The Patriot Post® · 'Where They Burn Books, They Will in the End Also Burn People'

Jeff Jacoby: “Perhaps the most chilling words ever written about book-burning were penned in 1821 by the great German poet Heinrich Heine: Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen – ‘Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.’ Today that axiom is etched on a plaque in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the public square where more than 20,000 books deemed ‘un-German’ and ‘decadent’ were destroyed in a vast Nazi bonfire on the night of May 10, 1933. Though Heine’s words are indelibly associated now with the Holocaust, they have lost none of their grim prescience. Just one day after news emerged of the book-burnings in the Islamic State’s so-called ‘caliphate,’ the jihadists released a video exulting in the horrific murder of Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive in a metal cage. There is something uniquely diabolical about setting books on fire, a lust to obliterate that almost ineluctably leads to even more dreadful evils. It is no coincidence that those obsessed with annihilating the physical expression of dangerous thoughts or teachings so often move on to annihilating the people who think or teach them. … The Talmud records the death of Chanina ben Teradion, a 2nd-century Jewish sage killed by the Romans for violating a ban on teaching Torah. It was a terrible death: He was wrapped in the scroll from which he had been teaching and set on fire, with wet wool placed on his chest to prolong the agony. His horrified disciples, forced to witness his death, cried out: ‘Rabbi, what do you see?’ He replied: ‘I see parchment burning, but the letters are soaring free.’ Any brute can burn parchment, or ransack a library, or blow up a mosque, or bulldoze cultural treasures. But not even mighty armies can destroy the ideas they embody. The Roman Empire couldn’t keep the letters from soaring free. ISIS can’t either.”