{"id":31702,"date":"2015-06-20T02:00:59","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T06:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31702"},"modified":"2015-06-17T21:43:52","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T01:43:52","slug":"isis-and-the-endangered-archaeological-sites-of-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/20\/isis-and-the-endangered-archaeological-sites-of-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"ISIS and the endangered archaeological sites of the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Michael J. Totten<\/a> described ISIS as “The Borg of the Middle East”:<\/p>\n

ISIS has conquered Syria\u2019s spectacular Roman Empire city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site long known affectionately as the \u201cbride of the desert,\u201d and in all likelihood is gearing up to demolish it. We know this because they\u2019ve done it before. ISIS used hammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy the ancient Iraqi cities of Hatra and Nimrud near Mosul, and they did it on video.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese ruins that are behind me,\u201d said an ISIS vandal on YouTube, \u201cthey are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The Prophet Muhammad took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muslims have ruled this part of the world for more than 1,000 years. All this time, they\u2019ve been unbothered by the fact that Palmyra, Hatra, and Nimrud include pagan monuments, temples, statues, and inscriptions that predate Islam. Only now are these places doomed to annihilation. ISIS is more belligerently Philistine than any group that has inhabited the region for a millennium. The only modern analogue is the Taliban\u2019s destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan with anti-aircraft guns, artillery shells and dynamite in March 2001, mere months before their al-Qaida pals attacked New York City and Washington.<\/p>\n

This attitude toward history harks back less to the seventh century than to the twentieth, when Pol Pot reset the calendar to Year Zero after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and when Mao Zedong\u2019s Chinese Cultural Revolution murdered millions in the war against everything \u201cold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maamoun Adbulkarim, Syria\u2019s antiquities chief, told Reuters that the army carted hundreds of ancient statues away to safety, but of course the giant Roman columns and the museum itself aren\u2019t going anywhere except, perhaps, underneath the jaws of ISIS bulldozers. \u201cThis is the entire world\u2019s battle,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how bad things are in Syria now. The mass-murderers, war criminals, sectarian gangsters, and state sponsors of international terrorism in Bashar al-Assad\u2019s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime can plausibly tout themselves as the defenders of civilization. In this particular case and in this particular place, they\u2019re right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, Michael J. Totten described ISIS as “The Borg of the Middle East”: ISIS has conquered Syria\u2019s spectacular Roman Empire city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site long known affectionately as the \u201cbride of the desert,\u201d and in all likelihood is gearing up to demolish it. We know this because they\u2019ve done it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,370,11,16],"tags":[288,982,47,694],"class_list":["post-31702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-middle-east","category-religion","category-science","tag-archaeology","tag-isis","tag-islam","tag-syria"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8fk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31703,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31702\/revisions\/31703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}