For those who can't get enough of Lileks' screeds, he has a new feature:

Three and a half years ago, a guard kicked a Qur’an. It’s a front page story today. Well, who am I to question the news judgment of the Post? Obviously it matters. One then must ask: is flushing worse than kicking? Flushing, after all, requires some amount of premeditation. One has to decide to flush a book. Kicking a book may be done in the heat of anger – say, when you’re interviewing someone fighting for a movement that wanted little girls to stay indoors all their lives dressed in hot sacks until the merry day when they were married off at 14 to some middle-aged guy with a nice job in the Remnants of Buddhism Demolition Division. If the guy might have info on what Al Qaeda was up to next – you know, the group from which the terro (SORRY!) detainee was plucked a mere five months after the Twin Towers thundered down, you might be tempted to shed all your civilized inhibitions and kick a book...

...I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:

What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?

"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."

Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –

"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."

Oh. So we lost, then.

Go forth, and read the whole thing.

Good Screed, but the Bleat... "Dear God" that is funny.

Symbols and how easily people get attached to them. A Koran flushed by a US soldier, a US flag being burned by some street Arabs. All... utterly silly.

Yes, gojira, the dozens of people killed in Cleveland and St. Louis after al-Jazeera broadcast the burning of American flags really is quite silly.

And who can forget the destruction of the mosques in Dearborn and San Francisco by Baptist suicide bombers? Silly, silly people.

Of course, it should be noted that only the symbols of states that matter get burned. One wonders whether anyone will ever bother to burn an EU flag?

You mean like this?
http://members.screenz.com/jreed/The%20American%20Journal_files/burnEU.jpg

Took me a whole half a minute finding that with Google...

So, the EU is important enough to burn its flag.

Ex-cellent. There's hope for the EU yet, I guess.

Care to comment on the larger point, which is that burning an American flag hardly engenders the same kind of reaction, and making your comparison inappropriate?