People are outraged over a Charlie Hebdo cover characterizing Hurricane Harvey victims as neo-Nazis

A French satirical magazine famous for its provocative and inflammatory cartoons was met with backlash on Thursday after it released a cover that characterized Hurricane Harvey victims as neo-Nazis.

The cover for its Friday magazine showed an image of drowning limbs saluting Nazi flags, accompanied by the text, "God exists. He drowned all the neo-Nazis of Texas."

Charlie Hebdo

Charlie Hebdo cover.

Predictably, the cartoon provoked some - occasionally misguided - backlash on social media.

The French publication has long courted and embraced controversy over its topical cartoons. After publishing images that some Muslims found offensive, the publication was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015 which left 12 people dead at its Paris office.

It has continued its anti-left and anti-institutional cartoons since the attack, garnering negative news coverage for its depiction of Italian earthquake victims as pasta and a series of cartoons mocking the symbolic value of a dead Syrian refugee that went viral in 2015.  

Charlie Hebdo wasn't the only publication to face criticism for its cartoonists' commentary on the hurricane. 

After an outcry on Wednesday, Politico deleted a tweet with a cartoon depicting a person in a Confederate flag shirt being rescued from a flooded house with a secessionist sign, which critics said was insensitive to flood victims.

The cartoonist, Matt Wuerker, defended his cartoon, saying it skewered secessionists and those who disparage the federal government writ large while taking its services for granted.

"As a political cartoonist, I try to get people to think - to consider the ironies and subtleties of the world we live in," Wuerker said in an email to Business Insider.

"This cartoon went with an extreme example of anti-government types - Texas secessionists - benefitting from the heroism of federal government rescuers," Wuerker continued. "It of course was not aimed at Texans in general, any more than a cartoon about extremists marching in Charlottesville could be construed as a poke at all Virginians. My heart is with all the victims of Hurricane Harvey's destruction and those risking their lives to save others."