There are some things that definitely ‘tick the box’ when it comes to defining what represents the core physical, moral and intellectual barbarism that is Islam. The Islamic oppression of women, and of religious, cultural and sexual minorities and free thinkers, quite obviously deserve to be to be included on any list of Islamic ‘civilisation fails’. However many people would also put the burning and destroying of libraries, because Islamic clerics disagree with what is in them, on that list of shameful Islamic barbarities as well.
Ancient documents in a Malian Library in Timbuktu, a town twinned with Britain’s ‘Town of Books’, Hay on Wye, have been destroyed. They were destroyed when Islamic fighters attacked the Ahmed Barbar Institute where the ancient documents, some going back to the 13th Century CE were kept, according to a report in the Israeli news source Arutz Sheva.
The Arutz Sheva report said that:
“The radical Islamist terrorists attempting to overthrow the Malian government torched the South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute where the documents were kept as they fled the ancient city of Timbuktu, Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse told reporters Monday.
The library, which contained thousands of priceless manuscripts from ancient times, was put to the torch as the rebels fled the French and Malian troops who were closing in on the Saharan city.
At least one of the manuscripts, buried beneath the sand or in cave for centuries in wooden trunks and boxes, was written in Hebrew. Another was written in Turkish, according to Seydo Traore, a researcher at the institute where the manuscripts were kept.
Most were written in Arabic, and some were written in African languages. They covered women’s rights, medicine, music, poetry, geography, history, religion and even astronomy, dating as far back as the year 1204. Researchers had managed to digitize only a small percentage of the manuscripts.
“The rebels set fire to the newly-built Ahmed Baba Institute, built by the South Africans,” lamented Cisse, who said in a telephone call to The Guardian that he heard about the destruction from his communications director, who had travelled south from Bamako a day earlier.
Cisse said that on Saturday the Al Qaeda-linked terrorists had shot to death a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military forces. They also set fire to the governor’s office and the town hall, as well as the two museum buildings where the manuscripts were being kept.”
Is there anything that sums up the vile intellectual backwardness and emptiness that Islam represents more than destroying a library because it contains within it views that are counter to that of Islam? It is no different from the book burning that went on in pre war Nazi Germany and we all know how that ended up. The Malian library destroyers represent a fascistic political and religious current that cannot co exist with any view other than its own.
We in free societies should see these Malian library burnings as a warning for the future. We should be aware that what the followers of Islam do in Mali today they could also do in London, or Paris or Stockholm tomorrow. The 19th Century German writer Henrich Heine once said that ‘those that burn books will end up burning human beings’. Heine’s words came tragically true long after his death, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The regime that burned books did end up burning people, and so will Islam unless it is fought. Islam as an ideology is no different from Nazism, it has the same single-minded hatred of ‘the other’, the dismissal of all views outside the core beliefs and the belief that it is divinely mandated to control the world.
Islam desires conquest, it desires to wipe out ideas and people that disagree with Islam. Despite the honeyed words of Islamic apologists, Islam is not tolerant of others beliefs and because of that needs to be seen as the enemy of freedom that it so often proves itself to be.
The democratic world needs to wake up and see the Malian library burnings for what they are, which is a fair representation of an ideology that hates all that which is not of itself. If we don’t stand up against aggressive Islam today, the consequences for the future will be terrible. It could be the British Library in flames tomorrow, and the British people enslaved the day after that.
Islam is not peace, Islam is oppression, people should never ever forget that, how could we when there are just too many examples of such oppression to come to any other conclusion.
Link
Report on burning of Malian library in Arutz Sheva news source
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/164659#.UQdp7L_Zbbw
Wiki on Heinrich Heine
