Ariel Zilber, Daily Mail, August 31, 2017

The cover of the latest edition of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicts Texans who drowned in the flood waters of Tropical Storm Harvey as Nazis, it was reported on Wednesday.

‘God Exists! He Drowned All the Neo-Nazis of Texas,’ the controversial weekly magazine writes for its cover story.

The cartoon on the front page shows a torrential downpour drowning a group of people carrying flags with the Nazi swastikas.

Some of the victims on the cover are under water as they do the Nazi salute with their arms outstretched at a 45-degree angle.

Presumably, the magazine intended to emphasize the fact that Texas voted for Donald Trump in the recent election.

Trump, of course, came under fire for not unequivocally denouncing neo-Nazis and white nationalists at a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month.

Yet the floods caused by Tropical Storm Harvey have decimated Houston, a city with a Democratic mayor which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.

The surrounding areas of Harris County, which also voted in favor of Clinton, have also been hard-hit by the catastrophic flooding.

Charlie Hebdo is a publication that goes out of its way to provoke angry reaction from its targets.

Fiercely secular and left-wing, it has published scathing cartoons poking fun at religion.

The cartoons that have catapulted Charlie Hebdo into international headlines were those satirizing Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

Those cartoons sparked outrage in the Islamic world, with some calling for the deaths of Charlie Hebdo editors.

In January 2015, two gunmen who claimed allegiance to Al-Qaeda killed 12 people including many of its star cartoonists in an attack on its offices in Paris.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of France afterwards, rallying behind the slogan ‘Je Suis Charlie’ (‘I am Charlie’) in defense of the right to free speech.

Last week, Charlie Hebdo generated controversy once again for publishing a provocative front-page cartoon about Islam and the recent terror attacks in Spain.

The previous edition of the magazine, which was targeted by Islamist gunmen in 2015 for a depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, shows two people lying in a pool of blood having been run over by a van next to the words ‘Islam, eternal religion of peace’.

A dozen terrorists of Moroccan origin are believed to have plotted last week’s attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, where 15 people were killed and more than 100 injured after a van and car were driven into crowds.

The attackers are thought by investigators to have been radicalized by an extremist Islamic preacher who died in a house where the group was trying to produce explosives.

As the cartoon became one of the top trending topics on Twitter in France, prominent Socialist MP and former minister Stephane Le Foll called it ‘extremely dangerous’.

In June, Charlie Hebdo ran a cover depicting a decapitated British Prime Minister Theresa May.

The satirical weekly also features cartoons of terrified Brits fleeing a terror attack near Big Ben, alongside the caption: ‘Slimming tips from ISIS – run fast.’

Another cartoon, seemingly an homage to its notorious cover of the Prophet Mohammed, shows a British man saying: ‘At least one never caricatured the prophet.’

That edition was written just after the deadly suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester which left 22 dead and scores wounded.