This post on a new blog, face of muhammed, articulates the concept Ry suggested to me the other day quite well:

A new non-political international movement is rising.

4000 terror attacks after 9/11, the world was still slumbering. But 12 innocent satirical drawings in a Danish newspaper, the kind of cartoons printed daily by the thousands in newspapers all over the world, have changed the geopolitical situation.

Suddenly, a new understanding is emerging across political differences.

In recent years, the world crisis between Islam and the non-Muslim world has been discussed in thousands of books, countless television debates and millions of articles across the globe. It did nothing but divide us. Even former western allies were divided, and a wave of anti-Americanism has swept even the free western societies.

Now ridiculous circumstances have changed all that. A sense of humour has changed what all the debating could not.

Read it all.