The "journalist" writing that "article," of course. Sharia law is not some other code with subsection 11.B3 that says "you must assault zombie Muhammads." And whether such sacrilege is worthy / requires a beatdown is hardly something Islamic jurists would agree on, anyway. (This issue has been poisoned in the last 10 years thanks to the Danish cartoons and irresponsible rhetoric, but traditionally, *Muslim law only applied to Muslims.* Granted this has its own issues, since many states refuse to acknowledge conversions from Islam and will randomly mark people down as Muslim even if they're not, and it's still horrible that you can execute random Saudis for tweets, but it's at least vaguely sane - of course non-Muslims won't follow Muslim law, why would they, so they'd be exempt from sacrilege punishments.)
What the judge was getting at, I presume, was that it's possible to initiate a fight non-physically. If I walk up to someone and start screaming and cursing and acting crazy, they still shouldn't strike first, but if they do it's more complicated than straight-up assault. I'd want to know the details of what happened more - entirely possible the Muslim here was just thin-skinned and attacked first, which is bad, but I wouldn't trust that article to fill things in if the zombie atheist made any provoking remarks himself.
