Where One Burns Books…

I was appalled to receive an email from my friend and mentor Angela Ruth, head of the Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation, which organizes the annual Holocaust Remembrance Project.  What Angela sent makes my skin boil as much as it makes me sick.  Basically, a church called the “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida has decided that in honor of the memory of our fallen brothers and sisters on September 11th, they are going to mark the ocassion by burning Korans. You did indeed read that correctly.

Might I remind you what happened the last time people organized to burn books.

Might I remind you of the quote of German philosopher Heinriche Heine:  “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”

I just returned from a trip that included a stop to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem.  I saw the videos of people throwing books into the fire, books written by contributors to humanity like Sigmund Freud and countless other German Jews.  I saw the pictures of Nazis giving Jews shovels to dig their own graves.  I saw the video, recorded by Nazi cameras, of those Jews who were then lined up in that ditch and executed.  I saw them fall.

In 1940 the head of a German printing press wrote to the Nazi party that he had prepared a special paper for the torahs he would print for the Jews.  This paper would allow the ink to easily be washed off, so that after the Jews were killed, shipped off to camps, etc., then the Germans could simply wash away their text.  Wash away any trace of their existence.  When one burns books, one deletes a record of a piece of humanity.  I don’t care how much you hate the Muslims.  I don’t care how much you hate the Koran.  The Koran was a book written by human beings, and their voice ought never to be erased from the library of humanity.  Period.

I am proud to be an American.  I respect the First Amendment even when it means a church with a name that conjurs images of world peace in fact writes a book entitled “Islam Is Of The Devil”.  And yet burning books connotes something more, something dangerous and inhuman and wrong.  UCLA Professor Eugene Voloch wrote in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that “the First Amendment protects symbols, paintings, handwriting and, yes, flag burning.”  And yet, the Dove World Outreach Center takes it a step too far.  I urge Congress to pass a law immediately making book burning a crime.  We do not burn books, nor people, in America.

These views are Auren Kaplan’s alone, and are not representative of any views held in public or private by any of the organizations mentioned here, or any other organizations with which Auren Kaplan is associated.  Auren is an entrepreneur and social media expert living in Venice, CA.