Cultural genocide is a consequence of jihadist warfare, as the supremacist impulse to impose Islamic law cannot tolerate any competition, especially from the non-Islamic past, or time of jahiliyyah. Ensuring submission requires extinguishing a populace's attachment to -- or curiosity about -- its prior existence, unless it can be subsumed in a narrative leading inevitably to Islam.
Hence the Orwellian drive here, and in the destruction of shrines in Saudi Arabia and Somalia, and among those eager to rewrite the history of the Temple Mount, to erase the past when it so rudely contradicts the party line.
"Taliban suffocate Pakistan Buddhist heritage," by Sajjad Tarakzai for Agence France-Presse, November 22:
TAXILA, Pakistan -- Archaeologists warn that the Taliban are destroying Pakistan's ancient Gandhara heritage and rich Buddhist legacy as pilgrimage and foreign research dries up in the country's northwest."Militants are the enemies of culture," said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum, one of the premier archaeological collections in Pakistan.
"It is very clear that if the situation carries on like this, it will destroy our culture and will destroy our cultural heritage," he told AFP.
Taxila, a small town around 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of Islamabad, is one of Pakistan's foremost archaeological attractions given its history as a centre of Buddhist learning from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century.
Violence is on the rise in Pakistan as Taliban bombers and gunmen strike with increasing frequency and intensity in the cities of North West Frontier Province and around the capital Islamabad.
"Even in Taxila we don't feel safe. The local administration has warned us about a possible attack on this museum. We have taken some extra security precautions but they aren't sufficient and we lack funds," said Khan.
"For weeks we don't get even a single foreign visitor. If visitors don't come, if sites are not preserved and protected, if research stops, what do you think will be the future of archaeology?" he said.
In March 2001, Taliban militants in neighbouring Afghanistan blew up two 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues in defiance of international appeals.
The Islamist militia has since spread into Pakistan. Their opposition to music, art, dance, girls' education and idolatry makes archaeologists fear that Pakistani Buddhist relics are in the eye of the storm.
Italian archaeologists were active in Pakistan's northwest Swat valley from 1956 until they reluctantly discontinued work in 2007 after Taliban fighters led by radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah rose up demanding sharia law.
"It is not planned to carry on any research activity," Luca Olivieri, co-director the Italian archaeological mission in Pakistan, told AFP by email.
After 17 years as curator in Swat, Khan took no risks. With the Taliban killing and bombing their way through the valley, the museum closed in 2008 and he evacuated the most priceless antiquities.
That September, the Taliban twice tried to blow up 7th century Buddhist relics -- damaging a rock engraved with images of Buddha that for centuries had been a pilgrimage site....
The Islamist militia has since spread into Pakistan. Their opposition to music, art, dance, girls' education and idolatry makes archaeologists fear that Pakistani Buddhist relics are in the eye of the storm.
Talibani ideology is so bankrupt they must attack museums, those mausoleums of culture and art. How weak can they get? Meanwhile, tourism in Pakistan drains down to a trickle. All this for the glory of Allah? Here's the rest of the story of Pakistan:
The situation is not much better further south.
Peshawar, the troubled capital of northwest Pakistan known for its Buddhist heritage and archaeology, used to attract thousands of tourists but security fears and bomb attacks make it a no-go area for foreigners.
Its museum is open, but one gate has been sealed and cement barricades outside the second allow only pedestrians to enter.
"For a year and a half, foreign tourists have completely stopped visiting this part of Pakistan," Qazi Ijaz, an official at Peshawar museum, told AFP.
So is this what Pakistan courted with supporting the Taliban? Raw fair justice, but abysmally depraved. There is no justice in this Islam, only death and destruction.
"Militants are the enemies of culture," said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum, one of the premier archaeological collections in Pakistan.
See, there's a Muslim who doesn't hate the jahilliya, so Muslims aren't all bad, eh? In fact, most Muslims aren't bad, it's only a minority of extremists who are the problem, right? Muslims like this curator represent the real Muslims, good decent people; while the "militants" represent the extremists who are threatening the real Muslims as much as they threaten us, right?
What if they proposed a supremacist ideology and nobody believed it?
The Taliban are so vicious that even many Muslims hate them. The next step is for Muslims to realize that groups like the Taliban are to Islam what plutonium is to nuclear power: A toxic by-product of the core process itself.
