NEXT month, the Temple of Baal will come to Times Square. Reproductions of the 50-foot arch that formed the temple’s entrance are to be installed in New York and in London, a tribute to the 2,000-year-old structure that the Islamic State destroyed last year in the Syrian town of Palmyra. The group’s rampage through Palmyra, a city that reached its peak in the second and third century A.D., enraged the world, spurring scholars and conservationists into action. Numerous nongovernmental organizations are now cataloging and mapping damaged cultural heritage sites in the region.
It will be uncanny and thrilling to see this arch from an ancient desert civilization set against the bright lights of New York. Unfortunately, facsimiles can achieve only so much. Denuded of people, stripped of the rich social contexts in which they were once embedded, antiquities appear just as evidence of the grandeur of the past, the accomplishments of another place in another time. But what did these assemblages of stone mean to the modern Iraqis and Syrians who lived with them?
For Salam al-Kuntar, a Syrian archaeologist who works at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the loss of the Temple of Baal was deeply personal. “I have a special love for Palmyra because the Temple of Baal is where my mother was born,” she said.
Ms. Kuntar’s grandfather was a policeman in Palmyra when its Roman-era ruins were inhabited. Well into the 20th century, generations of Palmyrenes made their homes in the shade of millenniums-old columns. The locals taught Ms. Kuntar’s grandmother — who was a young bride when she arrived in Palmyra — how to cook and how to bake bread.
Her daughter was among the last generation born inside the ancient city. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, French colonial authorities cleared the area of its inhabitants and dismantled their mud-brick house. That paved the way for the archaeological exploration and preservation of the site, but it also definitively ended ancient Palmyra’s habitation as well as the use of the Temple of Baal, which over the centuries had transformed into a Byzantine church, then a mosque, before eventually becoming part of the village where Ms. Kuntar’s mother was born.
A picture taken in March 2014 shows the iconic arched gate in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. The Islamic State destroyed it in 2015. CreditJoseph Eid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
http://nunezreport.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-temple-of-baal-will-come-to-times.html
Why New York? Why the US period? Of all the places on earth,NY.
Do the Syrians or New Yorkers have any say as to the removal and erection of this Temple?
People of NY ought to be angry that this devilish temple will be erected.
If this is not a slap in the face to our culture of Christianity, I don’t know what is.
Think joo york, Katie. War spoils on parade?
An arrogant and vulgar parade but would you expect anything different?
“It will be uncanny and thrilling to see this arch from an ancient desert civilization set against the bright lights of New York.”
Uncanny and thrilling? How about “the stupidest goddamn thing Times Square has ever seen”?
Really…. go look at a picture of Times Sq., and then imagine how ridiculously out-of-place this thing would look in the middle of it.
One problem with Jews is that their only concept of “good taste” ends at their mouths.
I wonder if they will be having live child sacrifices too? After all that was the only purpose for the Temple of Baal…
Gee why don’t they just build a “replica” of the Tower of Babel as well? After all, Long Island has a town named after it, Babylon?
Oh, I forgot, the European Union building already looks like it, so why build another one…
Oh joy. Let’s all just resurrect a statue of Satan and put it on the White House lawn. We’ll even drape this flag over it:
Watch at the 0:45 sec mark.
I mean that’s all there is to it.
What once was a dark comedy is now a horrifying reality.
It’s Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild.
THIS is what they’re embracing…
“Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants — men and women alike — would engage in bisexual orgies. The ritual of convenience was intended to produce economic prosperity by prompting Baal to bring rain for the fertility of “mother earth.”
The natural consequences of such behavior — pregnancy and childbirth — and the associated financial burdens of “unplanned parenthood” were easily offset. One could either choose to engage in homosexual conduct or — with child sacrifice available on demand — could simply take part in another fertility ceremony to “terminate” the unwanted child.
Modern liberalism deviates little from its ancient predecessor. While its macabre rituals have been sanitized with flowery and euphemistic terms of art, its core tenets and practices remain eerily similar. The worship of “fertility” has been replaced with worship of “reproductive freedom” or “choice.” Child sacrifice via burnt offering has been updated, ever so slightly, to become child sacrifice by way of abortion. The ritualistic promotion, practice and celebration of both heterosexual and homosexual immorality and promiscuity have been carefully whitewashed — yet wholeheartedly embraced — by the cults of radical feminism, militant “gay rights” and “comprehensive sex education.” And, the pantheistic worship of “mother earth” has been substituted — in name only — for radical environmentalism.”
Sick to the core!!!