"Suffice to say that, if the tables were turned and Hezbollah had been the one psychotically eradicating 5,000 years of cultural heritage and "collective humanity", western audiences would be hearing a lot more about the depravity of it all." Belen Fernandez

Debris covers ancient stone pillar bases near the archaeological site of the Roman Baths in Tyre, south Lebanon, a day after Israeli air strikes on the city, on 8 June 2026 (AFP/Kawnat Haju)

Israel and the US are erasing Iran and Lebanon's ancient heritage

Belen Fernandez

21 June 2026 

 

The Taliban's 2001 bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas was condemned worldwide, but the US and Israel's destruction of Tyre's ruins and other ancient sites barely registers

 

 In early 2001, the Taliban blew up two giant Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, which dated from the sixth century.

The world erupted in outrage at the destruction of cultural heritage, and western media engaged in handwringing over the loss of statues that most people presumably had not known existed in the first place but were nonetheless symbolic of our "collective humanity".

Philip T Reeker, deputy spokesman for the State Department of the United States, issued a press statement declaring the US to be "distressed and baffled" by the Taliban's decision to demolish the Buddhas and other ancient artefacts: "Deliberate destruction of statues and sculpture held as sacred by peoples of different faiths is incomprehensible."

Of course, when the US launched the so-called "war on terror" later that same year and undertook to bomb Afghanistan to smithereens, there was no similar distress over the "deliberate destruction" or the mass slaughter of "peoples of different faiths".

But such hypocrisy is part and parcel of an imperial mindset predicated on orientalist dehumanisation, selective cultural concern and the weaponisation of "heritage".

While the prevailing Bamiyan narrative was that the Taliban had done away with the Buddhas because they were idolatrous, The New York Times presented a slightly different version of events in an article published on 19 March 2001.

The article quoted Taliban envoy Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, who claimed that the destruction had instead been ordered by a council of religious scholars enraged by European and other foreign offers of money to preserve the statues – but not to assist a million Afghans facing starvation.

The scholars had been "so angry" at the misplaced priorities, the envoy told the outlet, that "they said, 'If you are destroying our future with economic sanctions, you can't care about our heritage.' And so they decided that these statues must be destroyed".

War on civilisation

Fast forward a quarter of a century to the 2026 war on Iran by the US and its genocidal buddy Israel, and the Bamiyan Buddha hypocrisy once again comes to mind. Iran, after all, is home to a lot of cultural heritage and ancient sites, many of which have been damaged in the months-long assault.

But because it's Us and not Them doing the destroying, no one is terribly up in arms over the loss of history - to say nothing of the vast loss of life. In one of the war's opening salvos, a US cruise missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab killed more than 175 people, most of them schoolgirls... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-and-us-are-erasing-iran-and-lebanons-ancient-heritage 

  [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]