Imagine what the Taliban and their ilk (the ilk here would be extensive) would want to do with all the magnificent religious art work in Europe. I suspect they would be most eager to destroy anything conveying the divinity of Jesus or those images displaying Mohammed in Hell. Hopefully, the more this destruction by Muslims goes on, tragic, repulsive and useless though it is, the more Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and peoples of all faiths but Islam will understand that their very heritage would be destroyed (never mind the portion which already has been by Muslims) if the more enthusiastic Mohammedans get the chance to do so. And forget about that useless group of human beings known as "moderate Muslims." They'll sit on their asses as usual and say little and do nothing.
And forget about that useless group of human beings known as "moderate Muslims." They'll sit on their asses as usual and say little and do nothing.
Think a moment, put yourself in the "moderates" shoes. What can they do, but sit on their asses as usual and do nothing? If they squawk, they'll be on target by their jihadi co-religionists. If they stay silent, they tacitly endorse what their monstrous followers of the Allah Cult are doing. So they are pinned down in the middle, that is if these "moderates" actually exist. And if they do exist, then they are double damned, since to defend Islam with its self-damning Koran and Hadiths means they are forced to defend a dying religious-political ideology; which even the most dense "moderate" knows is really a lost cause. Islam is dying, no matter what statistics their co-religionists parade about, and it is for this reason it is putting up such a contorted twisted struggle as evidenced by the Taliban. It is the last throes of its death scream. Sad for a world culture to witness its own gruesome demise, but do not expect any so-called "moderates" to come to its rescue. Islam is walking dead, and Taliban is its grand master of ceremony.
There will be no tears shed from us here, nor history, except perhaps some sentimental Arabists remembering fondly 1001 Arabian Nights.
Agree with virtually everything you have written, Battle_of_Tours. I would, however, like to see more courage displayed by so-called moderate Muslims, but you're right to maintain that that's not going to happen (wishin' ain't gettin'). Can't feel very sorry for them though. They believe in rotten stuff, same as fascists and Marxists did and how sorry could you have felt for them? When a person, even a child, believes in an ideology full of pathologies, even though they are not active implementers of that ideology, it's as though they have lost a part of their humanity and sympathy for such an individual is difficult to summon up.
The only real solution to Islam is the ending of it and I see that occurring before our eyes and give Islam only about another hundred years before it is marginalized almost out of existence. It's dying as you said but the future crimes and tragedies that will be committed in the name of Islam before death occurs are going to be terrible.
For those who discovered this site, and this comments floor, later than February 2007, and who may not, perhaps, have had time to fully explore the archives, I offer - directly relevant to the posted article and to our reflections on the shocking vandalism of Islam - a wrenchingly-moving posting by a professional archaeologist, Dominic Tabrar-Synge (now, alas, deceased) who had *been* to some of these archaeological sites in Paksitan, and who contributed here for a brief but memorable period under the name 'necessitasnonhabetlegem'.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/02/pakistan-asks-eu-to-look-inwards-to-stop-radicalization.html#c348055
necessitasnonhabetlegem | February 11, 2007 12:51 AM
"The government of Pakistan actually controls very little of that country - most areas outside the capital are efectively self-governing and respond only to military pressure from the centre. Very little civilian authority remains, especially in the more remote areas, and sharia law predominates even in the larger towns. Pakistan is most certainly not safe for Western civilised people to visit. Furthermore, there is a widespread culture of bribery for everything from owning a vehicle to taking a taxi to shopping for necessities. In effect, law and order, as the average civilised Western person would understand those terms, has long since ceased to have any meaning; indeed, such meanings probably ceased to be relevant shortly after 1947.
"A couple of years ago I was privileged to be allowed to join a study team looking into the rock carvings (petroglyphs) and inscriptions along the Karakorum Highway - part of the old 'Silk Road' network - which are, or, rather, were, some of the most historically important artifacts in Pakistan.
"I had read, naturally, the opinions of Professors Jettmar and Hauptmann (Heidelberg University) and also Professor A.H. Dani (Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan) a most civilised moslem of the 'old school' so to speak) and I looked forward to a very civilised and enjoyable two months pottering about amongst some very interesting carvings.
"Well, I was never more mistaken in my life!
"The rock carvings are mainly, but not exclusively, in the area around the village of Chilas in the Diamir District and it cost the whole team almost two thousand pounds (three thousand US dollars) in bribes, and three weeks of time in Islamabad, to have our travel documents made good for the journey to Chilas. It cost us an additional one thousand five hundred pounds for the 'arrangement' of a military escort - an escort, incidentally, which was never provided; we were, instead, escorted, if that could be construed to be the correct word, by a group of what I can only describe as barbarian, gun-toting ruffians who had to be paid off in US dollars on a daily basis.
