The Destruction and Loss of History and Culture.

[Bells]

Palmyra..

A World Heritage Listed site and one of the best archaeological sites in the Middle East.

The man who helped discover, interpret, restore and protect so much of it was named Khalid al-Asaad.

A scholar, who often spoke to archaeologists from around the world about this precious site, trying to educate the world about Palmyra and its treasures, many of which have never been shown to the public.

As we know, ISIS have taken Palmyra. With the fervent destruction of antiquities, precious objects and ancient sites in their wake, it was inevitable that Palmyra would suffer a similar fate.

Khalid al-Asaad, at 81 years of age, first sought to protect the treasures of the city:

As ISIS advanced on the city, al-Asaad led the efforts to evacuate the city’s museum of many of its treasures. He then chose to stay behind.​

As ISIS invaded, Khalid al-Asaad refused to leave, hoping that his age might protect him or save him as he worked to protect the city itself and its ancient buildings and columns and archaeology. Intent on protecting this precious and ancient city.

According to a statement from the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, al-Assad was publicly beheaded, then militants suspended his body from the same Palmyran columns he had once restored.

“It’s very symbolic, the way he died is outrageous,” Turkmani told ABC News in a phone interview. “It’s not just that they killed him, the way they killed him, it’s a big message for everyone.”

Chris Doyle, the husband of Turkmani and Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, called the news “a dreadful shock in a conflict full of shocks.”

“He was 81, he posed no threat to anybody,” Doyle said. “He wasn’t politically active. He was an archaeologist.”​

It is hard to describe what his loss means to archaeology.

At first, they imprisoned him, many suspect to try to torture him to reveal the location of the hidden treasures of the city. After a month, he was dragged into a public square and beheaded.

His crime?

A sign tied to Mr. Asaad’s body said he had been killed because he had overseen Palmyra’s “idols” and attended “apostate” academic conferences abroad.​

He was murdered for protecting his history, his culture and for educating the world about the preciousness of that history and culture.

At its heart, ISIS' destruction of such sites across the Middle East is not just a destruction of what they deem idols, it is also a theft and destruction of a people's history, their ties and their roots. That, like the thousands upon thousands of lives they took and destroyed, can never be replaced. Khalid al-Asaad dedicated his life to the site for 50 years. And he died trying to protect it and its treasures.

“They killed him because he would not betray his deep commitment to Palmyra,” the Director-General said. “Here is where he dedicated his life, revealing Palmyra’s precious history and interpreting it so that we could learn from this great city that was a crossroads of the ancient world. His work will live on far beyond the reach of these extremists. They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history.”​

Rest in peace, Mr Khalid al-Asaad.

You will not be forgotten.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Religion sucks. It should be outlawed, and anyone caught practicing it should be sent to a prison camp--on Mars, where there are no precious artifacts to destroy.

Because Christianity is the dominant bullshit (oops, I meant "religion") in the USA, Americans tend to focus their wrath on other religions, primarily (these days) Islam. But go back a few centuries and you'll find the "good Christian people" of Europe doing the same thing. The Spanish occupying force came very close to wiping out the entire written history of the Aztecs. Fortunately, enough texts survived for us to have learned how to read it.

And in South America, they melted down all the gold statues of the Incas, for being "heathen" artifacts.

But actually, we don't need to go back that far. Within my lifetime, the "good Christian people" of Europe were sending Jews to extermination camps. When we finally defeated the Germans, we started sending Jews back to Europe, and the fucking goddamned Polish Christians began shooting them!

Yes, we were all dutifully taught that the average European Christian citizen simply did not know about the concentration camps. Fortunately, after Perestroika, all of the Eastern European governments opened up their records to foreigners. It turns out that there were three times as many death camps as we assumed. It's very unlikely that any European who lived in or near a city in the warring countries (i.e., the vast majority of the continent's population) could not have known about the Holocaust.

 

[Spellbound]

Religion sucks. It should be outlawed, and anyone caught practicing it should be sent to a prison camp--on Mars, where there are no precious artifacts to destroy.

Because Christianity is the dominant bullshit (oops, I meant "religion") in the USA, Americans tend to focus their wrath on other religions, primarily (these days) Islam. But go back a few centuries and you'll find the "good Christian people" of Europe doing the same thing. The Spanish occupying force came very close to wiping out the entire written history of the Aztecs. Fortunately, enough texts survived for us to have learned how to read it.

And in South America, they melted down all the gold statues of the Incas, for being "heathen" artifacts.

But actually, we don't need to go back that far. Within my lifetime, the "good Christian people" of Europe were sending Jews to extermination camps. When we finally defeated the Germans, we started sending Jews back to Europe, and the fucking goddamned Polish Christians began shooting them!

