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The five-minute video shows a group of bearded men inside the Mosul Museum using hammers and drills to destroy several large statues, which are then shown chipped and in pieces. The video then shows a black-clad man at a nearby archaeological site inside Mosul, drilling through and destroying a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 7th century B.C.

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“Stop saying these words, they hurt,” a Toronto imam, Hamid Slimi, urged the federal government at a recent conference. He’s the former chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams, currently at work on a global campaign, Muslim Messengers of Peace.

Everyone can sympathize with law-abiding, peace-loving Muslims when they feel accused by implication of atrocities committed far away by people with whom they have no real connection except their religion. But the connection is not as distant as they might like to think.

Recently ISIS has brought further disgrace on itself by adding vandalism to its atrocities. In Mosul, Iraq, its followers burned 8,000 books they found in libraries. “These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,” according to one ISIS soldier on the scene. “So they will be burned.”

ISIS believes in exhibiting evidence of its ability to obey passages in the Koran literally and thus purify the world. Piles of books were burned in the streets, proving to everyone the spiritually powerful work ISIS does. And Islamic State soldiers used an electric drill to attack a major archaeological site, the huge sculpture of a mythical beast at the Nergal Gate at Nineveh. Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraq parliament’s security committee, said that ISIS “considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies.”