Flag burning

Saturday

James Kirchick

Jake Auchincloss and incendiary rhetoric

I can’t claim to know what Jake Auchincloss was thinking when he asked, 10 years ago, why it was acceptable for Pakistanis to burn the American flag but not Americans to burn the Qur’an. But I can make an educated guess. Auchincloss, currently front-runner in the race to succeed Rep. Joe Kennedy in the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, was a 22-year-old Harvard student when protests erupted across the Muslim world after an American Christian preacher threatened to burn the Muslim holy book. It was the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and Terry Jones wanted to memorialize that somber event in a way sure to attract attention.

jake auchincloss

Tuesday

Constantin Eckner

Germany’s flag burning ban is a threat to freedom of expression

From our UK edition

Germany’s national parliament has made the public burning of the European Union flag and flags of foreign countries punishable by up to three years in jail, classing it as a hate crime. In a vote last Thursday, the German parliament made the act of defiling foreign flags equal to the crime of defiling the German flag. The new law also applies to acts of defilement other than burning, such as publicly ripping a flag up. The initiative for this legislative change dates back to 2017 when protesters in Berlin burned the Israeli flag to emphasise their outrage about the United States’ support of Israel, causing indignation in parts of German federal politics.