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The Sack of Mosul
ISIS isn’t satisfied with destroying modern-day Iraq. They also intend to destroy its history.
The terror group uploaded a video Thursday of men smashing statues, pulling artifacts from walls and attacking Mosul antiquities with sledgehammers and power tools. To justify their violence, ISIS classified all these representations of man and beast as idols. Some of the irreplaceable works date back to the 7th century B.C.
Here is video of the iconoclasts in action, provided by Tunisian news agency Al-jarida.
http://youtu.be/O0GBkdb-Nwk
“The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him,” an unidentified man said in the video.
The smashed articles appeared to come from an antiquities museum in Mosul, the northern city which was overrun by Islamic State last June, a former employee at the museum told Reuters.
The militants shoved stone statues off their plinths, shattering them on the floor, and one man applied an electric drill to a large winged bull. The video showed a large exhibition room strewn with dismembered statues, and Islamic songs played in the background.
Lamia al-Gailani, an Iraqi archaeologist and associate fellow at the London-based Institute of Archaeology, said the militants had wreaked untold damage. “It’s not only Iraq’s heritage: it’s the whole world’s,” she said.
“They are priceless, unique. It’s unbelievable. I don’t want to be Iraqi any more,” she said, comparing the episode to the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Afghan Taliban in 2001.
As well as Assyrian statues of winged bulls from the Mesopotamian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, Gailani said the Islamic State hardliners appeared to have destroyed statues from Hatra, a Hellenistic-Parthian city in northern Iraq dating back around 2,000 years.
Axel Plathe, the director of UNESCO’s Iraq office, said ISIS’ continuing crimes were an attempt “to destroy the identity of an entire people.”
Statuary isn’t the Islamists’ only target in Mosul. Last week, ISIS sacked the city’s library and burned more than 100,000 historic manuscripts and documents. Many residents tried to prevent the destruction, only to see their invaluable collection set ablaze. Afterwards, terrorists blew up the building.
What strikes me about these fanatics is how incredibly insecure they are about their beliefs. They claim to be the most faithful among us, yet still believe their god is so frail that he’s offended by hunks of stone and leaves of paper.
If you truly believe in a divine Creator, it seems the best way to emulate Him is to create. Instead, like the enemy they represent, ISIS seeks only to destroy.
Published in General
Re ISIS destroying cultural treasures – is anybody even mildly surprised? After Bamiyan, Mali….? I am appalled, but sadly not surprised.
Does this look familiar?
I will tell you something that no police chief wants you to hear. I found that as a police officer there are some individuals that will not stop what they’re doing until you “put the boots to them”. What is true for one out of control individual is true for a group of out of control individuals. No one is sorrier than I am for telling you the truth. I wish there was another way, but unfortunately there isn’t.
Doug,
Agreed.
Regards,
Jim
I had to shoot a rabid dog once & felt sorry for the fine creature it had been at one time. The disease had consumed & twisted it’s mind. No such sorrow for these Islamic State vermin. There is only one answer for them.
Exactly right.
It’s a common theme in science fiction stories to have a group of modern people mysteriously transported to the past, where they have to survive among barbarians. This is a real life SF story where tens of thousands of lunatics from the age of barbarians has somehow been transported to present day.
Looks like ISIS has finally gone too far. Before they were just cutting off human heads. Now they’re destroying things that NPR listeners care about.
This story does have a certain familiar air, as if the broadcast of an old sitcom rerun.
Mali indeed:
Of course prior to that particular incident was the Taliban:
I am somewhat curious about what will be destroyed next.
ISIS has been somewhat active in Egypt recently, another land with many antiquities and innocents.
Let us hope el-Sisi’s words receive some attention before even more is lost.
They’re doing the jobs Americans wont do.
Dark ages came before and they can come again. We’ve gotten so wealthy that we’re as adamant about comment word count as we are about our Constitution. Years ago we chanted Obamacare must die; now we’ve decided/evolved to consider that we can tweak it. Our crusaders in the senate are afraid of losing their job so they concede to amnesty and executive overreach.
Mexican drug gangs have been beheading people for years (although I don’t think they published videos). Yet that wasn’t enough to secure a border. Politicians blatantly lie to the citizens of a democracy and we yawn.
Why do we care if they level a pyramid if we don’t care about our own culture? Tear down the family, sure. Damage an African antiquity – now you’ve crossed a red line.
If this is what it takes for us to stand and say stop, then so be it.
Well thank God and Obama that we’re going to give them two more years and the nuke before we completely capitulate.
If the NPR listeners ever hear about it. A glance at NPR’s front page has no mention of the story, even in their long headline sidebar.
I suspect they are constructing an in-depth story on the core responsibility for this action being laid at the feet of George Bush.
I suspect tension abounds in the editorial board rooms as the conflict between important stories about ahhhht and the risk of putting Islam in a bad light is hotly debated.
Ahh! Thank God we blamed this on Obama. How did we go 1.5 whole pages without mentioning his name?
One would assume you are aware of the difference between Iran and ISIS. But you know what they say about assuming…
Some people are extremely brave when it comes to threatening to nuke people over the internet.
Except that it’s the liberals who are for the silencing of the heretics today. If many had their druthers they’d be burning books too.
I would not be so quick to take Simon so lightly. He has a rather close acquaintance with the region.
Obama inherited a largely pacified Iraq and threw it away. That’s why we’re having this discussion now. US soldiers fought and died to take the damned city precisely to save the people and save the antiquities, and Obama deliberately abandoned it so he could say “I got us out of Iraq” – a cheap domestic political victory to salve his base. How is he not to blame?
