And so it goes on. Earlier this week an angry mob in Indian Kashmir, protesting against a group of Christians in Washington who tore up pages of the Koran, torched a missionary school.
Doubtless already primed by Terry Jones, the self-styled pastor of the Dove World Outreach Centre in Florida and his threat to mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11 at the weekend by burning truckloads of Islam's holy book, hundreds of angry Muslims chanting anti-American and pro-Islamic slogans marched on the educational establishment and did what such mobs often do.
Tit for tat. Intolerance versus bigotry. Ignorance meets imbecility.
In the end, having more than achieved his 15 minutes of fame, Pastor Jones desisted, and weighed instead into the debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in New York - which conjures visions of Istanbul's Sultan Ahmed mosque in Lower Manhattan.
It is of course nothing of the sort. What is proposed is a thoroughly modern Islamic community centre two blocks away but not visible from Ground Zero. If it proceeds, it will house a 500-seat auditorium, theatre, performing arts centre, fitness centre, swimming pool, basketball court, child-care area, bookstore, culinary school, art studio, food court, September 11 memorial and prayer space that could accommodate 1000 to 2000 people: the sort of space in which New Yorkers who happen to be of the Muslim faith - and doubtless others - can congregate to do all those things its facilities would imply.
Including, presumably, pray.
These are the sorts of enshrined constitutional American freedoms that those opposing the building of the centre - in the most inflammatory manner - would normally go to the barricades to protect.
And there are lots of them - from Sarah Palin to church leaders in Kansas, Wyoming, and Tennessee, some of whom by the way did burn the Koran, to citizens carried along on waves of unease and ill-defined defensiveness for "the American way".
So what is this hysteria all about? And why now?Superficially at least, the uproar is occasioned by cultural "insensitivity" and claims such a centre in the vicinity of Ground Zero would represent a "victory monument to Islam"; never mind that people of all ethnicities and religions were killed in the tragedy; or that the World Trade Centre itself contained Islamic prayer areas, prior to its destruction.
But is it simply about 9/11? Or is it about the descent into the fundamentalist mindset that appears to have infected United States society at so many levels: and in so doing would seem to want to conflate the terrorist menace of al Qaeda and 9/11 with an entire religion - and perpetuate an ugly, potentially devastating, religio-cultural confrontation.
President Barack Obama has done his best to reason against such tendencies.
"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as everyone else in this country," he said in Washington last week.
"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances."
But reason is not the currency in which this debate, nor many others in contemporary America, is being conducted. Rather it is prejudice and the appeal to base emotions - fear, xenophobia, religious and racial intolerance - that has the running, fanned by an unholy alliance of religious forces, the right-wing media and the Republican Party.
This controversy comes hard on the heels of the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, a war prosecuted on false pretences and sold to the American people by appealing to a similar cocktail of prejudice and fear wrapped up in bogus intelligence. It is a war that did nothing to diminish the threat of the fundamentalist terror responsible for 9/11 - arguably it enhanced it, just as does, albeit on a smaller scale, the bigotry of book-burning.
The Koran may have hogged the headlines at the weekend, but another book was all the rage last week: the memoirs of former United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair, A Journey. As might have been expected, there has been almost unprecedented coverage - including interviews with our own Kim Hill and one of the Sunday papers. I suppose we should be grateful to have been included in the conversation.
Much of it considered the fateful decision of Mr Blair to align his country with the United States and take it into the Iraq war. Mr Blair can, it seems, regret the downstream fallout, but not the actual decision.
Now, if one happened to believe in book-burning ...
• Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
