Members of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, including cartoonists Cabu (L), Charb (2nd L), Tignous (4th L) and Honore (5th L) posing in front of the headquarters of the weekly in Paris on March 15, 2006.

The mainstream United States press has reacted to the charge of hypocrisy for not publishing the Prophet Muhammed cartoons that incurred the wrath of Jihadists in Paris against editors and cartoonists of the Satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo.

“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,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, said according to a blog post written by the public editor Margaret Sullivan.

American creator of “Maus”, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, made the charge of “hypocrisy” against the US media, although some of the newspapers did a reprint of the cartoon.

Art Spiegelman said he “admires” Charlie Hebdo and thought the satirical magazine fulfilled its “mission” in 2006 by publishing a controversial caricature of Mohammed.

“I think it’s so hypocritical to drape yourself in freedom of speech and then self censor yourself to the point where you are not making your readers understand the issues,” Spiegelman told AFP during a visit to Beijing.

“That cartoon was not making fun of the prophet, it was excoriating the believers who would kill.”

While many media outlets republished several front-page cartoons in the wake of an attack that left 12 dead, among them some of Charlie Hebdo’s top cartoonists, some of the largest US newspapers,including the New York Times, refused for fear of offending readers.

Spiegelman’s critically-acclaimed “Maus” depicts his Jewish father’s experience during the Holocaust, casting Jews as the mice of the title and Nazis as cats, and is the only comic book to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

Mocking what he called the “mega-fanatic zeal to be polite” in the American press, Spiegelman said that Charlie Hebdo had not sought to hurt Muslims by publishing cartoons of Mohammed, pointing out that the paper printed caricatures of the Pope and orthodox Jews as well.

“When religion overlaps with social and political issues, it’s necessary to fight back, so Charlie is equally hard on Jews including anti-semitic caricatures and quotes when talking about Israel,” he said.

“The equal opportunity insult that came with Charlie Hebdo was the reason it’s estimable.”