The Baalshamin Temple and ISIS’ war on History,ISIS truly is the scourge of our times, a barba

The Baalshamin Temple and ISIS’ war on History,ISIS truly is the scourge of our times, a barbaric terrorist state that gleefully tortures and kills anyone who doesn’t conform to their strict religious beliefs.  Many peoples living in Iraq and Syria are marked for death simply because their existence is offensive to the Islamic State.  Like most strict ideological regimes, ISIS’ is also conducting a campaign to destroy the past, and unfortunately the Middle East is a great center of ancient history and culture. Earlier in the year ISIS fanatics stormed a museum in Mosul, smashing all of the artifacts and ancient relics housed there, many of which were over 4,000 years old.  Of course in that instance the joke was on ISIS, as all the artifacts had been replaced by plaster and concrete fakes, the real artifacts were evacuated by the Iraqi Government and are being held in a secret location. Others have not been so lucky, as artifacts all over Syria and Iraq are destroyed as part of ISIS war on history.  Even Muslim sites are not safe..  Dozens of mosques have been demolished by ISIS because they contained medieval Islamic artifacts or the tombs of Islamic saints.  To ISIS, the veneration of such things is idolatry, and must be stamped out.One of the most recent sites to suffer the wrath of ISIS was the ancient temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, Syria.  Constructed in 115 AD the temple was dedicated to worship of the god Baal.  In 129 the temple became famous as a site visited by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who funded an expansion of the temple, and thus inscriptions on the temple are dedicated to the visit.  In the 5th century, the temple was converted into a Christian church,  and in 1980, the temple was named a UN World Heritage site.  On August 23rd, ISIS militants took over the site and murdered its caretaker, 82 year old retired archaeologist Khaled Al-Assaad after he refused to disclose the location of several hidden artifacts.  His body was then hung on display and mutilated.  The militants then rigged the temple with explosives, and blew it sky high. -- source link

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