Recreation of Statue Destroyed by ISIS Denounced by Jewish and Christian Extremists

From the website of the Dubai Future Foundation:

The UAE has officially inaugurated the Digital Archaeology Exhibition “The Spirit in the Stone” in the United Nations’ headquarters in New York City. The pioneering initiative saw the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) partner up with the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations and the Institute of Digital Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

The project seeks to preserve the cultural heritage and archaeological sites of the region – especially those threatened with destruction or vandalism – by documenting them and then replicating them using 3D-printing technology. At the inauguration event, the Foundation unveiled a newly created, with 3D technology, replica of the rare Statue of Athena, which joins the replica of Palmyra’s historic Arch of Triumph, the gateway to the ancient Syrian city that was destroyed by ISIS terrorists.

Nothing can adequately replace the original antiquities destroyed by the Islamic fundamentalists, but this takes us as far as we can in safeguarding and curating the memory of what has been irrevocably lost. It’s also an encouraging sign that Muslim governments are committed to the historical preservation of the region’s pre-Islamic heritage.

However, not everyone is happy – but the complaints are coming in from Jewish and Christian extremists rather than Islamic militants. A religious website called Breaking Israel News reports:

Rabbi Elad Dokow, the head rabbi and lecturer at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology, was not surprised that the United Nations would feature a display of pagan symbols.

“There is currently an unmistakeable rise of paganism and idol worship in the world, more than any other religion, and it is naive to believe this display is disconnected from this phenomenon,” Rabbi Dokow told Breaking Israel News. “Paganism creates the ability for each man to create his own truth, as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, which state that there is an objective truth man must abide by. The UN, like paganism, is a place of subjective reality created by a vote.”

The article also tells us that:

It is also believed that the Greek goddess Athena was based on the earlier Mesopotamian goddess Ashera and was later incorporated into early Islam as al-L?t, worshipped in Saudi Arabia as the consort of Allah mentioned in the Koran. This would be consistent with the statue’s history at the site in Palmyra, which was used as a temple by the Mesopotamians, Romans, and Muslims in succession.

This is garbled. The notion that Athena must be “based on” a Mesopotamian goddess presumably derives from the out-dated assumption that we should look to historical information in the Bible for the origins of ancient religious phenomena – in fact, however, it would be more accurate to state that Athena and Ashera have a common derivation in a Cretan-Mycenaean goddess whose name is preserved on linear B tablets from Knossos as “a-ta-na- po-ti-na-ja”.

The second sentence is obviously meant to mock Islam by alluding to the “Satanic Verses” – a story in which Muhammad is said have been deceived by Satan into describing Lat (or Allat, “the Goddess”) and two other goddesses as “exalted”. However, this supposed message was quickly repudiated by Muhammad, so to say that Lat was “incorporated” into Islam is mischievous (although from the Bible it appears that Ashera was an ordinary part of Israelite religion until the goddess was purged from Israelite theology). Allat-Athena, as venerated at Palmyra, is a late combination. To suggest that the UAE project is motivated by “idol worship”, and that this is somehow derived from an element within Islam, is an absurdity.

Meanwhile, denunciations by Christian fundamentalists have been assembled by the conspiracy website WND, including a quote from WND editor Joseph Farah:

“Most people today don’t realize how much of a hold ancient pagan beliefs, practices and images still have on their lives,” said Joseph Farah, author of “The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians and the End of the Age.” “In fact, pagan values and traditions have never left us. Even Jews and Christians are impacted by them. And they are not innocent because the gods of paganism are actually demons, according to the Bible. It’s not something to be played with.

“The question confronting us right now is: Why would the United Nations be involved in resurrecting these occult images and icons of the past? Do they not understand what this represents – the false gods of child sacrifice and all kinds of abominations and perversions?”

Various self-styled “prophecy experts” and pastors concur: the article goes on to quote the likes of Jonathan Cahn (who famously predicted an economic crash for September 2015), Carl Gallups (a depraved Sandy Hook Truther who has explicitly mocked a grieving parent), Bill Cloud (blogged here) and WND‘s Joe Kovacs. According to Gallups:

“The Bible warns us that in the days before the return of Christ, there would be an unprecedented demonic outpouring,” Gallups told WND. “We are the first generation to live in the days of instantaneous communication and information technologies connecting the entire globe. The demonic have a stage like never before. And now the ‘gods’ are parading out their images, manipulating and using human agents to do so. The ‘gods are behind the ‘thrones’ of earthly powers. Satan is furious, he knows his time is short, as Revelation 12 says.”

There is some irony in seeing Christian fundamentalists in the USA superstitiously denouncing the activities of historians and art restorers as the work of the devil while an authoritarian middle-eastern state sponsors what is actually a commendable and enlightened educational project in the public interest.

I previously blogged on the reconstructed “Triumphal Arch” here. That project provoked similar responses, while an earlier plan to recreate the arch from Palmyra’s Temple of Baal prompted warnings that its erection in New York would create a Ghostbusters-style trans-dimensional portal.

