ISIS and Civilization Just Don’t Mix
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Sisi and Jordan’s King plan a “coalition of the civilized.”
Islamic terrorists have destroyed more priceless objects of beauty and incomparable historical value, this time in Mosul.
Islamic State thugs have destroyed a collection of priceless statues and sculptures in Iraq dating back thousands of years.
Extremists used sledgehammers and power drills to smash ancient artwork as they rampaged through a museum in the northern city of Mosul.
Video footage shows a group of bearded men in the Nineveh Museum using tools to wreck 3,000-year-old statues after pushing them over.
The pieces in the video date to the Assyrian and Akkadian empires. The destruction is being decried by the international community.
“The birthplace of human civilisation … is being destroyed”, said Kino Gabriel, one of the leaders of the Syriac Military Council – a Christian militia – in a telephone interview with the Guardian from Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria. The destruction took place in Mosul, the Iraqi city that has been under the control of Isis since June when jihadi fighters advanced rapidly across the country’s north.
“In front of something like this, we are speechless,” said Gabriel. “Murder of people and destruction is not enough, so even our civilisation and the culture of our people is being destroyed.”
Isis destroys thousands of books and manuscripts in Mosul libraries
Read moreThe five-minute video, which was released by the “press office of the province of Nineveh [the region around Mosul]”, begins with a Qur’anic verse on idol worship. An Isis representative then speaks to the camera, condemning Assyrians and Akkadians as polytheists, justifying the destruction of the artefacts and statues.
Now, for some good news related to two Muslims who embrace a more modern concept of civilization: Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan are planning to tag-team ISIS.
The two men are currently meeting in Cairo, and are making plans to garner international cooperation and form an Arab coalition.
“With regards to enhancing military and security cooperation, Egypt and Jordan agreed to form a work group from both sides to set a framework for facing regional challenges,” Egyptian Presidential spokesman Alaa Youssef said in the statement.
The visit of the Jordanian monarch to Cairo comes while a number of fellow Arab states are suffering growing political turmoil and security deterioration, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
…”President Sisi expressed Egypt’s appreciation of the honorable positions of Jordan and its support for Egypt, particularly in its war against terrorism,” the presidential statement went on, describing the bilateral relations between the two countries as “deep.”
Hopefully, the Egyptian and Jordanian leaders can form a “coalition of the civilized” before more of our heritage and humanity is destroyed.
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Comments
Correction: ISLAM and civilization just don’t mix!
OK, let’s TRY to keep it real, shall we?
These treasures were not in the British Museum. They were kept and carefully persevered in a Muslim nation for decades. BY Muslims.
Ditto for the other sites and works that ISIS has been busily destroying.
Next time you hear some drivel about how advanced 12th century Islam was in arts and sciences – remind them of 21st centry Islam.
But they stole all they had in the 12th century!
And yet liberals have managed to turn these people into a victim group. Now that is an awesome branding achievement.
With talent like that they could be selling bras and mascara to Navy Seals. Yugo would be the number one selling car in America and some unknown inexperienced black guy could be President.
The reason that the islamic world has made no contributions to civilization in the last 1400 years is that they are too busy trying to destroy all evidence of civilization before that.
If that were true…and it isn’t…how did these antiquities come to be around for ISIS to destroy?
You can lay a lot at the feet of Islam, but not that gross overstatement of the truth.
While it may have been despite Islam, we DO owe Arabic scholars for preserving and illuminating Greek culture, and for their own contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the law.
A lot of them were dug up by European and American and maybe Australian archeologists. There are also maybe some long time preserved Arabic manuscripts.
The first great destruction happened when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, but they didn’t bother what was buried in the ground and unknown.
Rags – now they are doing their best to destroy it. The fall of Constantinople to Moslems was a huge setback to Classical knowledge. But people give the invaders credit for carrying off and preserving a few treasures.
Not according to what I read. A lot of scholarship says that the loss of Constantinople was the catalyst for the Renaissance, as western thought and scholars were pushed out into Western Europe to escape the Turks. Not an uncommon result of warfare, BTW.
Most accounts say the Turks were ordered out of the city on the third day after it fell, and there was not any wholesale destruction of libraries, etc.
If you have anything saying otherwise, I’d be delighted to read it.
Don’t make the mistake of short-selling the role of the great Arabic city-states in gathering in Greek and Indic learning, and preserving it and expanding on it.
We don’t need to distort history to make valid points about today.
