JERUSALEM (JTA) — An Israeli artist’s caricature marking the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris was removed from a Tel Aviv exhibit.
Also, another Israeli artist had his caricature censored in the monthlong exhibit titled “Apres Charlie” (“After Charlie”) at the French Institute.
The French Embassy in Tel Aviv expressed concern over how the two works portrayed the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, the Israeli business daily Globes reported Sunday.
A work by Vladik Sandler showing the prophet posing as a nude model for the five cartoonists murdered in the Jan. 7, 2015 attack was removed from the exhibit, according to Globes. A work by Roy Friedler was censored, with a sticker placed over the caricature of Muhammad.
“The conclusions and calculations of winners and losers, people can do for themselves,” Sandler wrote on Facebook about the removal of his piece, according to the Times of Israel. “But I have been left with a feeling of terrible sourness that those people, whose only crime was dark humor, died for naught and that any symbolic heritage that they might have wanted to leave behind — has gone to the trash or is hiding behind red stickers of censorship.”
The attack by Islamists on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, killed 11 staff members.
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