As a Muslim who believes depicting the prophet is wrong, I say that Muslims CANNOT control what the other 5 billion of the world do or say. This is just getting out of hand. Its turning into a vicious cycle here. The world is seeing this as attempts to suppress freedom of speech > publish more> Muslims get offended > try suppress harder > more publishing.
Ignore it, and most probably it will go away.
On a slightly different note. I remember vividly seeing the Danish cartoons in September of 2005. I just simply brushed it off. At that time, the whole Arab/Muslim populace was basically boiling because of what was happening in Iraq and Gaza. They were calling for their nation's leaders heads for being idle. The Muslim world in general was totally oblivious about the cartoons. In December (notice 3 month after publication,) 2 Danish Imams, were allowed to present a dossier about the cartoons at the Organisation of Islamic Conference. Things got out of hand then. Why were they allowed to speak at the OIC? The Islamic world has hundred of thousands of Imams who can't just waltz in the conference. It was an attempt from the Arab leaders to distract their people from the important issue at hand: the atrocities happening in Iraq & Gaza. And guess what? It worked!
On the other hand, American Dad's episode (Stan of Arabia), which was by far more blasphemous, didn't cause any ruckus despite it being aired around the same period? It got minimal coverage if any. Wikipedia has 3 lines covering the criticism of the episode, mentioning only ONE Saudi newspaper coverage! And the newspaper is an English one!
So again, why were the two Imams allowed to speak in front of the OIC, while a more offensive cartoon got hardly any coverage? I don't know, maybe Arab leaders didn't want to get on the bad side of the US.
I know its far fetched; reading this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. But I thought about this a lot. And I realize that MSM in the Arab world is very much controlled, it might be plausible.
