Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey, on Feb. 19, 2020. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday vowed to launch an operation into the Idlib province of Syria if the Syrian government does not retreat by the end of February. (Photo by Mustafa Kaya/Xinhua)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vented his outrage Wednesday at a "disgusting" cartoon in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo depicting him looking up a woman's skirt while drinking beer in his underpants.

Erdogan's office vowed to take "legal and diplomatic action" while Turkey's NTV television said Ankara had also summoned the second-most senior diplomat at the French embassy to express its "strong condemnation." 

Under normal circumstances, France's ambassador would have been summoned, but he has been recalled to Paris for consultations in a further sign of the deteriorating diplomatic relations between the two NATO allies.  

The front cover Charlie Hebdo cartoon came out just days after Erdogan called for a boycott of French products and questioned President Emmanuel Macron's sanity for promoting a drive against Islamic extremism.

Macron's defense of the media's right to mock religion - as exemplified by Charlie Hebdo's blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad - has stirred angry protests across Turkey and swathes of the Muslim world.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday became the latest Islamic figure to criticize the French president, saying his defense of cartoons of the prophet was a "stupid act" and an "insult" to those who voted for him. 

Erdogan said he had not personally seen the Charlie Hebdo caricature because he did not want to "give credit to such immoral publications."

"I don't need to say anything to those scoundrels who insult my beloved prophet on such a scale," Erdogan said in a speech to his party's lawmakers.

Turkey is a mostly Muslim but officially secular country that has taken a more conservative and nationalist course under Erdogan's rule.

Macron's defense of Charlie Hebdo's right to publish drawings of the prophet, which is forbidden under Islam, came after the brutal murder on October 16 of a French school teacher who had shown cartoons to pupils during a class discussion about freedom of speech.

AFP