In this commentary published in Saturday's Guardian, Philip Hensher and Gary Younge try to make sense of the rights collision produced by the cartoons. Hensher argues the Yes side, while Younge argues for No.

An excerpt from Hensher:

Whether action should be taken, in a western democracy, against an argument that is just wrong, or against deliberate offence caused, however great, is another question. It's difficult to see that personal offence should be the basis of legal action in a state professing commitment to freedom of speech. The state takes a view on when personal offence is reasonable and when it threatens to infringe someone else's liberty, largely based on whether offence is caused generally, or just to a section of the community. Do the Danish cartoons cause offence only to isolated individuals? Or do they so attack anyone professing to be a Muslim that they would be caught by the UK's religious hatred law?

The cartoons almost certainly look very different to a Muslim living in a western democracy and to someone in the Muslim world. It's easy to sympathise with a Muslim living in Denmark, who would feel directly persecuted by these images. The Copenhagen Muslim interviewed in yesterday's Guardian certainly had a point when he compared them to the comments of a Danish MP who apparently called Muslims "a cancer in Denmark". Many people in his situation live difficult lives, and such images won't improve matters much.

But along with the sympathy one has to feel for people in that beleaguered situation, the uses that the Danish cartoons have been put to in the Muslim world must be challenged. Around the world, the anti-Danish campaign is being used by Islamist political groups to rally support for extreme causes. The aim of many such groups is, through pressure, to limit free speech on religious matters in the west, and entirely suppress it at home.

It is often forgotten to what degree law-making in the west is still seen across the globe as a model of good practice; and for that single reason our freedom of speech, even if exercised for the purposes of causing offence, even if simply wrong in practice, can't be eroded. To take an example: in Bangladesh in 1994, an attempt was made to introduce a law limiting what could be said on religious subjects. It failed because, it was argued, its terms could not be paralleled in the laws of any democracy. Britain's new law on religious hatred, even in its limited form, removes that defence from liberal voices outside Europe.

Debate on a great many subjects is already severely limited in the Muslim world. Reading Robert Irwin's brilliant new book, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, it is a shock to learn that serious scholarly work by historians on the first years of Islam has to be expressed in code, lest it cause offence to the faithful by contradicting the received account.

And here's an excerpt from Younge:

In January 2002 the New Statesman published a front page displaying a shimmering golden Star of David impaling a union flag, with the words "A kosher conspiracy?" The cover was widely and rightly condemned as anti-semitic. It's not difficult to see why. It played into vile stereotypes of money-grabbing Jewish cabals out to undermine the country they live in. Some put it down to a lapse of editorial judgment. But many saw it not as an aberration but part of a trend - one more broadside in an attack on Jews from the liberal left.

A group calling itself Action Against Anti-Semitism marched into the Statesman's offices, demanding a printed apology. One eventually followed. The then editor, Peter Wilby, later confessed that he had not appreciated "the historic sensitivities" of Britain's Jews. I do not remember talk of a clash of civilisations in which Jewish values were inconsistent with the western traditions of freedom of speech or democracy. Nor do I recall editors across Europe rushing to reprint the cover in solidarity.

Quite why the Muslim response to 12 cartoons printed by Jyllands-Posten last September should be treated differently is illuminating. There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them. When it comes to freedom of speech the liberal left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds, whether US evangelists, Irish Catholics or Danish Muslims.

But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. There is no contradiction between supporting someone's right to do something and condemning them for doing it. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in anti-racism should be no less so. These cartoons spoke not to historic sensitivities, but modern ones. Muslims in Europe are now subjected to routine discrimination on suspicion that they are terrorists, and Denmark has some of Europe's most draconian immigration policies. These cartoons served only to compound such prejudice.

The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. If newspapers have the right to offend then surely their targets have the right to be offended. Moreover, if you are bold enough to knowingly offend a community then you should be bold enough to withstand the consequences, so long as that community expresses displeasure within the law. ...