Controlling the Past
Belmont Club has a long post on the implications behind the all-too-common Islamist practice of destroying other religions' historical and holy sites:
Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan...
The grave desecrations are an obvious illustration of Orwell's dictum that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Like the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, their effect is remove any recollection of a creed or way of life that may have preceded Wahabism. Yet it is one of Madigan's quotes that shows how it affects the present.
This article is a useful lens through which to examine the on-going destruction of Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount. The Islamic Wakf authority uses the pretense of "construction" in order to continually remove "debris" - debris that just happens to be rich with thousands of Jewish artifacts. You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to realize that this is nothing less than a well-planned attempt to obliterate the Jewish link to Jerusalem. The tactical goal may be to strengthen Arab claims to the city, but the sensibility that underlies it is typically Islamist - eradicate knowledge of a pre-Islamist past by destroying material artifacts. It is an explicit enactment of everything that Orwell feared - the destruction of history in order to pervert the future.
Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan...
The grave desecrations are an obvious illustration of Orwell's dictum that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Like the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, their effect is remove any recollection of a creed or way of life that may have preceded Wahabism. Yet it is one of Madigan's quotes that shows how it affects the present.
This article is a useful lens through which to examine the on-going destruction of Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount. The Islamic Wakf authority uses the pretense of "construction" in order to continually remove "debris" - debris that just happens to be rich with thousands of Jewish artifacts. You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to realize that this is nothing less than a well-planned attempt to obliterate the Jewish link to Jerusalem. The tactical goal may be to strengthen Arab claims to the city, but the sensibility that underlies it is typically Islamist - eradicate knowledge of a pre-Islamist past by destroying material artifacts. It is an explicit enactment of everything that Orwell feared - the destruction of history in order to pervert the future.
