Dear Reader (Especially the newest member of The Dispatch team, Allahpundit!),

Full disclosure: I’m vexed. So I’m going to try to prevent—or delay—going full splenetic by easing into my first point.

Remember those idiots who wanted to burn the Quran? I probably need to be more specific because I vaguely recall there were a lot of idiots who wanted to burn a lot of Qurans. But the moment I have in mind was probably this one in 2010, when a tiny fringe church led by Terry Jones in Florida—grandly called the Dove World Outreach Center—announced it would burn the Islamic holy book to make some point it thought was clever. In 2011, the church literally put the Quran on trial for six hours, found it guilty of all charges, and set it aflame.

It was a dumb, hateful, un-Christian (spare me the lectures about the book burning at Ephesus) stunt intended to insult as many Muslims as possible. And it succeeded. Fatwas for Jones’ death were issued. A handful of protesters in various cities died in some riots. No doubt some terrorist attacks on Americans, Westerners, or Christians were at least partly inspired by the burning.