2 Responses

  1. This is all VERY dangerous Richard. The SAFF has always maintained that historically mankind’s suffering has to a great deal been created by Monotheism. The idea that there is only one god and only one Truth.

    It was the two monolithic ‘world religions’ of Islam and Christianity which have kept mankind in the Dark Ages until the scientific enlightenment occurred and produced a historically temporary lull in proceedings.

    The concept of One God-One Truth implicitly holds within it that all other creeds of whatever kind are therefore counterfeit and, in the eyes of the churchmen of monotheism, must be eradicated as harbingers of evil. It is this evil mental construct which has created intolerance and promoted the deaths of billions of people throughout history.

    Although paganism is often portrayed by Xists as a ‘cult’ it is in fact the first and most universal religion which evolved independently all around the globe. Therefore, as Paganism is built upon empirical and personal relationships with Nature and one’s surroundings (in order to make sense of one’s world) each pagan belief has within it the humanity which created it. It is therefore a UNIVERSAL religion. The pagan gods are symbols of the perfected human nature.

    Beginning originally with reverence for one’s own Ancestors / Tribe, when pagan societies began to evolve they deified SYMBOLS of human perfection TO WHICH THEY COULD ASPIRE (that is, Father and Mother gods who had ‘families’ each of whom portrayed a good or negative aspect of human nature. )

    Before monotheism, when pagans conquered other states and countries they therefore naturally found local gods which reflected their own and were able to meld the pagan gods and evolve them throughout thousands of years. This continued into Judaism and early Christianity. The Celtic Bridgit for instance becoming the template for the Christian Virgin Mary. Similarly ALL aspects of early Christianity are built upon pagan ideals. The crucified Christ for instance is a direct copy of the ancient Greek myth of Dionysus.

    The plethora of pagan symbols and ideas woven into early Christianity suffused Catholicism and were seized upon by Protestant dissenters as ‘proof’ of the evil within the Vatican and why it had to be replaced.

    Cromwell’s Puritanism and the English Civil war was a direct result of the attempt to rid Christianity of what hyper-sensitive religious zealots considered to be Pagan idolatry. That’s why one of the first things Cromwell did when he got into power was to ban Christmas (because 90% of Christmas [ the enjoyable parts] are directly sourced from and a replication of pagan ceremonies and festivities. )

    Whenever religious bigots seek to grasp power for their sectarian purposes they will try to create a scapegoat. In 1990 the scapegoat was promulgating a belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse of Children (which every decent person would find abominable) even though it didn’t actually exist.

    Once they had convinced the public about that falsity they moved on to exaggerating the incidence of child pornography. After this they progressed into false claims about a so-called epidemic of sexual abuse in adults and are trying to link the abhorrence of child pornography with ordinary pornography by consenting adults in order to censor and suppress the healthy sexuality of adults in an attempt to create a puritanism which recreates the historical control they had over the ordinary populace.

    Of course, as Paganism is a life-loving religion and sexuality is seen as a natural function which perpetuates the Tribe , the permissive nature of Paganism is therefore anathema to monotheists.

    The instigation of extremist religious tenets can be seen not only in the West but, of course, in the fundamentalist sharia laws of Islam. These two monotheistic religions cannot possibly ever co-exist and so conflict ensues. Whenever this has happened previously the hyper-aggression is reflected into hatred against each other as defined as ‘pagans’ (purported to mean – anyone who isn’t a fully-fledged baptised church-going Christian). Then commences a search for ‘iindicators’ usually based on mediaeval and supernatural symptoms, and beliefs backed up by twisting history to support nonsensical views as Richard has outlined above.

    These accusations about society being undermined by godless pagans is simply an extension of the Satanic Ritual Child Abuse Myth which the SAFF has been warning about for the past 30 years. The people who were best able to resist this, the Media, with it’s promotion of leading-edge art and writing, have of course been a calculated target of the fundies. Which is why almost every healthy male in the entertainment industry has been accused of abusing someone or other in the past year.

    It is why age-old evil stereotypes which have literally killed millions (NWO myth and the Blood Libel) have been rekindled in the past few years. After all every red-neck WASP knows the Jews control Hollywood and that it is their strategy to undermine godly society using sexual deviancy and kill and eat Christian babies!

    Can future unnecessary deaths be avoided? NO! The media is a festering sore on society which thrives like all parasites, upon setting one part of society against another (witness the Brexit farce) and so exacerbates these divides instead of healing them.

    Now that Trump is in power he keeps feeding these extremists (Christian and Islamic) with pivot-points which further destabilise and establish these hatreds. His move to recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital is a clear sop to his WASP supporters as it is one of the signs of the Tribulations picked out in the Bible.

    The SAFF has been noting and warning the media and politicians and other commentators about this danger for three decades yet no-one has had the insight or guts to acknowledge it until it has now gained unstoppable traction and momentum.

    They who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

    John Freedom

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