From my personal understanding of the issue , the law forbidding depictions of Mohammed applies ONLY TO MUSLIMS. The purpose was that Islam is dead against the idea of idol worship as that was one of the chief causes of disunity and warring among the various tribal factions of Mecca.
So if somebody else makes a cartoon depiction of Mohammed , Islam doesn't have anything to say about that.
Every other religion has been subjected to a lot of ridicule and hate ever since the enlightenment. European societies have accepted that religion should play no role in public life but Islamic societies are only slowly coming around to this idea.
The chief stumbling block to the progress of muslims is the regressive ideologies of the Saudi royals who use their oil billions to export their intolerant nonsense all over the world. It is they who are most interested in strengthening the notion that Islam and Democracy are fundamentally incompatible with each other because otherwise their subjects would question their own authority.
They justify their repression by conflating their authority with the rule of Islam , a trick which their subjects are increasingly realising because of which , they recently declared atheism as a crime equivalent to terrorism.
I live as a Muslim here in India and I'm glad I was born in India and not in some back-asswards country like Saudi Arabia. It is only in a democratic country like India are ALL muslims safe. Try being a Shia in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
We don't have absolute freedom of speech here , but we do have the power to question authority. Until the muslim world wakes up to the necessity of this , they won't enter the 21st century.
I'm a closet atheist but this rising tide of Islamophobia is making life difficult for all of us. Both sides need to work something out or else it's going to be a wild ride.