The destruction of historic Iraqi artefacts by the barbarians of Daesh is a terrible crime. Daesh has a vast catalogue of horrors being ascribed to it, from brutal murder in ever more disgusting ways, genocide, enslavement of huge numbers of people, and many others, to which we now have to add this cultural nihilism. Iraq and the Fertile Crescent is the cradle of human civilisation, where mankind first moved from a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle, to become a settled civilisation that was able to start writing and counting, and became fully self aware.
For the vandals of Daesh to claim that all this is irrelevant to our lives is an outrage. They expose their narrow ignorance of their wider membership of the human race, and their actions in the museums of Iraq condemn them as much as their earlier and continuing mass enslavement of whole populations, genocide and murder of large numbers of unfortunate victims in ever more disgusting ways, and their gross and deliberate misreading of the tenets of genuine Islam. Surviving artefacts of the history of mankind are priceless and they need to be preserved. Far too much has already been lost through the accidents of history for anyone to deliberately seek to destroy them and consciously seek to promote ignorance of our past and expunge the records of human development. But these propaganda videos do not tell the whole story. There are well documented reports of a flood of ancient artefacts coming onto the markets, indicating that despite its rhetoric, Daesh is well aware of their value and is hypocritically selling what it finds.
It may be that some of the artefacts they have videoed themselves destroying were not genuine and museums do make replicas to show people what the past was like without exposing fragile survivals of early history to potential degradation. Nonetheless, the videos show Daesh’s need to wipe out human history, like their Taliban colleagues in Afghanistan who destroyed the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the Ansar Al Deen who wrecked the ancient shrines and university libraries in Timbuktu. They are deeply wrong.