A group of prominent Yale alumni is criticizing the University’s decision to remove caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book about the infamous 2005 Danish cartoon controversy.

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and a group of other graduates who call themselves the Yale Committee for a Free Press, is circulating a letter to the editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine that renounces the “shameful censorship,” the Yale Daily News reports.

The group is asking for the University to publish “The Cartoons that Shook the World” with all of the referenced cartoons.

The cartoons triggered massive protests from Morocco to Indonesia. Rioters torched Danish and other Western diplomatic missions. Some Muslim countries boycotted Danish products.

Jytte Klausen, the Brandeis University professor who wrote the book, says the effort is coming too late. The book is already being printed and will be published in a few weeks. The original schedule for publication would have made the book available in November.

Even still, Bolton said “the whole episode was an example of intellectual cowardice.”

“To publish a book on the controversy around the cartoons and not publish the cartoons is just mind boggling,” he told the Daily News. "If they were scared, they should’ve just not published the book.”