Islamists
Eliminating History
A new form of warfare by
Islamists is being waged. This new offensive is not only a military
campaign for jihad and for the creation of Islamic states ruled by sharia law;
rather it is explicitly for the elimination of the non-Islamist past -- an
ideological offensive to remove the memories, historical artifacts, monuments,
buildings, or any other evidence of the history and contribution of Judaism,
Christianity, and even the moderate forms of Islam to civilization. This
offensive is potentially more dangerous than any violence or vandalism or acts
of revenge directed against supposed enemies. Part of it is the denial or
minimizing of the Holocaust.
It is now well-understood
that since the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Islamist
forces and groups, as well as the Palestinian extremists, have not only sought
to eliminate it by military methods -- by wars and terrorism -- but also
asserted that Jews have no historic association with the land and therefore
that the State is illegitimate. They even ignore or deny the visible
evidence of Jewish history offered by the many physical sites in the area.
Instead, a fallacious Palestinian narrative has been created declaring
that the disputed area, from Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and embracing
Jerusalem, Acre, Haifa, Jericho, Gaza, Galilee, Hebron, and Tiberius, is not
Jewish, but rather completely Arab by associations of history and identity.
Though their specific
activity varies from country to country, in recent years Islamist leaders have
emphasized this argument. Iranian President Ahmadinejad has proclaimed
that most Jews have no roots in Palestine and, in what may be considered
incitement to genocide, argued that the "Zionist regime" as he refers
to Israel is on its way to annihilation. In similar frame of mind,
Mohamed Morsi, in September 2010, before he became President of Egypt, declared
that the Zionists, "occupiers of the land of Israel ... these blood
suckers, these war mongers, the descendants of apes and pigs ... must be driven
out of our countries[.]" For Ahmadinejad and Morsi, Jewish history
in the area of Palestine never existed.
Recent events in a number
of countries have made clear that Islamist extremists have not confined their
ambition to obliterate the history of the Jewish people in Israel. Now
they are applying it to all countries in which they have or seek to have some
authority.
The occupation of northern
Mali by extreme Islamist and Salafist forces in 2012 has exposed this clearly.
These extremists have sought to obliterate the reminders of the history
of the more moderate Sufi Muslims, whom they regard as heretical and worshipers
of idols. They have destroyed three historic mosques, eleven mausoleums
of holy Muslims and cemeteries, and thousands of ancient manuscripts in the
historic town of Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a center of Islamic
culture five centuries ago. The tombs of Sufi saints were totally
destroyed. The Ansar Dine [Translation-Friends of
the Way of Allah] militants, who declared that they would destroy every
mausoleum in Timbuktu, regarded the destruction of the various artifacts as
obeying a divine command. Between 2,000 and 3,000 manuscripts in the
Ahmed Baba Institute were burned or destroyed in the city.
These militants were
following a pattern that has become familiar. In Libya, Islamists had
wrecked shrines and mausoleums and destroyed Sufi holy sites, some of which
were also World Heritage sites, in Zliten, Misrata, and Tripoli. For
Sufis, the sites were of cultural and religious significance. The brutal
civil war in Syria has led to the destruction of churches, as well as six World
Heritage sites in Damascus and Aleppo; historic buildings; and archaeological
sites, and the looting of museums. In Iraq, libraries and archives were
destroyed, and the National Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003.
The emphasis on
destruction has a long history, and it is not confined to the Muslim world.
Other religions in the past have sought to eliminate what they regarded
as idolatry, but at the present time, iconoclasm is largely evident in
extremist Islamist groups. Some of these groups have memories of the
consequences of the Muslim invasion of India and the rule of the Mughal Emperor
Aurangzeb, in the 17th century, who destroyed Hindu temples and
replaced them with mosques.
This kind of destruction
has taken place and is still applauded in other countries: in Egypt, Libya,
Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Perhaps the mildest but
most absurd statement, and the one that would affect the largest number of
tourists from Western countries, was the demand by an extreme religious
Egyptian named Murgan Salem al-Gohary to destroy the Great Pyramids and the
Sphinx, which is said to have some power over the level of the River Nile.
He argued that all Muslims were charged with applying the teachings of
Islam to remove idols such as the Pyramids, as had been done in Afghanistan
with the Buddhas. He did not mention that the Pyramids were the only
survivors of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The "removal"
of supposed false idols in Afghanistan and of the heritage of Buddhists was
indeed catastrophic. The most well-known disaster is the destruction in
the Bamiyan Valley in March 2001 of the world's two largest Buddhas, one 175
feet and the other 120 feet tall, carved into a sandstone cliff, which had
stood for more than 1,500 years and which together made for a World Heritage
site. The Taliban, perhaps influenced by al-Qaeda, destroyed them by
explosives and tank fire.
These actions have to be
seen as the desire to destroy all parts of the pre- or non-Islamic past of
Central Asia and North Africa. To its discredit, the international
community took no action to prevent the destruction in Afghanistan. But
the lesson has now been learned to some extent: Irina Bokova, the Director
General of UNESCO, did in December 2012 call on the international community to
act urgently to protect the cultural heritage of Mali. She recognized
that the attack on the heritage of Timbuktu was an attack against the nation's
history and values. The wanton destruction of inestimable treasures was a
crime against the people of Mali, committed by the Islamist radicals.
The urgent issue now is
whether the international community is indeed willing to take action to prevent
history and the artifacts that attest to that history from being erased or from
being falsified for the sake of anti-democratic and fanatical ideologies.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/02/islamists_eliminating_history.html at February 20, 2013 - 02:49:18 PM CST
No comments:
Post a Comment