6. a small strip of coloured cloth signifying membership of an order or award of military decoration, prize, or other distinction. 7. a small, usually looped, strip of coloured cloth worn to signify support for a charity or cause: a red AIDS ribbon.
The books burned were Jewish, Marxist, Bolshevik, or other disreputable or non-German books. These included the works of Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Jack London and Margaret Sanger.
Faced with the image of books burning in Mosul, I was reminded inevitably of the ruination of the great National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. In that dreadful incident, hundreds of thousands of books, periodicals, and hand-written records were lost in a blaze caused by rocket attacks.