France:Whatever verdict is handed down in the coming weeks, the two-day trial of Philippe Val, the editor of Charlie Hebdo magazine, is unlikely to improve inter-faith relations in France.
Three French Muslim groups filed a lawsuit against Val, claiming the cartoons he published equated Islam with terrorism and insulted Muslims because of their religion.
Each time Val approached the courtroom in the Palais de Justice, the crowd outside cheered him. "When Philippe Val looks in a mirror, he mistakes himself for Voltaire," scoffed Francis Szpiner, President Jacques Chirac's lawyer, who represented the Grand Mosque of Paris.
Muslim lawyers were booed when they arrived. "For the first time in 26 years at the bar, people hissed at me," said Ouassini Mebarek. "And the defence preaches about tolerance!"
By the end of the trial, Chirac was the only prominent French politician supporting the Muslims' right to redress.
The right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy made a dramatic jump into the secular/freedom of speech camp when the trial started on Wednesday, in an apparent effort to distance himself from Chirac and ingratiate himself with left-wing voters.
Chirac's support was tainted by the testimony of Denis Jeambar, former editor of L'Express magazine, which also published the cartoons. Jeambar said he received a call from Serge Dassault, a weapons manufacturer who is a close friend of the president, asking him not to print the drawings. Dassault has since sold L'Express, but still owns Le Figaro newspaper.
Dassault told Jeambar he was about to travel to Saudi Arabia with Chirac. French hopes of selling French fighter jets to the kingdom did not materialise, but Libération newspaper still accused the president of having "an arms contract in place of a brain".
François Bayrou, the centrist presidential candidate, took the stand yesterday to defend Charlie Hebdo's right to publish the cartoons. Bayrou described himself as a practising Catholic and a supporter of secularism. The church committed atrocities during the Crusades and the Inquisition, he said; Islam should also accept criticism of its errors.
At times, the debate became hopelessly entangled with the Holocaust and the 1990s civil war in Algeria. Claude Lanzmann, the film director who made Shoah, the best-known French film about the attempted extermination of the Jews, said there was "no possible comparison" between anti-Semitic magazines in 1930s Germany and the Soviet Union that caricatured Jews as "hook-nosed barbaric userers who defiled women".
Au contraire, said Christophe Bigot, a lawyer for the Grand Mosque. The Mohammed cartoons were "in the traditional, hateful vein of blacks with big lips and Jews with hooked noses".
Mohamed Sifaoui, an Algerian journalist who works for Charlie Hebdo, said he refused to be represented by the organisations that filed the lawsuit.
"When a terrorist threatens or kills, he does it in the name of all Muslims. When an Islamist drags a newspaper into a tribunal, he claims he's doing it in the name of all Muslims." Sifaoui keeps a collection of death threats, most of which quote the Koran.
The drawings "that almost started the third World War" were not the first to associate Islam with violence, he said, pointing out that the Saudi flag shows a sabre; the emblem of the Muslim Brothers, designed by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, two sabres.
Salah Djemai, the lawyer for the World Islamic League, noted that Sifaoui supported Khaled Nizar, the Algerian general who aborted that country's first free elections and violently suppressed Islamists. "Yes, I supported him because he stopped the fundamentalists coming to power," Sifaoui answered.
Despite Szpiner's closing reminder that "racism is not an opinion but an offence", past cases do not auger well for the Muslims' lawsuit.
Catholics have several times lost suits over "offensive" film posters and advertisements. Writer Michel Houellebecq was cleared of "incitement to hatred" after he said Islam was "the most stupid religion". The late Oriana Fallaci was sued in France for saying "the sons of Allah multiply like rats", but the case was thrown out on a technicality.