Yes, we were all dutifully taught that the average European Christian citizen simply did not know about the concentration camps. Fortunately, after Perestroika, all of the Eastern European governments opened up their records to foreigners. It turns out that there were three times as many death camps as we assumed. It's very unlikely that any European who lived in or near a city in the warring countries (i.e., the vast majority of the continent's population) could not have known about the Holocaust.

One may make the case for arguing that religion's purpose, if you take it as man-made, was to instill morals in order to curb the savage beast within all of us. But due to lack of its unity and Philosophy as well as science, we have confusion and violence as the prevalent occurences of a divided society. So how do you suppose we unify humanity?

 

[river]

This despicable act , against Mr Khalid al-Asaad ...and the historical treasures. Are a crime against the whole of Humanity.

The loss is ......the Quality of the loss is ....fathomable.

 

[river]

One may make the case for arguing that religion's purpose, if you take it as man-made, was to instill morals in order to curb the savage beast within all of us. But due to lack of its unity and Philosophy as well as science, we have confusion and violence as the prevalent occurences of a divided society. So how do you suppose we unify humanity?

By education of the ancient past.

 

[James R]

And now ISIS has blown up the temple at Palmyra, too.

People who burn books and destroy cultural heritage are truly philistine barbarians.

The murder of Khalid al-Asaad is just one more murder in a continuous string of attrocities carried out by ISIS.

It's hard to comprehend the mindset of people who join ISIS or applaud or mimic them at a distance. They place little to no value on life. They must be truly desperate people, by and large.

 

[river]

And now ISIS has blown up the temple at Palmyra, too.

People who burn books and destroy cultural heritage are truly philistine barbarians.

The murder of Khalid al-Asaad is just one more murder in a continuous string of attrocities carried out by ISIS.

It's hard to comprehend the mindset of people who join ISIS or applaud or mimic them at a distance. They place little to no value on life. They must be truly desperate people, by and large.

The destruction of ancient history

is a crime against Humanity ; only superseded by murder of a Human being and then cruelty by a Human towards another Human.

 

[origin]

The destruction of ancient history

is a crime against Humanity ; only superseded by murder of a Human being and then cruelty by a Human towards another Human.

I rarely agree with you, but in this case I certainly do.

 

[sideshowbob]

They place little to no value on life.

One of the worst things a religion can do is put the emphasis on an "afterlife" instead of this life.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

It's hard to comprehend the mindset of people who join ISIS or applaud or mimic them at a distance. They place little to no value on life. They must be truly desperate people, by and large.

Indeed they are. Their economies barely function, their governments range from impotent to kleptocratic, and they've got nowhere to go, if only because the neighboring states don't want them. Just look at the poor Rohingya!

 

[timojin]

Religion sucks. It should be outlawed, and anyone caught practicing it should be sent to a prison camp--on Mars, where there are no precious artifacts to destroy.

Because Christianity is the dominant bullshit (oops, I meant "religion") in the USA, Americans tend to focus their wrath on other religions, primarily (these days) Islam. But go back a few centuries and you'll find the "good Christian people" of Europe doing the same thing. The Spanish occupying force came very close to wiping out the entire written history of the Aztecs. Fortunately, enough texts survived for us to have learned how to read it.

And in South America, they melted down all the gold statues of the Incas, for being "heathen" artifacts.

But actually, we don't need to go back that far. Within my lifetime, the "good Christian people" of Europe were sending Jews to extermination camps. When we finally defeated the Germans, we started sending Jews back to Europe, and the fucking goddamned Polish Christians began shooting them!

Yes, we were all dutifully taught that the average European Christian citizen simply did not know about the concentration camps. Fortunately, after Perestroika, all of the Eastern European governments opened up their records to foreigners. It turns out that there were three times as many death camps as we assumed. It's very unlikely that any European who lived in or near a city in the warring countries (i.e., the vast majority of the continent's population) could not have known about the Holocaust.

Sir you are a very ignorant self assert brain washed old individual . I do not want to dispute with you , because I want to restrain my temper

 

[Oystein]

Sir you are a very ignorant self assert brain washed old individual . I do not want to dispute with you , because I want to restrain my temper

Then why even post? You sir, make no sense.

 

[timojin]

And now ISIS has blown up the temple at Palmyra, too.

People who burn books and destroy cultural heritage are truly philistine barbarians.

The murder of Khalid al-Asaad is just one more murder in a continuous string of attrocities carried out by ISIS.

It's hard to comprehend the mindset of people who join ISIS or applaud or mimic them at a distance. They place little to no value on life. They must be truly desperate people, by and large.

