The aged antiquities scholar Khaled Asaad had worked at this UN
World Heritage Site for over 50 years, looking after a historic heritage
of all humankind. His family reports that the "Islamic State"
cutthroats hacked off his head, and hung up his decapitated body as a
ghoulish threat to anyone who runs afoul of their deranged intolerance
for everything outside their stunted ideology.
He was 82 years
old. Too bad that after a life's work, he had to see the looming
destruction of the concrete evidence of the existence of a prior
civilization. Ruins like these provide a window into the past, making us
aware of the continuity of our species in time and connecting us
mentally with that which went before.
But to ISIS, preserving any evidence of the past such as this is "idolatrous," and thus worthy of death and destruction.
These murderous scum need to be exterminated.
The
U.S. must tell Turkey in no uncertain terms to stop bombing Kurds or be
kicked out of NATO. And the U.S. needs to back the Kurds, who so far
are the most committed by far to fighting back against the Islamofascist
barbarians. (The Iraqi "army," hundreds of thousands strong, were
abandoned by their officers and ran away in the face of a few thousand
terrorists, who seized thousands of U.S.-supplied military vehicles, and
weapons and ordnance in Iraq.)
It's true enough that the mess
in Iraq is a direct result of the U.S. invasion of 2003. Just as the
rise of Al-Qaeda and the conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban were
direct results of the U.S. jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
in the 1980s. (Brought to you by James Earl Carter, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, the CIA, and the loathsome Pakistanis and
Saudis.) Since the U.S. wrecked Iraq, one can argue that the U.S. has a
political and moral responsibility to not just walk away but to stay the
course and retake the territory ISIS has seized in Iraq and Syria. This
is significantly worse than the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
If
Iraq needs to be divided into two or three new countries or a loose
federation- which I think is nearly inevitable- so be it. Too bad if
Turkey doesn't like it.
["Isis beheads elderly chief of antiquities in ancient Syrian city, official says," guardian (UK), August 18, 2015.]
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