First, these are not Islamist, they are random people. Second this is not priceless, irreplaceable historical artifacts but instead random collections of random items at a random location of random age. Third, none of this matters anyway because at some time during the last couple thousand years a couple of Christians may have destroyed some property thus nobody in the world has a right to criticize these actions.
Come on, we are not the type of people to condemn such actions by these people, we are better than that.
— BHO
How is this any different to reading Exodus? How about all the stories about Christians & Muslims wiping out teachings with which they disagreed? It is incredibly successful–or it was–in Iraq, it might work today, as well. I find it strange to call people insecure if they know what they’re doing & have a good chance of success.
I guess, we think we know better & we would not have done the same these days? We may, but we certainly do not know well enough to get these people to stop, or any of the other Muslim terrorists who destroy ruins. It is also possible that knowing better these days is taking too much for granted–that these terrorists know some thing we’ve forgotten.
I’m not sure I follow you. I don’t hear a lot about Christians being taught to imitate the acts of creation–mostly, it’s about loving your neighbor & obeying commandments. In fact, the difference between emulating God & playing God is not obvious to me. But if you do start with this kind of emulation, how do you start creating without destroying the stuff that was there before you start creating?
If there’s a connection between this psychological matter & the political matter above, it seems to be how God created Jewish politics in Exodus, not the creation of the world in Genesis. Jewish political life & freedom in the Good book is based on destroying the people who were already there. Again, when Jews got to the promised land, it was time to slaughter, not to be friendly & humane…
Skipsul, Iraq was clearly not pacified – at best it was immobilized under occupation. There was no ISIS during the American occupation, but there was no ISIS under a Saddam either. Can’t really blame it on Obama :-(
He did not start the war, but he chose how to end it. He has decided what to do in the Middle East & has been working on his foreign policy at least since the Cairo speech. He is responsible for all these reasons. Not having started a war does not mean an American president is not responsible for it–he is responsible for everything that comes under the Commander-in-chief title.
Whether he likes it or not, America started a war in Iraq in 2003–how it ends is his responsibility once he runs for office & is elected & swears before the nation to execute his office.
Okay. Yes.
Vacuum. Negative space. To be entered when there is no resistance. In fact, it can be argued – as someone has – that ceding the territory in Iraq created the conditions for ISIS to thrive.
Land. Territory to control. I will happily blame this on Barry, to a degree, in that he made campaign promises and speeches to the effect that if we leave, peace will reign, and random people will hate us less.
Unfortunately for the Sissy-In-Chief, this is a lot like a kid taking a different path to get home every day to avoid where the bullies hang out. They’re still there, the bullies. You’re just avoiding them. The ISIS bullies aren’t content to hang out at the same corner, though, as they have clearly demonstrated.
Barry stated, openly, that the future does not belong to those who slander the Prophet. Which is probably why he couldn’t bring himself to stand by other Western leaders in France after Charlie Hebdo. He didn’t want to send the signal the other way. By word, and deed, he’s stating that he thinks the future belongs to those who do not slander the Prophet – which means, essentially, the West.
Chris
I rage. And weep.
If you ever wonder why it’s a good idea for antiquities such as these to be collected, owned, and kept by western museums, here is your answer.
If we sent this over there, would they put it back together?
I’ve been wanting to take a Middle East Antiquities Tour. Now I’ll have to be content with the Walters collection in Balto and a trip to Petra. The Jodanians will see to Petra’s protection, for sure.
I recently read “In the Plain of Dead Cities”; I was heartened by the author’s visit to one of the few places where Aramaic is still spoken, Maaloula, only to find out that Islamists had attacked it.
The British museum has two of the large Assyrian winged-lion-men statues (you see the ISIS folk chipping away at the face of one toward the end of the video). The statues were displayed kind of like pillars of a large gate that you waked through and it was pretty striking.
Similarly the famous Elgin marbles taken from the Parthenon were are wonderfully presented and were “saved” from the significant deterioration that occurred to the ones that were left behind.
& do not forget the Pergoman altar at the Pergamon Museum, as well as the Ishtar Gate…
Ugh…remind me of the crusades again. Does anyone really know what happened to the Sphinx’s nose BTW?
But seriously, your comment brings up a point I have wondered about. I think these are ruins of the Assyrian empire. I would think the same people who conquered Mesopotamia and Egypt in the prophet Isaiah’s time . One can make the circuit from Greece to Turkey to Lebanon to Egypt to Libya and countries in between and find all sorts of Greek or Roman ruins. You can add to that Egyptian and Assyrian ruins in some places. But Islam for whatever reason does not seem to leave much for ruins. From the establishment of the caliphate to the fall of the Ottoman empire, other than mosques and some palaces in Istanbul and Spain, there seems like there is precious little to show for it.
Why do we react so strongly to ISIS destroying books, paintings and statues? I think it’s because, on some level, we know we’re watching them enslave the minds of future generations by erasing cultural memory. Dead men tell no tales, but books, paintings and statues that have been reduced to ashes and dust won’t be telling any either. In a way, the ISIS savages are the primitive, violent, middle eastern version of Terrence Moore’s “story-killers”. And remember: “Hey hey, ho ho. Western Civ has got to go.” ? The methods are different but the goal is the same.
JON WRITES: What strikes me about these fanatics is how incredibly insecure they are about their beliefs. They claim to be the most faithful among us, yet still believe their god is so frail that he’s offended by hunks of stone and leaves of paper.
And THAT is really the heart of the matter. The ISIS nut jobs are terrified that their supreme god might be threatened or offended by old carvings. They are classic bullies in their monumental insecurity. And bullies understand only one form of communication – getting their butts whipped.
And if they did, could we send them to Restoration Hardware too?