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Freedom to offend: A collection of cartoons

A 2012 cartoon by “Eliot” in the Qatari Al-Watan newspaper depicts a Jew driving with President Barack Obama’s head as a gearshift knob and the U.N. logo as his steering wheel.
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January 15, 2015

This caption for the “Shoah Hebdo” issue (a mock cover of Charlie Hebdo) says, “I’ll take 1 million off 6 in exchange for Palestine” — showing a rabbi bargaining to knock 1 million off the official count of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust in exchange for Arabs allowing Jews to have Palestine.

The Amjed Rasmi cartoon from Arab News depicts rats wearing Stars of David, heads covered. They scurry backward and forward through holes in the wall of a building called “Palestine House.” Arab News, an English-language daily widely read by expats in Saudi Arabia, is published by a state-owned Saudi corporation.  Courtesy of TomGrossMedia.com

Drawn by Glen Le Lievre and satirizing Israelis watching fighting during the Gaza war, this cartoon appeared in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald on July 26, 2014, and caused an uproar, especially among Sydney’s Jewish community. The paper’s editor-in-chief apologized two weeks later, calling it a “serious error of judgement.”

This cartoon cover, by the French satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, is credited with provoking last week’s deadly attack in Paris against the magazine’s offices. It depicts a caricature of the prophet Muhammad for the special “Sharia Hebdo” issue, declaring, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”

This satiric September 2005  image, by Kurt Westergaard in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, shows the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb for a turban. It led to the current round of extremist outrage against media outlets that breach their sensibilities.

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