"A Collective Salman Rushdie"

Is the uproar over Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's misguided depictions of the Prophet Mohammed being fanned by simple semantics? If you read the BBC's round-up of comments on the issue, you'll find them variously described as "caricatures", "cartoons", "illustrations", "graphic art" and "drawings". Even if one bears in mind that representation in any form is offensive to Islam, each one of those words has a different connotation -- and using the wrong one simply serves to heighten tensions. Leading the Russian paper Novyye Izvestiya to assert that Denmark has turned into "a collective Salman Rushdie".