MORE DESTRUCTION IN PALMYRA: NO LONGER IDEOLOGICAL?
" ... their acts … are no longer ideologically driven because they are now blowing up buildings with no religious meaning," Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syrian antiquities chief on Isis’ blowing up of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra.
But do we understand ISIS’s ideology? It comprises, surely, the destruction of places of worship, even Islamic ones. But it does not stop there. Their enemy, I believe, is the past, or more precisely anything that might remind people that there are alternatives to the emptiness they offer. So the grander, the more beautiful, the more powerful a structure is, the greater the need to destroy it.
" ... their acts … are no longer ideologically driven because they are now blowing up buildings with no religious meaning," Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syrian antiquities chief on Isis’ blowing up of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra.
But do we understand ISIS’s ideology? It comprises, surely, the destruction of places of worship, even Islamic ones. But it does not stop there. Their enemy, I believe, is the past, or more precisely anything that might remind people that there are alternatives to the emptiness they offer. So the grander, the more beautiful, the more powerful a structure is, the greater the need to destroy it.
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