OPINION:
Trashing antiquities and traces of early civilization is so easy a caveman can do it. Steeped in ruinous belief, the cavemen of the Islamic State are adding to their criminal rampage across the Middle East, smashing and looting the priceless artifacts made by their ancestors in a more constructive era.
Videos have surfaced depicting Islamic State goons storming the Mosul Museum in Iraq and taking sledgehammers to statuary dating from the mists of a time before there was anyone recording history. The intruders have bulldozed an Assyrian archaeological site in Nimrud dating from nine centuries before the birth of Christ. One United Nations official calls the destruction “a form of cultural cleansing.”
These are not the first looters plying their grim trade in the name of Islam. In July, ISIS vandals blew up the Shrine of Jonah and the Tomb of Daniel, both in Mosul. They reduced to rubble the Shrine of Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, held by Muslims, Christians and Jews to be the progenitors of mankind.
Some Muslims say that Muhammad taught that religious objects that preceded Islam are not to be regarded as priceless treasures bequeathed by their ancestors, but mere idols representing false gods and must be reduced to dust. Thus they destroy the riches of their ancient heritage which would have made their culture the envy of educated peoples long after their oil wells run dry.
In places where there are no historical sites that hold such deep significance as those found in the cradle of civilization, it may be hard to grasp the depth of the tragedy. Americans have already had a taste of the horror that accompanies the destruction of civilization’s symbols, when the World Trade Center was leveled and 3,000 innocents were killed on Sept. 11. Such acts, wherever committed, are crimes against all humanity.
Nor are these the first marauders to think they can eradicate all traces of a despised past. The ancient Romans leveled the cities of their archrivals, the Carthaginians, and destroyed the holy temple of the Jews in Jerusalem. In modern times, the Taliban dynamited the immense statues of Buddha carved into cliffs in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. The Nazis destroyed the valuables of Europe’s Jews and tried to erase all traces of them. Their rampage across the face of Europe is told now in 27 museums and memorials on four continents, lest posterity forget the crimes and the men, women and children who were the human cost of the rampage.
The wanton Islamic destroyers of culture and learning should beware. Some day they, too, will be the subject of museums raised to remind men and women of a more enlightened era of the malice that emerges from the hatred of modern cavemen who sacrifice humanity on the altar of false and ruinous religion.
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