And now ISIS has blown up the temple at Palmyra, too.

People who burn books and destroy cultural heritage are truly philistine barbarians.

The murder of Khalid al-Asaad is just one more murder in a continuous string of attrocities carried out by ISIS.

It's hard to comprehend the mindset of people who join ISIS or applaud or mimic them at a distance. They place little to no value on life. They must be truly desperate people, by and large.

I agree the ISIS are a bunch of hooligans , but there are some adults rational people who supply weapons to them and make a good living . Please look into the stock market company that produce weapons their stock shares are doing very good.
You forgot to mention the Taliban destroyed a giant Buddhist statute in Afghanistan

 

[Bells]

The biggest crime of destroying their cultural heritage and those in the region is that they rob future generations of said cultural heritage and art works and being able to experience and see parts of it with their own eyes. But that is their intention.

By murdering al-Asaad, they have denied the world, and the people who live in the region, of the ability to learn about their own cultural heritage and their history. It is the silencing of knowledge.

The reason for that is simple. They destroy it because it does not tie into what they believe. They do not want people to learn about their history because they are trying to rewrite history to suit their perverted views. So by obliterating it, they are rewriting it. History has been reset to where they want it to be. So instead of people learning about their cultural history and of their ancestors and where they came from, for example, they will now only have access to what ISIS deems appropriate for them to learn.

Jose Antonio Gonzalez Zarandona makes a point of this in his article in The Conversation:

Barely a week after ISIS beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian expert who devoted his life to the study of Palmyra, the group is reported to have destroyed a nearly 2,000-year-old temple dedicated to Baalshamin, Semitic god of rain and fecundity.

The reason seems clear: it is part of a plan by ISIS to get rid of the so-called idols, destroy the past and erase history, by targeting the heritage of Iraq and Syria.

Following the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the unprecedented scale of heritage destruction currently undertaken by ISIS seeks to undermine the concept of heritage as professed by international organisations such as UNESCO, ICOMOS or ICCROM – that is, a Western concept very well grounded in our contemporary visual culture of the digital industrial age.

With the destruction of the Palmyra temple, ISIS, as has been shown through previous cases of iconoclasm, is sending a very clear message: territories under ISIS control need to be radically transformed, so Year Zero of their Caliphate can commence, and that entails the destruction of idols.​

ISIS and groups like the Taliban are not the first to do this. The destruction of Catholic churches, relics and artifacts during the reformation springs to mind. And so on and so forth. And they won't be the last.

Iconoclasm, as we all know, means the breaking of images. In the 8th and 9th centuries the word was used in Byzantium in reference to the removal and destruction of icons: sacred images depicting Christian divinities.

During the Catholic Reformation in Switzerland, Germany and England during the 16th century, it was used to describe the destruction and fury that characterised the Protestants who pulled down from Christian churches the artefacts they considered blasphemous and caused idolatry.

Iconoclasts claimed that objects made of stone and wood could not represent the true essence of the divine, and they dulled the senses.

Iconoclasm and idolatry are two words that have been regularly used by the media and ISISrespectively, in reference to the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria.

As a result, the value of cultural heritage in these two countries has dramatically increased due to the threat that ISIS represents. Otherwise, how can we explain that in 2012 Iraqi forces were deployed to Syria, in order to protect the revered Sayyida Zainab mosqueoutside Damascus?

The reason given was to avoid sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni, as was the case in 2006 when the Samarra gold-dome mosque that contains the remains of two Shia Imams was targeted by Al-Qaeda, sinking Iraq into a civil war that lasted for two years.

And many of us will remember that in February 2015 Turkish soldiers crossed over to Syria to save the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the founding patriarch of the Ottoman Empire, in order to prevent their destruction by ISIS.

We may try to understand ISIS' iconoclasm of cultural heritage as a replica of former models of ethnic cleansing and purification as those described in Byzantium and Northern Europe.​

It's is known as cultural cleansing. And it often goes hand in hand with war.

Does not make it any less criminal.

al-Asaad knew this, which is why he came out of retirement and did as much as he could to get as much of the treasures of that region out before they were over-run with ISIS. A lot of the treasures were hidden by him, to keep it out of ISIS hands and to try to preserve them. They tortured him for a month to try to find out where he hid them.




________________________________________________________________________

Zarandona, Jose Antonio Gonzalez. "Against ISIS' Destruction of Heritage, and for Curators as the Cure of Souls." The Conversation. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Aug. 2015. <http://theconversation.com/against-...-and-for-curators-as-the-cure-of-souls-46601>.

