I wonder what degree of tolerance or latitude is shown towards atheists or agnostics in Saudi Arabia or other predominantly Islamic countries.....

I'd like to see hateful cartoons disappear, so laws to ban them would be great, but it has to be done on a fair basis where the hate that they are attacking is banned first. There are two kinds of hate here: primary hate, and the secondary hate that is a reaction to the primary hate. It's just like when person A punches a blameless person B and person B punches him back. The first punch is deeply immoral, but the second one is fully moral. The cartoons are like the second of those punches, justifiably hitting out at something that hit them first without just cause. The Qur'an contains copious amounts of vicious hate which insults billions of harmless people by demonising and dehumanising them, by setting precedents for killing them, and by inciting their murder. That is the primary hate. The cartoons are a reaction to that and they are secondary hate. Secondary hate isn't desirable, of course, but you don't ban that while allowing the primary hate that drives it to go on being freely possessed and propagated. Banning the secondary hate will not stop the primary hate killing millions of people. Banning the primary hate would stop all that violence and the secondary hate would evaporate with it.

But how do you ban holy hate? You strip it out of the holy texts that contain it: all holy texts of all religions that contain it, and all manifestos and other associated literature of any other kinds of ideology too: no hate of that kind should be tolerated anywhere. People who are protective of that hate (and who typically go out of their way to reinterpret it ways to make out that it doesn't mean what it says) have a moral duty to stop loading that hate into the minds of the kinds of people who take a fancy to it and become terrorists. We have seen tens of thousands of people (maybe even hundreds of thousands of them) acting on that hate in ways that involve them giving up their lives for it, and that isn't a case of bad people latching onto it as an excuse to be violent, but highly principled people genuinely believing that they're doing good by killing for God. They are not evil people perverting a religion, but people with the best of intentions trying to do the right thing. Responsible people should be taking serious steps to stop that hate getting into the minds of the simple souls that latch onto it. Complete versions of holy texts could still be retained in restricted libraries for scholars to study under license, but the masses should only have access to redacted versions which are 100% peaceful and benign. That would put an end to all the violence and make all religions beautiful.

Such irony! They are able to criticize the head of the government because the society values liberty and free speech - the exact thing they are fighting against. China has conducted atrocities on so many innocent Muslims. Do you see anyone of significance from the Ummah utter a word of protest? Why not? Of course, freedom of speech and individual liberty are not exactly enshrined in the Holy Quran.
Muslims are great people of course, but mostly they suffer from the cancer of their psyche, called Islam. Islam takes advantage of the democratic apparatus to protect itself against reforms whenever it forms the minority. This is what we see happening in France.

It's like they're saying, "Damn, if anyone is allowed to ridicule my religion, everyone may realize how ridiculous it is?"

It takes a prize idiot to mistake the defence of laïcité as being an assault on Islam.

Boy did they go to the wrong civilization!
Even extra liberal France is a Capitalist system and I hate to break it to Islam but...
there's no profit in their prophet.

They can "request" all they like but Macron is not going to stop. Unfortunately when you don't include your fellow country men and women in how to fix a problem it will not go away.

‘Islam is being hyper-politicised in France, but Muslims are not part of the debate’

[france24.com]