"When we finally got to Chilas - a nightmare journey which took three days - we had the added financial burden of having to pay a 'tax' to each and every mosk in the area in order to be allowed to stay there (this eventually came to over one-and-a-half thousand pounds) and various moslem clerics routinely searched our baggage for what they called 'illegal works' and 'the devil's machines' and which we came to realise meant Christian writings and anything that looked like having a purpose more than that of a simple camera.
"We had been told that there were some 45 sites on a stretch of the Indus of about 80 miles in length, and on both banks, with about 40,000 petroglyphs and 10,000 inscriptions in more than 15 writing systems and that the carvings were scraped, or chiseled in some cases, into the larger stones scattered about on the river banks and the lower flood banks of the river valley.
"Certainly there are at least that number of sites but at almost every site we visited systematic destruction of the carvings had obviously taken place.
"At one site, a mere ten miles from Chilas, we witnessed for ourselves a group of locals, obviously under the directions of several clerics, systematically destroying the stones with large hammers, steel rods and sundry other tools.
"When we attempted to remonstrate with these people we were physically attacked and our interpreter - a young man from Islamabad - told us that our attackers were telling us that they were deliberately destroying the works of the ungodly that the British put there so that they could come back and claim the place as their own again!
"No amount of reasoning and explanation seemed to get through to these people.
"Some three days later we did manage to convince one imam that these rocks were much older than the British colonial era and he turned to us and said, according to our translator, that if they (the rock inscriptions) were indeed as old as we claimed then they didn't matter and should be destroyed anyway for they obviously came from the mythical (his word) era before the coming of the prophet and so had no validity.
"He added that because we were interested in them then they all had to be destroyed to save his people from the evil ways which we infidels brought with us.
"All of this, you understand, from a man who was counted amongst the folk of that area to be educated and knowledgeable!
"I'm not ashamed to admit that on the aeroplane home to London I wept - yes, really, I cried. Why?
"Because these damned barbarian moslems don't just want to rewrite the past, they want to destroy it also - they want to remove any evidence that anything is any different from that which they claim.
"They are doing it everywhere and all the time - robbing all of us of our past, cutting us off from our various identities, systematically destroying our sense of us.
"Even here, in civilised old Britain, I have encountered moslem youths who disrupt archaeological conferences, attempt to destroy archaeological sites, attack archaeologists and pervert knowledge in a desparate attempt to deny that the past ever contained anything other that islam.
"And what do we do? Well, we give in as far as I can see. Some days it just all seems so hopeless. {Note - Dominic wasn't always as despairing as this - normally he was pretty fiery - dda}.
Dominic."
Unfortunately, the destruction of Buddhist artifacts described above is the fate of all non-muslim cultural artifacts laying within Muslim lands. While there are exceptions to this-Egyptian authorities attitudes towards ancient Egypt, the general rule is that non-Islamic art and architecture fare poorly under Muslim custodianship. The attacks upon the Bamiyan Buddhas are well known, so too the attacks upon the Swat Buddha. Truly sad because Gandharan art was a unique synthesis of Classical Greek art and Buddhism. From the art and architecture of Christian Byzantium to ancient Mesopotamia to Gandhara, the best surviving examples of these cultures will be in non-Muslim lands. The simple truth is that Muslims really don't care about non-Muslim culture and art because they are taught by the Quran outright hatred of the 'other'.
Whilst working on my thesis and travelling the Silk Road, I lost count of the many cultural artifacts which were damaged because of Islamic contempt of non-Muslm cultures. The best example of the art created along the Silk Road is now under the conservation of Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and even the Chinese. Although some deride this as the vestiges of 'cultural imperialism', frankly, I'm very pleased that the Chinese control the Xinjiang province because Chinese authorities truly see the value of the artifacts and history of the Silk Road. I wish I could say that about the Uighur Muslims but I can't. In fact, I'll go one step further and state that if the we want these artifacts to be preserved the best thing we can do take them from the Muslims because whether it is from neglect or outright contempt these artifacts will at one time face destruction.
There is no question that muslims are vandals and even a diehard apologist like Abdullah Bullah cannot defend this vandalism. During barbaric muslim rule in India, they destroyed literally thousands of temples, monastries, art, literature, and libraries. The world's oldest university in Nalanda was completely ransacked, Buddhist monks killed, and the library burnt down. They did the same to Taxila university which was India at the time, but is now in Porkistan (after partition). Of course, Bamiyan Buddha is their more recent act of vandalism. muslims contribute NOTHING to arts, culture, music, science, and the like. They only know to take from infidels and whine incessantly when others indulge in some payback.
