Excellent post. Christians and Jews are not known to burn religious monuments or threaten and kill people to avenge cartoons and verbal assaults to their religions. In fact, they will fight and die for the rights of people to criticize (peacefully) whatever they should choose, even though they may abhor the manner in which it is done.
I was trying to explain how this is central to the concept of freedom to the Muslim woman on my flight yesterday. They seem to look more to the hereafter than to our life here, so though the moderates do "lip service" to wanting all to be "free", they have a warped concept of what freedom is.
For one thing, the women in the cult of Islam do not really enjoy freedom even now. For another, in the ideal "Allah-centered" universe, theirs would have the freedom, and all others would be killed or enslaved anyway, so it is just the worthless non-believers who would suffer the lack of freedom as they see it, so what's the big deal? They do not share the "live and let live" philosophy that is a cornerstone of other religions.
One cannot discount that it is the leaders of this group who are now emboldened to utter things they would not have said even a few years ago, such as Quadafi (sp?) "Americans should adopt Islam or be at war with Islam." Ahmadenijad "Israel should be wiped off the map." (I know I am killing the spellings and even the exact wording of the quotes, but, you will agree that I have the essence).
These may be maniacal crazies, but they ARE leaders of state. Why are we not seeing more outrage from within this group? That is a question I asked last night and it is a question we must continue to ask of this group who think they belong to a "religion".
Persons of all religions should be mindful of the hereafter. However, it should be noted that the Islamists have no experience of freedom -- they must obey or else. We have the precious freedom to choose our religion, make a rational, adult decision to embrace it. This makes our choices more meaningful to the Living God, or the Spirit of Truth, as Jesus termed it.