Faraaz Damji said:
Not offending people should always be secondary to educating them.
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with tweaking a few tweakable noses, especially those who raise purely personal objections, based on local cultural sensitivities, to aspects of an encyclopedic project. Such pressure is a naked and (because we're nice people and don't like to offend, largely successful) attempt to distort the encyclopedia on non-encyclopedic grounds. We can give a little but only where it doesn't matter much.
Also, we can't promise to avoid offending *everybody* if we get into displaying images as links.
This is my long-term objection to the path of appeasement. The only thing we can do in the long term is to remind people who are offended that they don't have to download, let alone render, the pictures. We can't make everybody happy.