So someone comes up to you and says the pattern on your shirt is offensive to them and they tell you to change shirts. You tell them to get lost and call them a nutjob. What a random thing to get in a fuss over!

Shouldn’t we then have the same response when a group of people decide it’s against the rules to make a depiction of a certain figure?

Look, I couldn’t care less what rules you choose to follow. I think it’s absurd that Muslims and Jews deprive themselves of the joys of bacon. But whatevs. Just means more bacon for me.

However when it comes to the cartoons, this isn’t just a rule that applies to the faithful. It applies to everyone. Chew on that for a second: I didn’t sign up for their religion, yet I still have to follow this rule?

It's like negative billing on your cell plan, except when the phone company does it nobody dies at the end.

Here’s where things get really dangerous though. This isn’t just a view held by a small number of radicals. This is the rule for many Sunnis, who make up three quarters of the Muslim world.

In other words, hundreds of millions of people certainly think the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were wrong to draw those very basic cartoons in the first place. That doesn’t mean they all support the violence. But they most definitely contribute to an atmosphere that encourages people to get worked up into a froth over such trifles.

These sentiments are clearly held in our own communities too.

As the Ottawa Citizen reported on Thursday, imam Imtiaz Ahmed wants such cartoons to be illegal in Canada, along with anything deemed blasphemous. And Ahmed is no fringe lunatic; he’s mainstream.

In one opinion poll four out of five British Muslims believed Salman Rushdie should have faced punishment for writing his novel The Satanic Verses.

It’s time to confront Islam head on about this serious problem. Never having developed the same critical culture that Christianity has been exposed to since the Reformation, many Muslims fail to understand the maxim that freedom of religion also includes freedom from religion.

It’s true nobody needs to draw these cartoons. But then again there are few things we as humans genuinely need to do. That’s not the point. The point is that nobody should be forced to take their marching orders from someone with an embarrassingly low barometer of offence.

If you’re upset by some simple little cartoons then you are the problem and you are the one who must adapt. The question is will Western society send that message?

The jury is out. Merely tweeting “I Am Charlie” doesn’t do it. Responding with a witty cartoon of pencils flying at jihadis doesn’t either.

It reminds me of a scene from the 1979 Woody Allen film Manhattan, where he’s chatting with a woman at a party:

Woody: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Woman: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op-Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.

Woody: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

In other words, satire has no impact on people tone deaf to nuance. As it stands, cartoonist rebuttals to the jihadis are only going to be seen by the pro-liberty echo chamber.

The only solution is to normalize the cartoons. Run them everywhere so the easily offended educate themselves as to cultural norms in liberal society and wean themselves off their addiction to being offended.

For sale: One pair of big girl panties large enough to fit the entire ummah. The game plan: Organize one giant intervention and sit down everyone in the anti-cartoon faction and explain to them they've got it all wrong. But will enough people join in?

Hard to say. Too many still label balanced and necessary criticism as Islamophobic or racist. It’s sickening to hear calls for tolerance aimed at the very people who are speaking out against intolerance.

The left need to realize that the issues they cherish more than the right are the ones most at threat from the rise of political Islam.

My fellow atheists also need to stop condemning all religions equally. Christianity was a bad seed back in the day, but has since evolved. It’s also neutered and on the decline. Meanwhile Judaism shouldn't register as there are only 15 million Jews in the world, compared to over 1.5 billion Muslims.

The call to “respect all religions” is bogus. The Enlightenment era idea was “religious toleration,” not respect. Toleration was needed because various sects were hurting each other. And right now there’s one religion that needs to learn tolerance more than the rest.