While condemning the "Muslim barbarians" who killed 12 people at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, Catholic League president Bill Donohue told
Newsmax TV on Thursday that the satirical journal's staff routinely abused their editorial freedom by publishing profane anti-religious cartoons.
Following up on his blog post, "Muslims Are Right to Be Angry," Donohue told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that he was referring to moderates who don't respond to religious insults with violence, but do take offense at seeing Islam and the Prophet Muhammad mocked in vulgar terms.
Note: Watch Newsmax TV now on DIRECTV Ch. 349 and DISH Ch. 223
Get Newsmax TV on your cable system – Click Here Now
"We're talking about some things that deal with, you know, bestiality and scatological commentary, and things of that nature," Donohue said in describing Charlie Hebdo's editorial cartoons — which he described as too offensive
to be rebroadcast or reprinted in accounts of Wednesday's attack.
"There's not a single newspaper or TV show which will put on their screen or in their newspaper what I have in front of me," he said.
Donohue said that media outlets have misrepresented his opinion to suggest that he blamed Charlie Hebdo itself for the massacre — in which 12 people, including cartoonists and the publication's top editor, died at the hands of gunmen heard proclaiming "God is great" in Arabic.
"And by the way, to just set the record straight, nothing that these Muslims barbarians did can be ever, ever justified," he told Berliner on Thursday. "I made that clear."
"Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned," he said.
But the killings, and Charlie Hebdo's treatment of Islam "are two separate but related issues," aid Donohue.
"Somebody might think, well, what we're objecting to, or what Muslims are objecting to, is just poking some innocent fun," he said. "No, no, no, no, no."
"All I'm simply saying is this: These guys in Paris … the cartoonists, they're not champions of freedom," he said. "They've abused freedom for years, and we need to have a public discussion about what is the meaning of freedom. When you abuse freedom and trash other people's religion with obscene portrayals so shocking you can't put it on TV, there's something sick going on."
He noted that the newspaper's murdered editor, Stephane Charbonnier, once told an interviewer that Muhammad is "not sacred to me,"
"Well he's not sacred to me, either," said Donohue. "But you see, in the little, small, selfish world of this man who was killed yesterday — tragically killed, my heart goes out to his family — but in his mind, he never takes responsibility for anything.
"So just because Muhammad is not sacred to him, therefore I can trash him? No, no. People ought to get it straight," said Donohue. "Nobody has a moral right, even if they have a legal right, to insult people of faith."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.