The Dove World Outreach Center, a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, has announced an “International Burn a Koran Day” on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This is barbaric and counter-productive.

We are adamantly against the burning of books.

We are adamantly against the burning of copies of the Koran.

So is Robert Spencer, one of America’s foremost experts on Islam, and one of the strongest critics of it. He sensibly writes:

This church’s plan to burn the Qur’an on September 11 is stupid; I disapprove of it and of many other things about the pastor, the church, and the church’s approach to the jihad threat. I don’t support the burning of books; it’s tactically stupid, as it will make the mainstream media portray the church as a bunch of Nazis, and it’s wrong in principle: the antidote to bad speech is not censorship or book-burning, but more speech. Open discussion. Give-and-take. And the truth will out. There is no justification for burning books.

Marisol’s comments here are apposite: “‘International Burn a Koran Day’ does a grave disservice to the cause of spreading awareness about Islamic teachings and the threat that Sharia poses to our way of life. It is a gift to Islamic groups who would so dearly love to portray all of us who criticize and question Islamic teachings (and triumphalist mosques) as frothing reactionaries.”

It would be far better to prescribe the Koran as compulsory reading in all institutions of learning and non-Muslim religious assembly, to have it on open display in all public libraries, to read it aloud in classrooms and theaters, to serialize it in periodicals and daily newspapers, to endow the giving away of copies free of charge, and to place one in every hotel room.

It is an immoral, misogynistic, anti-human text, and the more widely it is read the more likely will Islam be to lose respect and protection, and the less likely to succeed with its proselytizing and jihad.