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The Philadelphia Inquirer became the first major American newspaper to publish any of the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on Saturday, prompting a small protest outside the newspaper's offices yesterday morning.

About two dozen demonstrators, holding signs reading "No to Hate" and "Peaceful Protest for Religious Tolerance," dispersed after about an hour. The organizers said they would be back on Friday unless they received an apology.

Amanda Bennett, the editor of The Inquirer, said the decision to publish one cartoon came after several days of internal deliberation. The editors drew on the newspaper's history of publishing stark images that some readers find offensive, she said, including a grisly photo of civilian contractors who were burned to death in Falluja, Iraq, in March 2004.

When it became clear that the caricatures were becoming "more, not less, newsworthy," Ms. Bennett said, the editors decided to publish the cartoon on Saturday so that readers would be better informed about the controversy.

"There's been a whole history of newspapers publishing things that people would find controversial and offensive," Ms. Bennett said. "My view is that we need to publish it for a good news reason, we need to publish in context and we need to explain to readers why we did it."

One small New York daily, The New York Sun, published two of the cartoons last Thursday. The paper's editor, Seth Lipsky, hung up on a reporter yesterday when contacted for comment. In an e-mail message later, Mr. Lipsky provided the following comment: "We published the two images last week not to make a political statement but to illustrate a dispatch by The Associated Press. We sought to respect the sensitivities by running the story and pictures in a modest position inside the paper." The cartoons have been widely circulated on the Internet.

Other major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, did not publish the caricatures. Representatives said the story could be told effectively without publishing images that many would find offensive.

The Inquirer chose a cartoon depicting Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb. The newspaper also provided a link on its Web site, philly.com, to all 12 of the cartoons, which were posted on the Web site of Michelle Malkin, a conservative syndicated columnist.

A leader of the protest, Asim Abdur-Rashid, an imam with the Majlis Ash-Shura, a group of mosques in Philadelphia and the surrounding Delaware Valley, said he had learned about the cartoon's publication on Saturday when a friend showed him a copy of the newspaper. At a monthly meeting of local imams on Sunday, Mr. Abdur-Rashid suggested organizing a protest.

"It was a thing of disrespect," he said yesterday when reached by telephone. "They knew the sensitivity of the cartoons because of the reaction that has taken place around the world."

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, said that despite The Inquirer's decision, he had seen restraint on all sides of the issue within the United States. "I think The Inquirer's move was the exception that proves the rule," Mr. Hooper said.

Scottish Ninja wrote:Well, we're seeing a marked contrast between protests here, where they have signs that say, "No to Hate," and the Middle East, where they have signs that say, "Slaughter those who insult Islam".

You'd think someone over here would be protesting the protests a bit more actively.