Both the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News quietly killed a “Non Sequitur” comic strip that mentioned “Muhammad” — a move the author of the strip calls ironic.

“The irony of editors being afraid to run even such a tame cartoon as this that satirizes the blinding fear in media regarding anything surrounding Islam sadly speaks for itself. Indeed, the terrorists have won,” Wiley Miner told a blog that follows the comic strip business, The Daily Cartoonist.

Other papers that didn’t run the Oct. 3 strip include the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

Miner’s cartoon asks “Where’s Muhammad?” — a takeoff on the “Where’s Waldo?” books. The comic shows characters in a park buying ice cream, fishing, roller skating, etc. No character is depicted as Middle Eastern.

The fact that the papers had spiked the comic didn’t become public until Washington Post’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander criticized his paper for canceling what he called “a powerful and witty endorsement of freedom of expression.”