Worse: it helps justify Israel's cruelty to a lot of people.
Wow. That this isn't known in some parts of the world suggests how information gets filtered, skewed, and manipulated elsewhere.
It's the message of forgiveness that's almost as much of a shocker as the image of the prophet himself (peace be upon him).
There's an English idiom called the "
sacred cow". It is those things which are given mystical importance in one context, but are typically rather mundane and no reason for alarm or concern in other contexts. Like the cow in Hinduism: some may see the incarnation of the divine, and yet many others see, well, a cow.
Charlie Hebdo made its existence out of lampooning sacred cows the world over. Some are political cows, some are religious, some are social taboos that don't seem taboo-like at all from a different perspective.
To non-Muslims, the image of Muhammed is, well, like the cow to non-Hindus. Not a cow as in insulting someone, calling them a cow. But it registers nothing of significance as would, say, you seeing a bicycle. That something as mundane as an image of a bicycle could incite men to kill over it is a complete mind-fuck to much of the world. They don't get it, and to be honest they will never get it.
I do my best as a non-Muslim to understand why just a visual rendering of Muhammed is so insulting. I don't think I will ever understand it either unless I become a devout Muslim -- and even then it might not be the same because I wasn't born with that nor raised in that cultural environment where that was considered the norm. Something in my brain registers that this is something that might be perceived as hurtful by others, so don't forget that, but it's purely on an intellectual level -- a sort of need to enforce my own awareness of it, because for me it just doesn't register. I could walk past a poster on a wall of Muhammed and I simply wouldn't even notice it.
That might explain things just a little: it requires mindful effort for non-Muslims to sensitize ourselves, let alone even notice these things. Much as if you meet someone from El Salvador at a party, you mention the word "latino" as the word you always use in casual conversation, and he goes all ballistic on you every time you say "latino" because he's offended that you don't say "hispanic" instead. There's a lot to be said about cultural sensitivity and making others feel accepted. But how much do you tolerate from each and every person and each and every culture before that gets out of hand?
Now there's clearly a massive leap (and stick to the eye) from that to when you get to Charlie Hebdo. There are a lot of people who are (somewhat justifiably) fatigued with laundry lists of cultural sensitivities when no insult is even intended, like walking through a minefield. "Why am I such a horrible person just because I say the word 'latino'?" That sort of thing. So what you get with Charlie Hebdo are sophomoric pranksters who basically underscore these social absurdities by exaggerating them to the extreme. Partially in the hope that presenting them that way will make us less overly sensitive, though in their case they are also having a bit of fun at the expense of others who they see in power.
That last part is important: power. Many Muslims will lament they have no "power". But to feel rules that (from one cultural perspective) seem absurd, there is power in forcing people to change their behaviors for reasons that are essentially invisible to them. It's almost the power to intimidate. That's true about politicians, that's true about Jews and Israel, that's true about Christian figures, and that's true about Muslim extremists who kill if you disagree.
So Charlie Hebdo fights back with what it can against that power. The unfortunate part of that fight back is that Charlie Hebdo's actions are really directed at Muslim extremists -- the ones who would storm their doors and shoot them -- but that there's also collateral damage to every moderate and liberal Muslim as well. I can assure you, as much as you take offense as one is insulting your mother, you are not the primary intended target of their message or insults. Even though you feel offended as if it were personal.