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Dean Baquet addresses NYT's republication of anti-Semitic cartoons

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet decided that his paper would not publish Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad primarily because he did not want to insult the paper's Muslim readers.

"Ultimately, he decided against it, he said, because he had to consider foremost the sensibilities of Times readers, especially its Muslim readers," Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reported Thursday. "To many of them, he said, depictions of the prophet Muhammad are sacrilegious; those that are meant to mock even more so. 'We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.'"

Yet in August 2010, the Times published this item about a Holocaust-denying Iranian cartoonist with an image of a cartoon that featured, in the Times' words, "anti-Jewish caricatures." Four years earlier, in 2006, the Times published this article about an Iranian exhibition of "anti-Jewish art," which featured a photograph of three anti-Semitic cartoons, one of which included a swastika. (Our thanks to Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal for both of these.)

In an email to POLITICO, Baquet noted that he wasn't executive editor when the two pieces were published, and added, "I obviously don't feel an obligation to follow anyone else's edict."

"Here is how I made the call, and it wasn't easy," he continued. "We have a standard that is pretty simple. We don't run things that are designed to gratuitously offend. That's what the French cartoons were actually designed to do. That was their purpose, and for that publication it is a fine purpose. But it isn't ours. So I had to decide whether it was so important to the story to show the drawings, important enough to drop the standard. And the answer was they were not. We could describe them. And anyone who wanted to see them could easily do so."

"By the way, to really show what the fuss was about you have to show the most over the top drawings. Otherwise, people won't really understand the story," he added. "Go have a look at those. They would not have met the standards of most news organizations."

UPDATE (3:31 p.m.): Baquet sends a follow-up email, adding:

And obviously don't expect all to agree. But let's not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet. I don't give a damn about the head of ISIS but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them.

UPDATE (4:10 p.m.): In 1999, the Times ran a report with a photo of Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary," a 1996 painting of a black Madonna "with a clump of elephant dung on one breast and cutouts of genitalia from pornographic magazines in the background." Per the report, "John Cardinal O'Connor called the show an attack on religion itself. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said it found Ofili's painting offensive, too. After seeing a photograph of "The Holy Virgin Mary" in the exhibition's catalogue, the league's president, William A. Donohue, issued a statement saying people should picket the museum." (h/t Steven Strauss)

UPDATE (5:16 p.m.): Gawker has rounded up a few more images that might "gratuitously offend."