It's not a religious thing. It looks like one, but it's not. Even worse: if you actually ask the ones who killed those 16 people, they would say to you they did it for their religion, yet they did not.
It's the same old story: it's power and politics and money and control of natural resources. Those in the streets fight for an agenda they don't even know. You see it all the time, especially in Africa. The western media don't understand anything outside their normal, comfortable borders, and give the most easy portrait of it.
A war is the Balkans, and you hear it is for "ancient hatred", a genocide in Rwanda and they say is for "ancient tribal and ethnic conflicts", Darfur and it's "for religion and race". Now this, and they say it's because of some cartoons. Well, guess it, it's not. Exactly like it was not the case in Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Nigeria, Congo or Palestine. Have you ever heard of a leader of Hamas or Fatah doing suicide bombings? Never. They send 16 y.o. kids, telling them it is the best they can do, and taking advantage of their despair to get power and respect. And the more we spin around their vision of "struggle of cultures" the more they are succesfull.
Those people actually killing and dying are forced into believing they are serving some kind of cause, while in fact they are just following some warlord, politician, religious or tribal leader agenda. The war we should be fighting is the war against ignorance, that ignorance that make so many people so easily exploited. Go look at the warlords biographies. Rich people, educated in Paris or London who come back home and take advantage of desperate and ignorant people. It's happening again in Darfur. It's happening again all over the world for this cartoons.
Smart people have poor people fight, kill and die for a cause it doesn't even exist. And we accept their rules.