BEIRUT: The head of Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah on Friday urged France to back down from its defence of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

“Do not allow this mockery, this aggression… to continue, and the whole world will stand with you,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said.

“French authorities instead of fixing the issue… became stubborn about this being freedom of expression,” saying “‘we want to continue with satirical cartoons’,” Nasrallah added.

“You need to think about correcting this mistake.”

Anger has erupted in the Islamic world over French President Emmanuel Macron’s defence earlier this month of the right to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The French leader spoke after an extremist decapitated a schoolteacher in a Paris suburb on October 16.

The teacher had shown cartoons of the Prophet published by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during a lesson on freedom of expression.

Nasrallah urged France to “be fair and just”.

“No Muslim in the world will accept our dignity… the dignity of our Prophet, being insulted,” he said.

Nasrallah also condemned the killings a day earlier of three people in a church in the French city of Nice. The suspected attacker was a young Tunisian man.

“This event is rejected by Islam… which forbids the killing of innocents,” he said.