No, I'm not denying that people were offended

But you are denying (or shrugging off) that people other than members of clerical hierarchies and Putin were offended. You don't want to admit that the actions you find fine offend ordinary people whom progressives would like to have as allies.

I'm stating that "people being offended" is not a valid basis for prosecution in a court of law, due to the reducto ad absurdum of such a trial being extremely offensive to some subset of the population.

There are much larger subsets of the Russian population who would handle the PR affair in the same way the Lebanese population handled the cartoon affair. If you manage to prevent lawsuits that doesn't mean that the offended people are prevented from all agency... Is that what you want?