Question to Donald Trump: Do you have concerns about the Koran?

When you hear him described as just looking for attention, think of this answer.

Trump: Well, I'll tell you what. The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it teaches love and there is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do. I'm certainly not an expert, to put it mildly. But there's something there that teaches some very negative vibe.

I mean things are happening, when you look at people blowing up all over the streets that are in some of the countries over in the Middle East, just blowing up a super market with not even soldiers, just people, when 250 people die in a super market that are shopping, where people die in a store or in a street. There's a lot of hatred there that's some place.

Now I don't know if that's from the Koran. I don't know if that's from some place else. But there's tremendous hatred out there that I've never seen anything like it.

Someone, inevitably, will denounce this as Muslim-bashing; I'll bet CAIR is lining up its press releases at this moment. But his comment includes modesty about his own expertise, and a characterization of violence in the Muslim world that seems pretty darn fair. He doesn't cite any explicit causation that would be almost impossible to prove; obviously millions upon millions of Muslims read the Koran and don't blow anyone up. But you look at the Muslim world, particularly the Middle East, and other parts of the world with great poverty and limited freedom -- central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia -- and you just don't see the same periodic explosions of violence aimed at what we call innocent civilians. Some professional grievance groups get upset for just noticing that and expressing that. Hell, I'll probably get denounced for writing this.

But if Trump addresses Americans' fears in a blunt manner, and everybody else in the field hews to the "Islam means peace" boilerplate script, look out.