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There is no morality to be found in religions and their scriptures. It is a human being who interprets the words and it is human being that makes the decision to x or y – no religious magic involved. So what is happening in Palmyra with ISIS is a testament to how religion enables truly shitty human behaviour.
“ISIS militants have blown up two ancient tombs they consider sacrilegious in Palmyra, a 2,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site in central Syria, the ultra hardline Sunni Muslim group said on Tuesday.
The report was the first of any damage being done by the militants to buildings in Palmyra since they seized control of the city, also known as Tadmur, in May. Syrian forces have bombed the city, and the militants camped within it, since then.”
Destroying world history because someone interpreted the tombs to be sacrilegious. This is some zany shit we are dealing with here – the lesson here is quite clear, and quite obvious: When the religious are in charge all bets are off and nothing is safe, not even history from the perverse ideals of radical religious thought.
Boiling down all the hoo-haa we can see that, at least in the case of ISIS, the religious piece is there for the sole reason of keeping people in line and most definitely not thinking for themselves. What reason can be supplied for destroying tombs that isn’t irrational?
Of course, destroying archaeological, is small potatoes in comparison with the recent acts of violence in France and Tunisia. How much more evidence is required before the West will decisively act and put an end to ISIS and their extremism?
Who could ask for anything more. A great beach, a good discotheque and an opportunity for martyrdom for the win!
Over a million tourists from around the world visit Sousse, Tunisia every year. And, while the coastal city boasts pristine beaches and world class hotels, recently, hordes of local young men have been leaving fun and sun behind them in favor of joining ISIS in Syria.
The chickens of western colonialism are coming home to roost.
Excerpt from “The Guns of August” – by Matthew Stevenson via Counterpunch
“Doubts about the sincerity of Americans in Iraq probably began when President Ronald Reagan dispatched his former national security advisor Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane to Tehran in 1986 with a cake and a Bible and proposed swapping arms for American hostages in Lebanon.
Until that moment, in the long war between Iran and Iraq, Saddam was our man, a bulwark against Shiite expansion in the Gulf, a non-fundamental (i.e., someone not adverse to girls or gin) Muslim willing to do the West’s bidding.
Bud’s cake and Bible alerted Saddam to the fickleness of Western support, and he repaid the favor in 1990 when he invaded Kuwait and let his troops drive all those looted Mercedes back to Baghdad.
The Iraqi occupation of Kuwait led to the first Gulf War and Saddam’s alleged death threat against President George H.W. Bush, cited in 2003 when his son, President George W. Bush, decided to overthrow Saddam’s regime.
Driving Saddam into a hole near Tikrit (where he was captured and later hanged) wasn’t the hard part of the blitzkrieg. The biggest challenge was deciding who should run Iraq once Saddam was swinging from the gallows.
Remembering the Mesopotamia, Churchill had faced the same conundrum in 1921, and at the Cairo Conference he went with an invented, cereal-box monarchy, an air campaign to subdue rebels, and a cadre of loyal Sunnis to keep the majority Shiite population on their knees.
In one form or another, that unholy coalition lasted until the 2003 American invasion, when the Bush administration decided to turn the country over to the Shiite majority.
Never mind that such a government would align Iraq more closely with Antichrists in Tehran.
* * *
By suppressing the Sunnis, the U.S. hoped to keep al-Qaida sympathizers in Iraq away from the oil fields. Under this partition, Shiites would get the government, the U.S. would get the oil, and Sunnis, especially those with Osama bin Laden posters on their kitchen walls, would get the shaft.
The problem with this division of Iraqi spoils is that it required the Bush administration to disband the Iraqi army and Saddam’s Baathist party infrastructure, two centers of power not solely identified with either Sunni or Shiite interests.
At the same time (mid-2000s) the U.S. army withdrew its forces into frontier stockades. Iraq fell into anarchy until Gen. David Petraeus took time out from his amorous counter-insurgencies and paid Sunni warlords, especially in western Iraq, some $300 million to fight on the American side.
The rent-an-army surge worked until the Obama administration stopped payment on the Petraeus incentive compensation and left it to the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to explain to the opposition the fine print of the American victory, what in the Vietnam War President Nixon called “peace with honor.”
Speaking of peace with honour; the IS is bringing neither to the region as this Vice News clip illustrates.
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