Or, you know, they just didn't want to publish racist caricatures under the guise of satire.
Claim: We need something analogous to "fence the out" for "being offended" if we want to construct a broadly participatory society, complete with free, open, and vibrant debate. In other words, perhaps our society should standardize on the convention that it is your job to not be offended by things, instead of other peoples' job to not offend you. Perhaps this might boil down to civilly agreeing to disagree.
Given a large number of religious/ideological groups and a larger number of issues with non-negligible probabilities of offending someone, it becomes likely that many statements in the public discourse will be offensive to someone.
We can model the situation binomially and compute the likelihood of at least one success (offending some group) in N trials, where N is the number of events in the public discourse per day (perhaps 10^5 in today's fractured media landscape) and the probability of offense is on average perhaps 1/(.001N). It's not hard to see that at least one success will probably happen every day. That's why I think we need a more robust system for dealing with this.
Just because most people won't go on a shooting rampage over them doesn't mean the images aren't offensive to some people. No point throwing fuel on the fire.
If you want to see offensive cartoons there are plenty of websites just a google search away.
It's funny how many stories are posted on HN about being sensitive to women/minorities/whatever, with comments full of people saying how open and accepting people need to be, then this comes up, and the dominant theme is "We need to publish offensive stuff everywhere, because fuck that group who's different than me."
It's funny how many stories are posted on HN about being sensitive to women/minorities/whatever, with comments full of people saying how open and accepting people need to be, then this comes up, and the dominant theme is "We need to publish offensive stuff everywhere, because fuck that group who's different than me." > No, fuck the group that uses terrorism to shut people up. It should be way more offensive to bow to the demands of the terrorists than to post some cartoons.
Let's test your free speech ideals.
Besides, given that most Americans wouldn't even know what kind of cartoons we're talking about, it would have actual news value to show them.