Last week I was in Berlin where I was shown the memorial on Bebelplatz to commemorate the night of 10 May 1933 when hundreds of "non-German" books were pilled in an obscene bonfire in the courtyard opposite Humboldt University. The memorial consists of a window of clear glass embedded in the paving stones where you can see below to what Micha Ullmann, the Israeli artist who created the memorial, calls a "silent library" - a series of empty shelves to mark the books that went missing. Ullmann's father, a German Jew, saw the writing in the flames and left the country the same year.

Looking at the memorial I was filled with rage at the threats made to Salman Rushdie after the awarding of his knighthood by the British government - for book burners and their allies and appeasers are alive and well today. I saw, when I got back, the most ignominious performance by Shirley Williams on Question Time defending the book-burners. And then the boasting philistines - "I tried one of his books once, couldn't get past page two, ha ha."

Some Muslims, apparently, are angry. Fine. So am I. I am absolutely incandescent that we are willing to throw freedom of expression on the bonfire, so as not to offend thugs. Heinrich Heine, who attended Humboldt University, nailed it a century ago:

"Where books are burned, in the end people are burned." They were burned in the fires of 7/7.