Remember the 2003 outcry against us when the Iraqi National Museum was looted and it was the supposed to be the fault of the US Military because they didn’t move fast enough to prevent it? Much of that (and it wasn’t really our fault) has been recovered. No recovery here. Not hearing the outcry from the left on this one. Of course, removing heads looks pale next to this.
I meant to say, this looks pale next to removing heads.
Gotta be causing some conflicted thinking in lots of college and university Art History departments across this great land. In the world of most Art History faculties there are some eternal constants: Liberalism good/ Conservatism bad. Islam good/ Christianity bad. But its not religion crazed Christians who are currently destroying their precious Bronze Age Mideastern statues and artifacts. Leave it to the Liberals, though, to somehow come up with a way to resolve the conflict, maybe by blaming it all on George W Bush.
The real problem is with the idea that keeping things in their country of origin is good.
You need to stop distorting the facts with willful nonsense.
Organizations and people you would categorize as ‘liberal’ from all over the world protested in outrage when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the standing 6th Century statues in Afghanistan.
Liberal museums, art schools, universities and organizations raised funds to restore them, including the ‘liberal’ Getty Conservation Institute, in ‘liberal’ Los Angeles, California.
How do you expect to gain credibility with those kinds of gross distortions of fact?
The whole concept of “self parody” is kinda lost on you, huh?
And in all the college and university Art History departments across this great land concerning these crimes, all you hear……..CRICKETS!
Stupid is as stupid does. Animals are as animals do.
Isn’t it time for another campus BDS demonstration against the “horrors” of Israel? /sarc
They are no better than the Taliban. If we could just give them jobs……
There’s something fundamentally wrong with keeping or returning historical objects to countries without long and stable democratic traditions, which are also safe from war.
You mean countries like France, England, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia, Norway, Greece, Spain, the United States, Japan…those countries that are not safe from war?
Maybe Superman has room in the Fortress Of Solitude?
We could move them all to New Zealand.
“Come for the sheep; stay for the priceless antiquities!”
I HOPE there was not a Scotophobic slam embedded in that comment…
In Timbuktu the treasures were saved from Islamists,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/23/book-rustlers-timbuktu-mali-ancient-manuscripts-saved
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/17/timbuktu-manuscripts-appeal-crowdfund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts
But there was no plan in Mosul, and insufficient worry. and the plan to liberate Mosul, per U.s. advice, was very measured and slow (so as to minimize casualties and ensure that once liberated, it wold stay liberated)
It’s difficult to say what places are safe. But places outside the stable democracies are definitely not safe.
Things were not so safe in Europe, either, before 1945, and of course there is some kind of danger of war. But some places are not stable over the medioum term, now.
There is a good argument, always, for not putting all things in the same place or even continent.
ISIS showed pictures of themselves destroying statues.
But they did not show pictures of themselves destroying (and/or possibly hiding some for resale) books and manuscripts and other things.
They said they were destroying statues on the grounds they were idols.
To the obvious counter-argument: “But they were tolerated by the early Moslems” they said no, they were recently dug up by “Satanists” – not even calling them Christians, or possibly Moslems or anything that actually exists.
They are liars – nobody should think, like that Atlantic magazine article said,, taht they tell the truth.
As if these ISIS idiots and their ilk needed any more behavioral parallels to draw to the Nazis…Obozo and his foreign policy team have failed completely to learn the salient lessons of Europe during the preamble to World War II. Fascist thug bullies and their political movements need to be confronted and nipped in the bud early, before they metastasize like a cancer and eventually require one hundred or one thousand times more blood and treasure to be defeated.
Islamic jihadists represent unabashed sadistic totalitarianism, and no amount of historical revisionism, theological ignorance/mendacity or public relations spin and posturing by Obozo Chamberlain and the Left can alter that reality.
ISIS’s genocidal acts and gleeful savagery and the rampant rise of Islamic jihadism in the Middle East will be Obozo’s bloodstained foreign policy “legacy.”
A lemming Obozo supporter disagrees with my critique of his feckless and shameful failure to identify/acknowledge the Koranic roots of Islamic jihadism, to recognize its historical antecedents in other totalitarian-fascist movements such as Nazism and communism, and, to confront the same with any sense of urgency, conviction and resoluteness.
Good thing that al-Sisi and King Abdullah are showing leadership in combating ISIS, because Obozo certainly won’t.
Their strict interpretation of Islam prohibits images of human form in art.
Capturing human form on video committing atrocities? Perfectly OK.
Excellent point.
I gotta bet they practice on human silhouette targets, too.