Not that it's anything new being reported in that sense, it's just that the frequency of the occurrence has accelerated.  Poor Old Glory, a sacrosanct symbol of all that America represents, is being held as a despised counterpart of all that is evil in the world.  As opposed, say, to the reprehensible and vicious symbol of Islam - violent jihad - which converts believers into living destructive missiles.

Banaras Khan / AFP / Getty Images Pakistani Muslim demonstrators burn a U.S .flag during a protest against an anti-Islam film in Quetta on September 20, 2012. Up to 50 people were injured on September 20 as police clashed with thousands of protesters, some carrying the banners of extremist groups, demonstrating in Islamabad against an anti-Islam film. 

 

Much, much earlier in our lives when we often travelled to Washington D.C. for recreational visits on annual tours of the many museums and art galleries that proliferated in that world capital of social contrasts we had also, once, visited the rudely modest (for our times, not that of the time represented) abode of the first president of the United States of America, in Virginia.  On the grounds there was an American flag draped over something, I can no longer recall what and where, but accessible. 

There were two young men present in the disparate group that wandered around the premises, both of military age, and both, by their haircuts, either current or past conscripts.  We watched, mesmerized, as one of them in a seemingly trancelike state, adoringly gathered a small fold of the flag, pressed it to his face, and kissed it.  This seemed to us, as Canadians, a repugnant act of an ignorant person; how could anyone venerate a flag to that worshipful extent?  Canadians honour their flag, but at a respectful emotional distance, and with more than a bit of casual oversight.

And there was another young man; impressed in my mind was a very small body of water and seating around it for people to rest.  This young man was at that place on the grounds, seated on the accommodating benches, and quietly weeping, in an excess of emotions evidently caused to swell within him as a result of the venerable place he found himself in.

These were young people whose state of exalted emotions we found unfamiliar and slightly distasteful in their exhibited excess.  These two most certainly became older people who must have continued to feel such a huge emotional attachment to their country and all that it represents. 

It must be extremely difficult for them to view on the nightly news and through their Internet connections, the religious fervor of Muslims who think nothing of desecrating a symbol so vital to Americans' emotional attachments, while themselves rampaging in vile demonstrations of violent umbrage at depictions of their Prophet they hold to be so insultingly demeaning to all that they honour and worship.