"In the video, militants use drills, sledgehammers and a bulldozer to destroy ancient stone reliefs and walls, before huge explosions can be seen...."
In the video, militants say "God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statutes worshiped instead of Allah in the past days" and "Whenever we seize a piece of land, we will remove signs of idolatry and spread monotheism."
ADDED: More pictures (and video) here.
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This is akin to digging up and attempting to destroy the relics running the pizza joint in small town Indiana.
No one has worshiped these idols for thousands of years, but still the perpetually offended are offended. They worship ignorance, and are propagating it far and wide. How blind they are!!
Such seemingly pointless destruction makes perfect sense as an expression of eusociality.
Rubble doesn't make trouble.
The UN needs to use it's magic diplomatic powers now!
Disgusting monsters.
Coming soon to a gay wedding near you.
I'm buying the pizza. BYO popcorn.
The instincts of the initial European archeologists in the Middle East were to remove ancient artifacts to safe places in English or German museums for study and preservation. UNESCO pressure on European and American museums to repatriate such human treasures is insane.
The history of iconoclasm in the Middle East is long and obvious to anyone who has seen the defaced frescoes and statues in ancient churches or greco-roman ruins in Turkey. The notion that these belong to the Arabic populations that currently live in these lands, to do with as they will, can only be seen as decadent self-loathing on the part of the West.
"The instincts of the initial European archeologists in the Middle East were to remove ancient artifacts to safe places "
More important than ever. I wonder if the pyramids are safe,. I was going to go to Egypt to see them ten years ago but I would not take a female to Egypt now and don't really want to chance it myself.
There are some very important ancient ruins in Iran but they will be off limits for decades.
We will be lucky if the middle east does not end up radioactive in the next decade,
Idolators you say? Well I guess it takes one to know one - see Mecca. The Israelis should make a special effects video showing what's going to happen to Mecca if Israel gets nuked. No Masada, no Holocaust again without retribution.
I'm pretty sure Christianity could survive the loss of the Vatican (although it might unite us like crazy) but I wonder if Islam would survive the loss of Mecca and Medina.
Despite the global test ban treaty, I sometimes think it would be instructive to light one off somewhere for a demonstration. In these days of special effects, I'm afraid the old school newsreel footage is unconvincing. Better demonstration would be to start with the size bomb like Pakistan has, and Iran wants, and then light off a hydrogen bomb on top of it.
Barbarians. They give vandals a bad name.
Thanks, Obama!
What nimrods.
North Americans did the same thing with ancient Indian graves. It's all progress.
While it will hurt tourism, the people will have nice paved streets.
They want to blow up an idol? Well, there's this meteorite in Mecca...
kzookitty
At least they're not from Indiana. That would be unforgivable.
I wonder if Jackson Pollock would get a pass, as not representing anything.
North Americans did the same thing with ancient Indian graves.
I don't believe it. Can you provide a source?
Among the bigger picture of fanaticism, there is also the micro-scale pointlessness of it:
Why bother sledge hammering, drilling and bull-dozing when you are going to dynamite the whole site anyway?
I see a lot of comments relating this to the whole pizza imbroglio in Indiana. They look apt.
ISIS destroys monuments to gods nobody has worshiped in thousands of years. Progressives try to destroy a pizza place because even though no customer has been turned away--it could happen--if a gay couple wanted pizza, from that place, on their special day.
Any threat, however slight, must be utterly stomped-out. At least the ISIS fanatics don't call their intolerance tolerance. They are brutal, but at least honest, in their own way.
Coupe said...
North Americans did the same thing with ancient Indian graves. It's all progress.
I think we're talking about today, no?
And today, any authentic North American totem relic would cause a considerable buzz of excitement and envy on Antiques Roadshow.
@madAsHell I don't believe it. Can you provide a source?
Simple Google Search: http://gizmodo.com/rare-indian-burial-ground-quietly-destroyed-for-million-1567902076
Gays are totally ISIS.
