The four-months-old row over the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed was until this week attached to a slow-burning fuse. No longer. The decision by a group of European papers to reprint the caricatures is spreading the controversy like wildfire. We could soon be confronting a new Rushdie affair - cubed.

The fuse was lit last September, literally, when Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper, published the cartoons. One of them depicted the Prophet with a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse. The cartoons are, at best, juvenile. Were it not for the faux-Arabic calligraphy, moreover, they could take their place in an older European tradition of anti-Semitic caricatures.