Dy-No-Mite!

An interesting recent news story reports that a couple of ancient statues dating back to the Hittite Empire (approximately the 2nd millennium B.C.) of life-sized lions were discovered in Turkey. Aside from other interesting details to the story, what caught my Hesperado eye was this part: 

The story of the discovery of the massive lions began in 2001...

The Karakiz lion was found dynamited in two, likely in the mistaken belief that it contained hidden treasure. 

["likely" means you don't know, you're just guessing this must be the motive -- I mean in a country full of Muslims, there couldn't possibly be another motive for destroying the artifacts of another culture, right...?]

"There's this belief that monuments like this contain treasure," said Summers, explaining that the dynamiting of monuments is a problem in Turkey. "It makes the Turkish newspapers every month or so." 

The second lion, found to the northeast of the village, had also been split in two. As a result of this destruction both lion sculptures, which originally were paired with another, now mainly have one lion intact. The danger of new looting loomed over the researchers while they went about their work. 

In the summer of 2008 evidence of "fresh treasure hunting" was found at the ancient quarry along with damage to a drum-shaped rock that, in antiquity, was in the process of being carved. 

Let's see...  Take the Islamic doctrine of jahiliyyah (i.e., the destructive contempt for any other culture that preceded the glorious revelation given to Mohammed); mix it with the actual destruction, using dynamite, by Muslims (with Saudi and Pakistan engineers helping out, by the way) of ancient Buddhist Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan in 2001; add a dash of revivalist Muslims in the Maldives smashing statues in their National Museum in February of this year; throw in another pinch of a glimpse into the breadth and depth of the problem of Muslims vandalizing the cultural artifacts of other cultures; leaven in this story of general Islamic destruction of cultural artifiacts with Muslims in Mali putting it into practice; sift in the fact that six years ago, the two top Islamic scholars of the Sunni world based in Egypt, Ali Gomaa and Sheikh Qaradawi, issued fatwas against statues calling them haram (forbidden) "as long as they symbolise living entities such as human beings and animals" leading some in Egypt to genuinely worry that the ancient Egyptian artifacts -- including temples pyramids and the Sphinx -- could be blown up in terror attacks following these fatwas; blend in a half cup of the fact that the recent "Arab Spring" in Egypt has freed up pent-up Islamic calls to destroy the pre-Islamic Egyptian heritage of ancient archeology; and, finally, spoon in the fact that Turkey is predominantly Muslim and has been becoming increasingly Islamic in the last decade thanks to a concerted process there by Prime Minister Erdogan and others to undo the decades of secularization laid down by modern Turkey's founder, Ataturk...

And now, after our fruitcake has fnished baking, would we so glibly assume -- as do those Turkish spokesmen quoted in that article we cited at the top -- that the destruction, of the two Hittite lions in Turkey, using dynamite and other means, along with all the other "vandalism" of other artifacts which the article indicates seems to be quite an ongoing problem for Turkish archeologists, is merely due to "looters" doing their dirty work merely for the universal human sin of greed?  

Or could another motive be afoot here?  You know, that very widespread motive of pathological fanaticism which nearly the entire West with its collective head in the sand persists in ignoring: the Islamic motive -- to, among many other pernicious things, efface all traces of the interesting glory of past epochs and other cultures which flourished blithely without Mohammed and his deranged Koran.