By BI: The New York Times’ hypocrisy regarding displays of “offensive” religious imagery runs unabated. An article yesterday about the sale of Chris Ofili’s controversial painting showing the Virgin Mary clotted with elephant dung against a porn-collage background, was accompanied by a photo (below) of the offensive work.

Newsbusters  Yet when the paper refused to reprint a cartoon of Muhammad that appeared in the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that resulted in the January 2015 massacre of 12 magazine staffers, it offered this smug, cowardly justification:

Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities. After careful consideration, Times editors decided that describing the cartoons in question would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.

No fear of violent reprisal, but fear of “causing offense.” So why does Ofili’s dung-clotted Virgin Mary get a pass?

As noted before, the Times isn’t afraid to run all religiously offensive images. The paper has in the past run approving pictures of Ofili’s painting, which caused controversy when it hung in the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. On Friday, ignoring its previous self-righteous comments on not offending “religious sensibilities” when it comes to Muhammad, the Times once again ran a photo of the Virgin Mary.

At Shoebat, Muslim ‘religious sensibilities’ will never stop us from exercising our First Amendment rights.