How free is freedom of speech?

Last night we had a very controversial world today. For many, it ended up in tears and hatred. And it made me wonder. How far can freedom of speech go? If it is limited by politeness, can it still be considered as freedom? Well, I guess I will have to grab a philo student to understand this better.
Basically, we had this journalist/caricaturist from Jordan come over and he showed a few of his political cartoons (many unpublished) and he pissed of a couple of people. Well, to be more specific, all the Jews. He was very anti-American, although he did not consider himself to be. His cartoons, were very controversial, especially the one portraying holocaust and then showing the same picture, but replacing Jews with Palestinians and Nazi Germans with Israelis and that's were the whole quarrel started. I do not know what to think. I wasn't that touched by the cartoon, simply because it applies to me less than it does to Jews and also because I felt his point wasn't to "make a fair comparison" (quoting the Jordanian guy) between holocaust and the situation in Palestine, but to show that both of them were acts of extreme racism, btw Nareg came up with this point and I can only agree.
Another thing that made me wonder is.. how equal are religions in the world? And how connected are they to political issues? Last week we had a world today on danish cartoons making fun of prophet muhamed and quite a number of people supported the cartoons because for them it was the sign of ultimate freedom of speech in Denmark. The muslims expressed their disapproval in a rather polite manner (unlike the Jews last night), but still, I felt as if people did not listen to them fully.
But! When someone says something negative about Israel, that person may often straight away be accused of anti-semitism. And being anti-semitist and anti-us is the last thing we should want in the world today, right?
So, in the end it seems like it's okay to make fun of Muslims, but making fun of Jews does not quite fit into the whole "ultimate freedom of speech model".Why? Perhaps, there are many Danish Jews, perhaps more than Danish Muslims...
I know that this thing is MUCH MORE COMPLEX.. but these have been my impressions so far.
Dot.