Andrew Curry, National Geographic PUBLISHED March 12, 2015. "On ISIS's Path of Ruin, Many Sites of Global Importance." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 12 Mar. 2015. Web. 29 Aug. 2015. <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ooting-ancient-sites-iraq-syria-archaeology/>.

 

[James R]

You forgot to mention the Taliban destroyed a giant Buddhist statute in Afghanistan

How is that relevant?

The Taliban is another group of radicals who want to take their people back to the dark ages.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Sir you are a very ignorant self assert brain washed old individual . I do not want to dispute with you , because I want to restrain my temper

You can argue with my emotions, which are rather easy to identify and not mingled in with the statements of fact. But you cannot argue with my OBSERVATIONS.

Any reputable history of the New World will note that both the Mesoamerican civilization (Olmec --> Maya --> Aztec) and the South American civilization (several smaller regional fiefdoms that coalesced into the Inca empire) had achieved a Bronze-Age level of technology. In addition, the Mesoamericans had invented written language and the South Americans had built a road that ran almost the entire north-south span of the continent.

The same book will remind you that the Christian invaders did everything they could (and with their Iron Age technology they were virtually unstoppable) to eradicate the native cultures. It will also have a couple of chapters on the fate of the tribes north of the Rio Grande, who were still getting along with Stone Age technology, although many tribes in what is now the eastern USA had invented agriculture (graduating from Paleolithic technology to Neolithic) and had begun establishing trade routes.

I don't give a flying fuck about what modern American and European Christians have to say about their precious "Jesus," (to whom both sides in every Christian-against-Christian battle pray for victory) and their invisible "Father" (who, if he were sighted on a sidewalk in any First-World city would be immediately arrested for child abuse).

We all know that words are cheap but action requires a greater investment of energy. And 99.99% of modern Christianity is nothing but words. The paltry few Christian leaders who actually attempt to make this a better country (and perhaps a better world) are quickly culled from the herd--e.g., Martin Luther King.

Pick up any newspaper and notice which segment of American society is trying to stuff the LGBT population back into the closet: the CHRISTIANS!

 

[wellwisher]

Pick up any newspaper and notice which segment of American society is trying to stuff the LGBT population back into the closet: the CHRISTIANS!

The reaction is a backlash against the LGBT population wanting to be in people's face, in ways that upset a group of people. Say I was constantly in the face of a group of people and said the 'N" word, knowing they don't like it (I assume they have to accept this because I am more important). Instead of just accepting it, they get mad, should I blame them for being mad at me? This would be irrational and would demonstrate I am not fully in touch with the reality of social cause and effect. Others not impacted by the word, will now have concern due to possible pathology. One should not reward pathology.

If I spit on the ground and this weirds out people, the normal person will see this social reaction and have empathy. He will try to spit where people don't have to watch; out of sight and out of mind. If I think I am the center of the universe and I should be able to spit anywhere I wish, and all others; majority, have to adapt to me, this will lead to conflict. All ti takes is one self centered on the other side. The fact remains, many people are weirded out by LGBT and constant exposure is not desensitizing them but is creating a backlash. One can still spit on the ground, but do it away from such people and they will settle.


As far as Christianity, you need to look at history to understand modern Christianity. In the 4th century AD, Christianity became the official religion of Rome. Rome was one of the pinnacle civilizations and superpowers of the ancient world. It was at he crest of the BC wave, and ushered in AD.

Rome chose Christianity. It was not Christianity who chose Rome. Rome was the overlord, with Rome adding its touch to the Christian religion, to suit the needs of the empire. It added holidays like Christmas, which are not in the new Testament in any direct form. It added secular education, with members of the clergy among the most educated of all people for centuries.

The Roman Catholic Church was as much Roman influenced as Christian influenced. Christianity was a composite and paradox of opposites; conquest to charity. Atheists don't understand history and tend to render onto God what should be rendered onto Caesar; secular side.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Atheists don't understand history and tend to render onto God what should be rendered onto Caesar; secular side.

That's a remarkable statement to post on a website whose membership tends to be well-educated and irreligious.

I'm a third-generation atheist and I never had any trouble with my history courses. Like most of our members, I'm quite aware of religion being used to manipulate people.

 

[timojin]

That's a remarkable statement to post on a website whose membership tends to be well-educated and irreligious.

I'm a third-generation atheist and I never had any trouble with my history courses. Like most of our members, I'm quite aware of religion being used to manipulate people.

Are you not preaching atheism ?
Are you aware of the atheist period in the Communist world . Incarcerating, believers sending them to Siberia to starve , teaching in schools Zars history non existing . I suppo se you a coming from that period of brain washing.