Every year Jewish people read the Book of Jonah from the Old Testament during the Yom Kippur holiday – that was this past Saturday, and Jonah came to my mind when I was writing about the holiest day of the year for the Jews.
Jonah is my favorite biblical story, I was saddened to learn that ISIS, a radical Sunni Islam group blew up Jonah’s tomb with complete disregard to human heritage.
Left, right and center the militant group is imposing Sharia law and with that blowing up whatever holy sites it can find. Jonah’s tomb was bombed this past July.
Jonah is considered a biblical prophet. He was challenged by God to go from the port of Jaffa, sail up the sea and then travel to the city of Nineveh (now in present day Iraq) to ask the people to repent for their sins. Jonah, for the most part didn’t really want the job, as it seems, and spent a part of his journey inside the mouth of a whale. Even surviving that ordeal he still wasn’t running to Nineveh.
Blowing up Jonah’s tomb is like blowing up our collective past and future.
According to reports militants from Islamic State (known formerly and now commonly as ISIS) destroyed the Shrine of Yunus (Tomb of Jonah) Mosque in Mosul, Iraq on July 24. They also blew up the Biblical town of Nineveh.
At first residents were told that they were barred to enter there to pray. The militants laid down explosives and detonated the tomb. Not only are the ISIS savages destroying good people, they are ripping human history to shreds.
Video shows the destruction of Jonah’s tomb:
The tomb is thought to be the burial place of the Old Testament prophet who survived in the belly of a whale. Officials in Mosul said militants with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) planted explosives around the shrine and detonated them remotely, CNN reports.
The mosque that housed Jonah’s tomb as seen before the blast:
The mosque with Jonah’s tomb after it was destroyed:
The tomb was part of a Sunni mosque
Had the mosque been in a site of Sunni worship it might have been spared.
Jonah is an important figure for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, but the tomb was located inside a Shia Islam mosque, the Mosque of the Prophet Younis. ISIS likes to blow up Shia holy sites even if they are also fundamentally important to Islam.
UPDATE 2023
Driving Christians out of their territory and female genital manipulation are just another couple of past-times for ISIS when they are not beheading infidels – and it’s not limited to one terror group. Beheading people after the Palestinians associated with the Hamas attacked Israel. Two days before Palestinians beheaded a gay guy who was trying to immigrate to Canada. Who is going to stop this insanity?
