آمریکا و فرانسه مواجه شده است.#شارلی_ابدو
— عباسعلی کدخدایی (@Kadkhodaee_ir) January 15, 2023
The expert added, “This is why resolutions adopted by the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly to ban insult to religious sanctities have been met with the negative votes of the US and French regimes."
His remarks came after Charlie Hebdo released several sacrilegious cartoons that contained insult to Muslim sanctities as well as Iran’s religious and national values. The controversial right-wing magazine had in early December announced a competition for the cartoons.
In a post on his Twitter account earlier this month, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian strongly condemned the “insulting” act by the controversial French magazine, warning of a “decisive” response.
“The insulting and indecent move by a French publication in publishing cartoons against the religious and political authority will not go without an effective and decisive response,” the minister tweeted.
Thousands of Iranian people across the country took to the streets on Friday to condemn a French magazine’s insulting cartoons.
The demonstrators attended the rallies after Friday Prayers in major cities, including the capital Tehran, voicing support for Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and chanting slogans against Western states and their hostile acts toward Iran and Islam.
They issued a resolution, noting that the “insolent move” proves the enemies’ “grudge against Islam," while showing nothing but the destruction of morality and spirituality in the West.