The "beautiful men" destroying history in Iraq

The human rights group "Cage" didn't make many friends when one of their spokesmen described the man now known as "Jihadi John" as a "beautiful man". Turns out he didn't really know him, but that was the line they decided to take. Seems like we now need to redefine that term in light of what Emwhasi was actually getting up to.


The Cage spokesman also suggested that if he had gone bad then we must look to MI5 for the reason, as it was them who pushed him over the edge with their monitoring and harassment. Now here I have a certain sympathy with both sides. British citizens have a right to their views, however unpleasant they may be, though they don't have the right to blow us up because they disapprove of our government's foreign policy. I also feel for MI5, who are clearly out of their depth when it comes to assessing and monitoring threats. To me, stopping people in the street and asking them what they think about 9/11 or 7/7 is not necessarily the best way of going about it, though apparently that is exactly what they did.


Today we have heard more about what Jihadi John and his co-religionists have been doing in Iraq: bulldozing the ancient site of Nimrud in northern Iraq. Of course this is not new. In 2009 the Taliban dynamited the giant Buddhas in the Bamyam valley in Afghanistan, because they, er, weren't Islamic. Same thing in Nimrud. This site was built thousands of years before Mohammed, peace be upon him, was ever thought of. No matter. If they don't approve- it gets blown up. Sounds like if they came over here they would flatten Stonehenge, which is a spiritual site which pre-dates Islam and therefore should be destroyed, as should the west front of Wells cathedral. Come to think of it, we have had our own, homegrown cultural vandals in the shape of the puritans who laboured long and hard to destroy anything they didn't approve of. There was man they called "Stone-killer Robinson" who made it his business to topple all the stones in the great Avebury Stone circle in the 17th century. Fortunately there are several hundred of them and he never achieved his goal, though dozens of stones are now missing or buried deep in the ground, with only concrete markers indicating where they once stood.


These ancient sites do not belong to the countries where they are found: they belong to the world, and when they are destroyed they represent a crime against the entire world, and it is for this reason the devils of ISIS stand condemned in the court of public decency everywhere where history is cherished.