Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has condemned what he described as "absurd" and "intolerable" threats to freedom of expression while commenting on a Rotterdam teacher being forced into hiding after a classroom discussion of last month's killing of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty.
"We must be able to discuss topics such as freedom of expression in our classrooms without any outside pressure. It may hurt when someone has an opinion that conflicts with your worldview or religious conviction, but they have a right to say so in all liberty", Rutte told reporters on Saturday.
He spoke after Dutch police said on Friday that they had arrested a young woman in Rotterdam following her posting threatening messages on social media in the wake of the discussion of the Paty killing in a classroom at Rotterdam's Emmauscollege high school.
Police added that it remains unclear whether the detained 18-year-old, who has yet to be identified, was an Emmauscollege student.
During the debate, some students reportedly took offence over a cartoon that had been hanging on a bulletin board for years, showing a decapitated figure labelled "Charlie Hebdo" sticking its tongue out at a bearded man with a bloody sword, in an apparent reference to a French satirical weekly and the Prophet Muhammad.
The incident comes after a teacher from an elementary school in the Molenbeek district of Brussels was suspended last week for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad while discussing last month's beheading of Party who used the same cartoons.
"Our decision [to suspend the teacher] is uniquely based on the fact that these are obscene images. If it had not been of the Prophet, we would have done the same thing", the spokesperson for the mayor of the Molenbeek district, Catherine Moureaux, said in a statement that caused flak from netizens who described the move as a violation of freedom of speech.
The developments followed Macron pledging to continue to uphold France's right to freedom of expression, also vowing that the country will never renounce caricatures.
Cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are considered blasphemous by Muslims, and the publication of such caricatures led to a deadly shooting at Charlie Hebdo's office in 2015, when 12 people were killed and 11 more injured as a result of the attack.