"While there are exceptions to this-Egyptian authorities attitudes towards ancient Egypt"
What happened was that when Egyptian Muslims were less constrained by the West, prior to the 18th century, they had no explosives to use against the pyramids and Sphinx. Coincidentally with the advent of explosives and their procurement by Muslims, there has occurred constrainment of Egyptian Muslims through a complex process of geopolitico-economic symbiosis with the West. What Muslims really want is to be free of this symbiosis because it condemns Islam to a third-class at best partnership by virtue of the fact (denied by Muslims of course) that Muslims and their Islam are spectacularly inferior to the West -- a partnership that nevertheless proves to be quite lucrative to certain Muslims receiving so many billions from the stupidly generous West over the years. And of course in this context, one might as well skim more wealth from Infidel tourists visiting those ancient relics of Jahilliya, who keep coming despite the mass-murderous machine-gun attack on them only a little over a decade ago at Luxor I believe.
Incidentally, while Muslims in the pre-modern era had no explosives to use against the pyramids, perhaps some zealous ones tried to hack away at the Sphinx and at least got the nose?
Wellington wrote:
Imagine what the Taliban and their ilk (the ilk here would be extensive) would want to do with all the magnificent religious art work in Europe.
...............................
Exactly, Wellington. Except for Jihad violence against non-Muslims, this has been my greatest fear with the huge influx of Muslims into culturally rich Infidel lands.
Pre-Islamic and non-Islamic art have been ravaged for centuries in Dar-al-Islam—ancient Egyptian art in Egypt, Christian churches and cathedrals in Turkey and the Balkans, Buddhist art in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hindu art in India and Indonesia. And the capacity for destruction with modern explosives is more extreme than ever—re the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Museums have been a big target in Egypt, and the Taliban when in power virtually destroyed Afghanistan's artistic heritage in Kabul—the only pieces that survived were those hidden by the heroic curator of the museum.
Muslims in Europe have already threatened the Bologna Cathedral of San Petronio, with its famous fresco of Mahomet in Hell—here is a good article on the subject:
http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/Ibnwarraq/prophetic_words
Then there has been the threat to contemporary art—everything from Swedish artist Lars Vilks' "Modoggies" to a staging of Mozart's "Ideomeo" by the Berlin Opera. (That some of this art is very silly makes no difference)
Here is an excellent article by Fjordman on the threat:
http://www.islam-watch.org/Fjordman/Western-Arts-Threatened-by-Muslim%20Immigration.htm
Thanks for those links, gravenimage. Loved the comment by Fjordman that "Camille Paglia is mostly silly." That's about right. She's brilliant but very loony too and so only now and again does she stumble into the truth. More seriously, the great art work of the Western tradition is indeed threatened by the more "enthusiastic" Muslims out there. They're such idiots but idiots can be very destructive at times. Vigilance against them should be constant. Hope you are well.
Archaeologists warn that the Taliban are destroying Pakistan's ancient Gandhara heritage and rich Buddhist legacy as pilgrimage and foreign research dries up in the country's northwest.
Pakistan came to existence only in 1947. It can have no claim on Taxilla, which is really a cultural heritage of India. In any case, most Muslims regard their existence prior to Islam as one of shame, and to be expunged from their minds as well history.
I was watching this terrorist destruction special on TV the other day I can't remember which channel but this arab lady said the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues inorder to get international attention. She romanically claimed they were trying to demonstrate how the world cares more about these two statues than they do about all the muslims suffering. Which I found Ironic because the Taliban are some of the worst human rights abusers on the face of this planet.
LMAO!!!!
I shit you not.
This nobel savage bullcrap needs to stop. Poeticizing terrorism is not rational. Which is why I hate poets. I will take people who think like Albert Einstein over Bob Dylan any day.
I wonder if savages have ever been noble. Tho ones around today certainly aren't.
Back in the summer of 1997 I visited the Bizaklik Thousand-Buddha Caves in Xinjiang in China. They were in pretty bad shape, and our tour guide told us that they'd been largely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. He said that, while Chinese were busy destroying relics of their own culture in the rest of China, the Muslims of Xinjiang used the opportunity to destroy Buddhist relics, while leaving their own Muslim relics largely intact.
If you go any kindergarden, you will find a group of boys cooperatively building an edifice out of the set of wooden blocks that are found in seemingly every kindergarden class. At some point, a single anti-social hooligan will kick the structure down.
This demonstrates, but does not explain the glee that Islamic culture displays towards destruction of any infidel accomplishment. That Islam rewards such behavior only validates that it has not progressed from its seventh century origin.