From Charlie Hebdo To Jiang Yefei, The Cost Cartoonists Pay For Political Satire

Ten years ago, on January 7, 2015, two gunmen stormed the Paris office of , a satirical magazine, and killed 12 people.

Brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, who claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda, entered the building with Kalashnikov rifles. After shooting a maintenance worker, they forced their way into the second-floor newsroom. They called out the names of four cartoonists and executed them. Th✤ey also killed four other journalists, a bodyguard assigned to protect one of the cartoonists, police officer Ahmed Merabet, and a friend of one of the victims.

After a violent two-day standoff, police shot the attackers dead outside a printworks northeast of Paris. Ostensibly, the gunmen killed Charlie Hebdo ♛cartoonists for drawing controversial cartoons of tไhe Prophet Muhammad.

Since its founding, Charlie Hebdo has championed free expression and secularism, using satire to criticise organised religions, political movements, and those in power. Its targets have included the political right, capitalism, Christianity, Judaism,𝓰 and Islam.

The horrific murders at Charlie Hebdo shocked the world. They also led to varied debates across the globe—about blasphemy, censorship🐠, and freedom of expression. While the scale and violence of the incident were unprecedented, violence against cartoonists is not new. Throughout history, cartoonists have been jailed, kidnapped, tortured, exiled, for making a joke at the expense of those who couldn’t take one.

The Price Of Drawing Political Cartoons

Political cartoons blend journalism and art with satire, making them a powerful form of expression. They have the capacity to expose power and potentates with a clarity and humour that many🅘 fear. Their accessibility also turns them into a threat—feared by politicians in both democracies and autocracies. 

In October 2023, British newspaper The Guardian fired its long-time cartoonist Steve Bell over an unpublished drawing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bell shared the illustration on Twitter. It showed Netanyahu operating on his own stoꦓmach, showing a cut in the outline of the Gaza Strip. Bell shared on X what happened next:

“I filed this cartoon around 11 a.m., possibly my earliest ever. Four hours later, on a train to 𝄹Liverpool I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangꩵely cryptic message ‘pound of flesh…’ I’m sorry, I don’t understand, I said and received this even more mysterious reply: ‘Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; anti-Semitic trope’. Clearly it was self-evident, anybody could see it…”

The phrase “pound of flesh” comes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the Jewish moneylender Shylock demands literal flesh as collateral for a loan. Over time, the character has become one of the most notorious Jewish stereotypes in English literature. While Bell denied any anti-Semitic intent, the controversy cost him his 40-year career at The Guardian.

If a cartoon cost Bell 🎉his role, in Turkey, it costꦑ Musa Kart his freedom. 

In November 2019, an Istanbul court sentenced the cartoonist to three and a half years in prison for allegedly “supporting an illegal organisation.” Kart had spent decades working for Cumhuriyet (“Republic” in Turkish), a newspaper critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s growing authoritarianism. He was one of 12 journalists and administrators sentenced to up to eight years in prison for Cumhuriyet’s editorial stance. 💧After nine months in preventive detention and five months behind bars, authorities released Kart under judicial supervision. He remains banned from leaving Turkey as he awaits a final court ruling.

For Chinese political cartoonist Jiang Yefei, not even exile provided refuge. A refugee in Thailand since 2008, Yefei, who was known for his satirical cartoons for the US online magazine , was arrested by the Thai authorities in 2015 at China’s request and was extradited back to China despite his UN-recognised refugee status. In a secret trial, a Chinese court sentenced him to six and a half years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” through his cartoons. He was released in 2022 after serving his sentence. Before his trial, he was held in solitary confinement for nearly three years, during which he was shown on Chinese state media displaying “visible signs of physical abuse.”. Before fleeing to Thailand, Jiang had already been imprisone🧸d and tortured multiple times in connection with his cartoons. 

Jordan in July 2023 blocked access to the satirical news website (“The Borders” in Arabic) within the kingdom without specifying the reason. The ban was decreed shortly after Al-Hudood mocked lavish spending lin�﷽�ked to the Jordanian crown prince’s wedding. 

Launched in Jorda🃏n in 2013 and currently operating from its exile base in the United Kingdom, the satirical news website has content on sensitive subjects such as corruption or poor governance in West Asia. It says on its website that its journalists and cartoonists “remain anonymous for obvious security reasons.”