Erik Wemple at the Washington Post:

One year ago, the Associated Press was among the outlets that censored certain cartoons of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after the murderous attacks on its Paris offices. “None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images,” said AP spokesman Paul Colford at the time, in a rationale that reflected the (less than courageous) thinking of many prominent U.S. news outlets.

So much for journalism – the AP doesn’t show images at the heart of important news stories, because it pretends to consider them “provocative.” So much for not letting violent bullies tell us all what we can read and see.

Now Charlie Hebdo has come out with an anniversary product that depicts God as a gun-carrying terrorist. “One year on: the killer is still at large,” says a line on the cover as a bearded, God-like figure scurries. The Vatican doesn’t like it, asserting that it doesn’t “acknowledge or … respect believers’ faith in God, regardless of the religion.”

It’s not supposed to. We don’t have to acknowledge or respect believers’ faith in God any time we want to say or draw something. We’re allowed to reject religion. We’re allowed to hate Bastard God. The Vatican is not the boss of us, and neither is the AP.

The Associated Press doesn’t much care for it, either: “We made a determination that showing a caricature of God in this context was just as offensive as showing a caricature of a prophet and hence decided to not to use the cover image,” said Santiago Lyon, AP’s vice president and director of photography, in a statement to the Erik Wemple Blog.

70 years ago they would have been rounding up the Jews because that nice Mr Hitler told them to.