I’ve had a chance to look at those cartoons that seems to have caused all this trouble, and I haven’t seen anything in the cartoons that states directly–“This is the Prophet Muhammad !” (I hope I was looking at the right cartoons.)
To me, the cartoons seems to caricature your standard “garden variety” Muslim adult male from the Middle East (and thereabouts.) Who determined that these cartoons were of the Prophet Muhammad? If it is forbidden to make any image of the Prophet Muhammad, how would anybody know what he looked like in the first place? How would you caricature somebody if you have no idea of his original appearance?
I think that is part of the problem. Besides depicting him, which you shouldn’t really be doing at all, it depicts him using a set of nasty old stereotypes. Jews don’t usually depict their God, but imagine if someone decided to depict him with a big hook nose and a wad of cash in his hands.
The thing that I don’t understand is that by banning images of Muhammed as a way of discouraging worship of him, they are actually elevating him to God-like status since the “no graven images” edict doesn’t apply to anyone else. I’ve never heard of Muslims protesting over actual images of God whether reverential or satirical. Suppose a paper solicited purposefully irreverent images of “The God of Abraham”. I can’t believe there would be one single Muslim protest anywhere in the world.
That’s not universally true. Some sects (Muslim and Christian alike) have at various points in history banned all art of human figures, and even all representational art.