How often do these guys shower?
...spread monotheism."
It is important to note that the monotheism is mandatory.
No one has worshiped these idols for thousands of years, but still the perpetually offended are offended.
This is incorrect. It is not because these are idols (in many cases they are not) that Isis is destroying these works. It is because they depict or represent history — kafir (pre- or non- Islamic) history — that they must be destroyed.
As author V.S. Naipaul (who has made a considerable study of Islamists over the years) put it in this recent piece:
“[T]he particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror – such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) – interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.
“This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.
“It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.
“So an idea of history was born that was fundamentally different from the ideas of history that the rest of the world has evolved.
“In the centuries following, the world moved on. Ideas of civilisation, of other faiths, of art, of governance of law and of science and invention grew and flourished.
“This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.
“But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.”
@SomeoneHasToSayIt I think we're talking about today, no?
Well ISIS is sort of like a modern version of Ibn Saud. Saud believed a dictatorship (even if installed by the west) was bad, and a King was good.
The reason is, a King can be benevolent, whereas a dictator fears his murder every day.
So, ISIS is going to unite all the tribes, and must kill or chase out all those who will not support the King. Same as Saud had removed from Arabia, anyone who wasn't a Wahhabi.
How do they explain why no other previous Islamic rulers did that?
It wasn't all just dug up recently?
What they are doing is ignoring the past, so they don't have to answer that question. They are acting like they were the first generation after Mohammed.
ISIS does not see, nor care, that one learns from history.
Destroy history and you will end up repeating it.
@Paul Destroy history and you will end up repeating it.
Not true. There are no Jewish sites anywhere in Arabia. All destroyed, and paved over.
There are no Ancient Choctaw Indian sites in Florida. All destroyed, and paved over.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I believe history ought to be preserved. But not all history. Some people take this to fanatical levels and you get no progress. I grew up on the west coast where there was always lots of building and expanding.
Then when I was older I went to the south and east coast and everything looked old and run down. Because they were preserving everything.
Ugh.
I looked at that "Indian burial ground" link'
Two comments: that is one example when there are hundreds of thousands, and 2, that is the Bay Area, home of leftism triumphant.
Too many people don't seem to mind them beheading people en masse, or immolating a man in a cage, or melting skyscrapers filled with thousands of people.
I wonder if the misanthropes will mind destroying priceless archeological treasures.
Nah. But I'll be if they pollute the Tigris or Euphrates River they'll suddenly start caring.
A neutron bomb could solve the problem for a little while.
Islamists are like Charles Manson; they think if they cause enough anger then they can precipitate a war. And they think that they will win the war. They might be right if we don't wake up.
@Sammy,
How do they explain why no other previous Islamic rulers did that?
It wasn't all just dug up recently?
Actually, it was dug up just recently (last 200 years). And, no, while previous Muslim rulers didn't necessarily take action to destroy it, they didn't work to preserve it, either.
It was the British & French colonizers who dug up the antiquities, and set about to catalog & preserve them. The locals who jumped on the preservation bandwagon were often the local Westernizers or Christians or Jews or secularists. Post colonial regimes (Nasser in Egypt, the Ba'athists in Iraq) would sometimes tie into the pre-Muslim histories of their countries in order to try & build a "national" identity separate from the religious identities (i.e. the milet system) that traditional Muslim culture had bequeathed to them. But, other than that, Islamic society didn't have a lot of use for "antiquity" in the same way that Christian culture did.
Hard to argue this is not the fault of Obama.
Remember how Bush was blamed for the theft of artifacts following the invasion because of the security vacuum in the natural chaos after the fall of Saddam?
This wholesale destruction of both art and humanity is the result of a second security vacuum that Obama deliberately orchestrated.
Coupe said...
@madAsHell I don't believe it. Can you provide a source?
