Friday 6 March 2015

The Cultural Delinquency of ISIL: Who Knew?

It turns out that ISIL, the latest and most exciting of states to join the comity of nations, really is a bit uncouth after all.  In an inexplicable turn of events, they have allowed their archaeological heritage to fall into disrepair! 
 'The militants continued to "defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity": [Iraqi officials are] calling for a UN Security Council meeting to discuss how to protect cultural heritage in Iraq'
A serious lapse - and so unexpected, coming as it does only days after ISIL successfully applied to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

However, the dispute is not thought to jeopardize their bid for the 2026 World Cup. 

Our environment correspondent adds:  They are falling down on the green side of policy too, deliberately setting fire to oil-wells which will do nothing for their CO2 emissions targets.  In 1991 Saddam Hussein had to be rapped over the knuckles for similar failings.  Greenpeace monitors are planning to inspect the sites next week, and intend to request high-level meetings with the ISIL Office of Climate Change to map an appropriate 'CO2 pathway' with them.

ND

6 comments:

Raedwald said...

Ah Nick - some things are beyond Irony! I met with Tam Dalyell at the start of the Iraq war, he wearing his hat at Chair of the all-party Parliamentary archaeology group. A battalion of US tanks had laagered on the site on an ancient Babylonian city, then visible only as the slightest of rises in an otherwise pancake flat plain, but a thousand years of mud-brick habitation, cuneiform tablets, sherds and irreplaceable human history in eighteen inches of untouched dirt.

An Abrams tank snuggles its hull down into loose material by churning the ground with alternate tracks in forward and reverse.

The septics destroyed every useful trace of this unexplored resource for 'operational imperatives' - and yes, they had been told what it was.

I suspect ISIL may lack the means to inflict so deep a damage to human heritage as our best allies.

Nick Drew said...

it's even worse than we thought:

"The head of the UN's cultural agency condemned the 'systematic' destruction in Iraq as a 'war crime'"

good to know they have a sense of proportion

I swear the Beeb's piece on this - both on the web and on air - was longer than some of their pieces on ISIL's destruction of, errr human beings

andrew said...


A few mud huts in Mesopotamia?

It's nearer to home that we should be looking.

...i think you will find that the mud huts in the uk were removed due to planning and elf and safety issues.

whereas the ones in NZ are now a tourist attraction.

Bill Quango MP said...

Our heritage was wood based.
Wood being plentiful in these isles.

But wood left out in the damp and wet British Isles for 2000 years doesn't leave much to examine.

Roman brick and Norman stone. That's our heritage.

Nick Drew said...

doesn't leave much to examine

post-holes!

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