“The mullahs are not happy. The caricatures of their supreme leader (..) don’t seem to have made them laugh”, reads the latest issue of the magazine, out on Wednesday.
“Mocking oneself has never been a tyrant’s forte,” added the magazine’s editor, who goes by the name of Riss.
Last week, “Charlie Hebdo” published the caricatures of the ayatollahs in a special edition of the magazine, commemorating the January 7, 2015 attack by Islamic extremists on the magazine’s Paris office. The extremists killed 12 people.
The attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial team came after the magazine published cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, considered offensive in much of the Islamic world.
The magazine was hacked after publishing cartoons about Khamenei.
“The digital attack left no one dead, but it sets the tone. The mullahs’ regime feels so threatened that it considers hacking a French magazine website essential to its existence,” Rhys said.
“It’s an honor in a way, but more importantly it shows that they feel their power is very fragile,” the editor added.
Protests have been underway in Iran for months, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on 16 September in the custody of the service police. The protests quickly turned into broader dissatisfaction with the situation in the country and with Iran’s 83-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Protests are brutally repressed by Iranian authorities and foreign countries and opposition groups are accused of fueling the unrest.
Iran has issued a formal warning to France over “offensive and indecent” cartoons in last week’s Charlie Hebdo.
The Lebanese militant group “Hezbollah” also condemned these cartoons, declaring that Khamenei is not only a ruler, but also “a religious symbol for tens of millions of believers”.
