"In an Unequal World, Mocking All Serves the Powerful"

"In practice, however, art is always beholden to forces other than simple truth, and even the most ruthless satirists have their sacred cows. Charlie Hebdo, which fired the cartoonist Sine in 2009 for an antisemitic column, certainly did. American cartoons such as South Park and Family Guy joke about the disabled and the terminally ill, and constantly engage in "envelope-pushing" racist and misogynist humor. But these "no holds barred" shows never mock, say, 9/11 victims, or soldiers killed in Iraq. American newspapers do not publish pro-ISIS cartoons."
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/01/10/when-satire-cuts-both-ways/in-unequal-an-world-mocking-all-serves-the-powerful

short and simple and YES. 
I have been feeling really uncomfortable about the sort of free-speech activism(?) response to the attack on Charlie Hebdo that has led to a reverence for these cartoons that ARE offensive to a LOT of groups - to Muslims and Jews and Christians and French conservative groups, etc... and I am listening to news shows and reading articles and I sort of get it but I am also so uncomfortable because what is this fervent reaction all over the West? Comparing it to how people have reacted to other recent incidences of violence (like the two young American men I can think of off the top of my head who killed multiple classmates in reaction to being rejected by women), what are the values that are amplified by popular consent and energy?

It's also the problematic nature of the "equal-opportunity insulter" thing, as though everyone is standing on some equal level of security and it's an equal thing to insult them at all - and this failure to see that the insults that are used for people who are already oppressed are so tremendously more powerful and involved in maintaining the worst things about the world.

I think it all gets down to: I've been in a space where marches and think pieces are about speaking to a status quo and asking it to change, standing from a place of less power and trying to be heard, and I don't recognize that in this #JeSuisCharlie movement. Who is it trying to talk to ? What is it trying to produce? What kind of a movement is being built?

Or am I expecting unfair things from people who are grieving?