Widespread banning of books is horrible as social policy, especially on the scale of governments and nation states. Saudi Arabia comes to mind.

I take issue with the notion that the koran deserves special protections because it’s a religious or holy book. No. A genuine religious book would not forbid it’s followers to carry it with them to distant and foreign lands. But the koran does.

It cautions sojourning servants of allah to keep secret from infidels in their own homelands —called Dar ul Harb (House of War, big clue there) —the details of their fates, according to the written words of allah. What faithful mohammedans are required to do to infidels as soon as practical is downplayed and explained away. It helps that it is also too awful to be believed. Whatever else it is, this book qualifies as a war manual —a holy war manual.

I’m sure the koran has been banned, at various times and places. Just not so much in this post-Gutenberg electronic networking era. I’m against banning books in general, but banning the koran would be wrong, in part, because doing so would be complicit with one of it’s own directives.

The secrecy thing is now dead, sort of. It has been replaced by widespread ignorance, apathy, wishful thinking, decades of leftist-socialist propaganda, multiculturalism, rabid PC-ism, human right councils, UN resolutions, and anti-hate speech laws. Oh, and widespread unfettered new-wave Jew-hatred. The combination appears to be as effective as secrecy. Perhaps more so.

If anyone doubts that such secrecy ever existed, please riddle me this: Why does traditional islamic education put so much emphasis on memorizing and reciting the whole book in Arabic, even when Arabic is not understood at all by the student or his peers?

Of course all this may be a little too nuanced, esp to those among us who would interpret Death to America as subtle diplo-speak for more economic aid, please.