Simple Google Search: http://gizmodo.com/rare-indian-burial-ground-quietly-destroyed-for-million-1567902076
So madAsHekll was right and Coupe was wrong: they didn't go out of their way to destroy anything, they just ignored it.
"The remains have since been reburied according to the wishes of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the most likely descendants of the area's indigenous people."
They're almost certainly not the descendants of people who lived there 4,500 years ago.
We have Amerindian petroglyphs all over the place; I've never seen any that were defaced or destroyed, though that certainly happens sometimes. Same for the old towers and cliff dwellings.
Islam
The religion of ignorance.
As mentioned above, the Saudi regime certainly has done a lot to erase archeological sites across their realm. This is not just in relation to things that could be linked to Judaism, but also to any pre-Muslim sites or artifacts (save the Kaaba). This has been mentioned in various sources since the 1960s, if I recall correctly. There are some early Muslim sites destroyed as well, IIRC.
As for Naipaul, much of his two Muslim books expand on the matter of Muslim regimes deliberate erasure of predecessor civilizations, including much Taliban and ISIS style vandalism. In the Muslim controlled parts of the subcontinent this has apparently been very thorough.
Michael McNeil quoting Naipaul: “This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.
“But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.”
So, a lot like modern Western progressives, then?
Coupe: North Americans did the same thing with ancient Indian graves. It's all progress.
Coupe, you really need to work harder on this "analogy" thing you're trying out here. I see you've managed Step 1, asking yourself "how is Thing A like this Thing B I want to compare it to?"
But that's just the first step. Now, you can find incidents in New World history that really are analogous to this ISIS behavior - e.g, the deliberate destruction of Mayan codices. But the examples you give are not. Unless the Old World conquerors and their descendants were and are just really, really incompetent in carrying out this deliberate "wipe 'em from history" campaign against the conquered that you're imputing, and ISIS has future plans for a "Museum of the Kingdom of Nimrud" in the Caliphate's capital should their dreams of power be fulfilled.
Nobody expects the religion of Peace!
I don't think Coupe read his sources too closely.
Indian artifact treasure trove paved over for Marin County homes; Archaeologists crushed that tribe declined to protect burial site:
Notice that? It was the tribe (or at least, a tribe) that was behind the loss of the site. Not those dastardly Europeans, as Coupe wants to imply.
The American Indian leaders ultimately decided how the findings would be handled, and they defended their decision to remove and rebury the human remains and burial artifacts.
Perhaps you should get your news from someplace besides Gizmodo.
ISIS is doing it now, getting the reptile lizard aliens mad at them... destroying Babylon, Nimrud... how long before the Illuminati reptoids swarm out from their underground bases and abduct ISIS for genetic experimentation? David Icke told me all about it...
That's nothing. The racist sniffers are out to eliminate our sacred Confederate Battle Flags. We better guard Stone Mountain's carried idols too.
And then there was Dresden Germany. We eliminated that beautiful City in one night of idols living and dead..except for a few men in hiding at a Slaughter House Five.
The Religion of Pieces. -CP
Not, BTW, The Religion of Pizzas. Which, coincidentally, seems to also be an ongoing topic in this thread. -CP
dbp said...
At least the ISIS fanatics don't call their intolerance tolerance. They are brutal, but at least honest, in their own way.
Saying they're less dishonest than socialist activists is "damning with faint praise".
Blogger Rusty said...
Islam
The religion of ignorance.
God told 'em to do it, like this:
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;"
They're probably just protecting people - and the people's children unto the third and fourth generation - who might stumble upon the relics and, out of an arrogant ignorance, think they're cool.
Elizabeth Warren of the Boston Band of Braves says reparations are overdue., and Her 1/24th of the Cherokee Indians share will be about 2 billion beads.
Those weirdos who believe the world is 6000 years old aren't so nuts now, are they? Everyone who paid attention knows this after what they did to the Bamiyan Statues.
No Egypt's history is not safe from these loons.
