My personal favorite of the Danish cartoons:

Blogburst organized by Michelle Malkin
Jeff at Protein Wisdom had the best analysis of all the bloggers I read. I wish I could write like this….
“But of course, freedom of speech—reduced (for purposes of this debate) to its core, animating mandate and protection—is PRECISELY the ability to look religion in its pious face and flip it the bird. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize religion, just as freedom of religion is supposed to protect the rights of the religious not to have their religion established for them by a government—a counterbalancing right that is lacking in theocratic states and in religions where pluralism is denied legitimacy.
But this lack of balance between the freedoms—rather than being exploited by the west to make its case for free speech and its necessity as the guiding principle of liberalism—is instead being exploited by neophyte identity politicians in the Muslim world, who have learned to play the victim card so quickly that our own State Department has bought into their affected outrage at victimization and religious “intolerance.”¹
Somehow, it seems to escape those raised on westernized Orientalism that by calling the intolerance of intolerance “intolerant,” they have reduced the concept of tolerance itself to a cruel semantic joke—the idea being that groups formed around cultural similarities, once they have honed their group message and excommunicated the dissenters—own the narrative. Outside criticism is therefore inauthentic—always tainted by the gaze of the Other, and so only to be considered secondarily (if at all) as a valid critique.
From there, it is a short journey to asserting the absolutism of a cultural paradigm—and this happens necessarily where universality (or, for postmodernists, social contracts that rely on the trappings of what is metaphysically untenable) is surrendered to competition between identity groups over primacy of “rights” in the global sense.
This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.
One regret I have is that this battle should have been fought and won in favor of intentionalism and individualism inside our own western universities years ago; instead, the victory went to our progressive academic collectivists, whose fidelity to PC culture, identity politics, free-speech zones, tolerance training courses, et al manifested themselves in a “tolerance” culture that now has the goverment looking inside individuals’ heads (hate speech, hate crime) and effectively chilling all speech by defining tolerance in an Orwellian sense of tolerating only that speech which is so bland and banal that it is unlikely to offend anyone. And now we might be forced to battle with guns and chemical weapons and fissile material rather than with confidence in our own intellectual rigor and rectitude.
The idea of liberal democracy was NEVER about such nonsense—nor was it ever about balkanizing into identity groups who, by asserting a self-defined narrative, could claim an authenticity that put them beyond criticism.
So yes, the clash of civilizations has begun. But, to fall back on a useful cliche’, we have seen the enemy, and he is us (too).”
Read the whole thing, it is simply excellent analysis…

I found this cartoon at Free Republic on this thread
What my faith teaches about religious tolerance:
The Articles of Faith – #11:
“We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”
D&C 134: 1-4, 7,
“We believe that religion is instituted of God; and that men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others; but we do not believe that human law has a right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion; that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the freedom of the soul.”
“We believe that rulers, states, and governments have a right, and are bound to enact laws for the protection of all citizens in the free exercise of their religious belief; but we do not believe that they have a right in justice to deprive citizens of this privilege, or proscribe them in their opinions, so long as a regard and reverence are shown to the laws and such religious opinions do not justify sedition nor conspiracy.”
Jenny Hatch
UPDATE:
Victor does it again….Europe Awakes….
And Mark….

Click on the image to get to Human Events where you can view each cartoon at full size.
Claudia Rosett today at National Review
Quote:
“If statehood, citizenship, and civilization itself are to mean anything, we are all in the end accountable for our own actions. When people riot and brutalize and burn, there are individuals in the crowds who are responsible.
And in the places where this is happening, if the governments will not call these individuals to account, we need to hold those governments themselves responsible. Cartoons alone, to quote another line from Hamlet, are in a class with nothing more than “words, words, words,” and those are grounds on which newspapers, nations, and religions may have their disagreements and their dialogues.
But when violence enters the picture, that is a matter for governments to settle, and in the free world the job of government and politicians is not to opine upon cartoons, but to lay down the law that no one may with impunity threaten our liberty and lives.”
UPDATE: Feb 7th
And of course, Ann Coulter chimed in on this topic!