No Matter How Incendiary, A Book Should Not Be Burnt

Like me, Jeff Jacoby isn't hot on book-burning:

You don’t have to admire Islam or revere the Koran to have regarded Jones’s talk of book-burning as barbaric. “Where they burn books,’’ the German poet and playwright Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821, “they will ultimately burn people also.’’ Heine’s works were among the tens of thousands of books torched in public bonfires by the Nazis after their accession to power in 1933 — and Hitler and his followers did indeed “ultimately burn people also.’’

This is not to say that everyone who burns a book eventually sheds blood. But the depravity of book-burning inescapably suggests more deadly evils. The brutal lust to suppress, the hatred of free thought and expression, the manic determination to physically annihilate disfavored ideas rather than challenge them intellectually — from these to the destruction of human beings is no very great leap. Only the imbecilic preach, like Jones, that “Islam is of the devil.’’ He says the same, incidentally, of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Setting books on fire, however, really is diabolical.

The point being that it's not as diabolical as burning people, but it is diabolical nonetheless.