Richard Fernandez wrote a thought-provoking piece years ago about 3 conjectures and what Islam is made up of, combining the Sun God RA, etc.
Leaving ISIS aside, what is the big attraction of monotheism anyway? Never understood that.
What the media ignores, is that a NATO member is the gateway for ISIS soldiers to enter the new Kingdom.
Turkey has done little to stop them, and hopes in the end they will exterminate the Kurds on their way to uniting the Sunni tribes.
The only thing to do is support ISIS, like we supported Saud. In the end it cleans-up the rif-raf and who knows, in 20 years we will be selling them our first-line weapons, just like Arabia.
This is incorrect. It is not because these are idols (in many cases they are not) that Isis is destroying these works. It is because they depict or represent history — kafir (pre- or non- Islamic) history — that they must be destroyed.
Ancient Assyrian city.
Assyrians have been Christians for Millennia.
No idolatry going on.
I am first generation Assyrian.
The situation is beyond pathetic. It is evidence of diseased minds at work.
@Paul Ciotti Leaving ISIS aside, what is the big attraction of monotheism anyway? Never understood that.
Bottom line: All religions derived from people who thought the Earth was flat, even though the shadow on the moon must have strained their consciousness.
Europe had the right idea early on, they waited for the bodies to decompose, then ground all the bones (human, animal) into fertilizer. There's your true God:
Phosphorus! Deliverer of Life, Essential for Life.
A repeat of the 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
To put things in perspective, Napoleon's soldiers used the Sphinx for cannon target practice.
Global warming is a more serious threat than ISIS, obviously.
>>To put things in perspective, Napoleon's soldiers used the Sphinx for cannon target practice.
Thanks for reminding us. I was just about to get on my high horse.
Paul Ciotti said...
Leaving ISIS aside, what is the big attraction of monotheism anyway? Never understood that.
Gods only know.
Napoleon's soldiers used the Sphinx for cannon target practice.
They were French..what do you expect?
They were also fresh from the French Revolution which was dominated by the same desire to erase History and the prior civilization.
They are like liberals in their single minded determination to destroy all opposition.
"Napoleon's soldiers used the Sphinx for cannon target practice."
Or not.
@Smilin' Jack To put things in perspective, Napoleon's soldiers used the Sphinx for cannon target practice.
It's a great analogy, alas, unproven.
Tom Holmberg writes:
A poll conducted on the Internet found that fully 21% of respondents believed Napoleon was responsible for the Sphinx's missing nose.
One of the most recent examples of the persistence of this falsehood was Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March" speech where he said:
"White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you [sic] too much of the Black man's majesty."
And the perpetuation of this myth in "Afrocentric" circles was even the subject of a segment of the U.S. television investigative journalism program "60 Minutes."
So anyway, The French did a lot of bad things probably, but the cannons were only used against humans...
Paul Ciotti said...
Leaving ISIS aside, what is the big attraction of monotheism anyway? Never understood that.
Having only one deity to bribe for good fortune.
Jordan Speith is a credit to his race.
These guys are not.
Gahrie: They were French..what do you expect?
Yeah, I guess that's why Bonaparte made sure that all the historians, archeologists, linguists, artists, and scientists stayed back in France when he was swanking around Egypt trying to obliterate the past, eh? "Soldats, songez que du haut de ces monuments, quarante siècles vous contemplent"! Obviously a man with no sense of history, appealing to like-minded men.
But hey, if Smilin' Jack says it's so, it must be.
Fritz,
Maybe, but we don't actually have any Enhanced Radiation Weapons in inventory, do we?
Kirk Parker said...
Fritz,
Maybe, but we don't actually have any Enhanced Radiation Weapons in inventory, do we?
Dial-a-yield. . .
Yeah, I guess that's why Bonaparte made sure that all the historians, archeologists, linguists, artists, and scientists stayed back in France when he was swanking around Egypt trying to obliterate the past, eh
Bonaparte wasn't French, he was Corsican, which means he was more Italian than French.
