On March 20, Terry Jones, a Christian pastor in Florida, publicly burnt a copy of the Koran, a book that orders murder, slavery, cruelty, exploitation of women, intolerance, and aggressive war as religious duty.

On April 1 a shrieking pack of Afghans – Muslims, for whom the Koran is holy writ – killed 20 people, two of them by chopping their heads off, on the pretext that their feelings were hurt by Terry Jones’s little bonfire. (The victims all worked for the disgusting UN, but even that is not a reason to murder them.)

Senator Harry Reid of the Democratic Party and Senator Lindsey Graham of the Republican Party blame the killings not on those who perpetrated them but on Terry Jones, and suggest that Americans should be prevented by law from doing what he did.

Of the many comments published on the issue, the one we like best is by Mark Steyn. He writes:

In defense of freedom of expression … I have no expectations of Harry Reid or the New York Times [see also this comment], but I have nothing but total contempt for the wretched buffoon Graham.

A mob of deranged ululating blood-lusting head-hackers slaughter Norwegian female aid-workers and Nepalese guards — and we’re the ones with the problem? …

Lindsey Graham is unfit for office. The good news is there’s no need for the excitable lads of Mazar e-Sharif to chop his head off because he’s already walking around with nothing up there. …

We are expending blood and treasure building an Afghanistan fit only for pederasts, tribal heroin cartels, and the blood-soaked savages of Mazar e-Sharif. … We are sending the message that the bedrock principles of free, pluralist societies will bend and crumble in a vain race to keep up with the ever touchier sensitivities of the perpetually aggrieved. … The real “racists” here are not this no-name pastor and his minimal flock but Reid, Graham, and the Times — for they assume that a significant proportion of Muslims are not responsible human beings but animals … If that is true [and it obviously is – JB], certain consequences follow therefrom. The abandonment of the First Amendment is not one of them. …

A society led by such “men” [as Lindsey Graham] cannot survive, and does not deserve to.