http://english.alarabiya.net/article...12/249092.html

‘Destroy the idols,’ Egyptian jihadist calls for removal of Sphinx, Pyramids

Monday, 12 November 2012


By AL ARABIYA

An Egyptian jihad leader, with self-professed links to the Taliban, called for the “destruction of the Sphinx and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt,” drawing ties between the Egyptian relics and Buddha statues, local media reported this week.

Murgan Salem al-Gohary, an Islamist leader twice-sentenced under former President Hosni Mubarak for advocating violence, called on Muslims to remove such “idols.”

“All Muslims are charged with applying the teachings of Islam to remove such idols, as we did in Afghanistan when we destroyed the Buddha statues,” he said on Saturday during a television interview on an Egyptian private channel, widely watched by Egyptian and Arab audiences.

<script> jQuery('.contentMultimedia a').lightBox({ maxHeight: $(window).height()-200, maxWidth: $(window).width()-200 }); </script> “God ordered Prophet Mohammed to destroy idols,” he added. “When I was with the Taliban we destroyed the statue of Buddha, something the government failed to do.”

His comments came a day after thousands of ultraconservative Islamists gathered in Tahrir Square to call for the strict application of Sharia law in the new constitution...

http://middleeast.about.com/od/afgha...a/me080910.htm

The Buddha Statues of Bamiyan, Afghanistan

In 2001, The Taliban Demolished 1,500 Years of History and Art

...
Beginning in 1994, the Hazara’s new enemies were the Taliban, whose perverse version of Sunni Islam doesn’t recognize Shiites as Muslims; worse: the Taliban resented the relative freedoms that Shiite Hazaras afforded women, who took part in the Bamiyan Valley’s politics, its militias and social enterprises. The Taliban’s enmity toward the Hazara of Bamiyan was immediately brutal.

The Taliban vs. the Statues

In 1998, a Taliban commander fired grenades at the smaller statue, knocking off its upper half. The Taliban bombed the mountain above the statues frequently, cracking the niches that held the statues and damaging the colossi further. By winter 2001, pleas were raining down on the Taliban from around the world to spare the statues. Pleaders included the Buddhist Thai monarchy and Sri Lanka, itself home to a set of giant Buddha statues. “Unesco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a leading Islamic scholar in Cairo were also among those begging the Taliban not to carry out their threat to the Bamiyan statues and other Buddha images in museums across the country,” wrote Barbara Crossette in The New York Times.
To no avail.


On Feb. 26, 2001, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that “these idols have been gods of the infidels” and ordered them destroyed. By early March, the statues were rubble. ...