Man started out worshiping the food source. It took Greeks to create a really fun set of personality gods. That only made the Hebrews mad, and so One creator was postulated that spoke among his selves became the Hebrews God and set up the People using the most powerful single man to ever live on the earth, named Moses.
Than a rural Hebrew carpenter's assistant named Jesus hijacked it all since His Father happened to be God and He gave it all to Him after He died and rose from the dead. He rules everybody now. And you have no idea how mad that has made the Arab caravan raiders descendants.
Dial-a-yield. . .
Really? I'm not a high-energy physicist, but I didn't think the techniques used for variable yield affected the amount of neutrons emitted other than as a side-effect (as opposed to minimizing the containing case as much as possible, so that as many neutrons as possible escape the device, which I thought was the point of Cohen's original design.)
"All religions derived from people who thought the Earth was flat, even though the shadow on the moon must have strained their consciousness."
This is such a pernicious myth that you really should read about Eratosthenes who calculated the circumference of the earth within 0.11% error.
Columbus did not think the earth was flat. He was using an estimate of circumference that was too small.
""White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you [sic] too much of the Black man's majesty."
Black Egyptians is another myth. Cleopatra was Greek, a descendent of one of Alexander's generals. The name was the same as Alexander's sister.
Let them keep destroying.
One day the Arabs will be left with only sand to sell. No tourist, no manufacturing, and can't grow crops.
Then they can all go to Allah, via the Jim Jones method.
"This is such a pernicious myth that you really should read about Eratosthenes who calculated the circumference of the earth within 0.11% error."
That can't be true because uhm I fucking love science! and shut up.
Do you maybe have a picture of Eratowhatisname? I like pictures. Because I fucking love science!
Gahrie: Bonaparte wasn't French, he was Corsican, which means he was more Italian than French.
I'm pleased to see that you know something about Bonaparte, despite knowing diddly about the French in Egypt.
They're trying to reestablish the Caliphate, but the Caliphs did not destroy these relics. Mohammed himself did not destroy these relics.
Even on their own insane terms, this is madness.
A culture long gone and dead, and still they hate it.
This reminds me of an event the late Col. David Hackworth witnessed:
"Not long afterward I went out on another patrol to a little Serb village a few kilometers outside Sarajevo. At one point as we were walking along, we stopped at a cemetery. The patrol leader shouted a few directions to his troops and they started digging up a grave. At first I thought they must be looking for weapons. It is an old trick to cache weapons in a grave. It looks like you are going to dig up Omar but what you are really after is a case of AK-47s. While they were digging, I wandered around the graveyard. Checking the marker they had thrown aside, I saw the guy had a Muslim name and had died in 1944. This puzzled me.
Finally, the shovels hit a coffin. The soldiers scraped away the dirt and climbed out. Then they all lined up around the hold and pulled out their ****s and pissed on the coffin. Atfter that, the patrol leader snapped an order. This time the troops slammed rounds into their chambers and emptied their magazines into the disintegrating casket.
"What goes on here?" I said to the patrol leader.
"That man was very, very bad man," he said. "He killed many Serbs during World War Two. He is being punished."
If you go to that kind of trouble to punish the dead, I thought, what are you going to do to the living?"
"What are you going to do to the living?"... What indeed? I guess we can start looking at the Yazidi as an example and go from there.
It seems more typical of Islam to over-top existing monuments, or to re-purpose them. For example: the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, or the re-purposing of the Hagia Sophia after the conquest of Constantinople.
This simple destruction is video heater, intended not only to enrage but to make clear that ISIS represents a return to the 7th Century, to the give-no-quarter, never compromise, keep the truce only until it's in your interest to break it attitude that is characteristic of Islam's bloody origins.
As such it is perhaps more of a challenge to non-Islamic Islam than to non-Muslims?
OK, I meant "non-Islamist," not "non Islamic."
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