Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has a weird niche of freaking out over reproductions of ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS -- but downplaying that fact and ludicrously portraying it as a revival of pagan worship. That freakout and downplaying continues over the latest project, the reconstruction of a lion statue ISIS destroyed when it invaded Palmyra, Syria (where ISIS also destroyed an ancient temple, and whose arch reproduction sent WND on its original freakout).
A Jan. 2 WND article by Bob Unruh complains that "a third project is nearing completion, and it again has a theme of pagan gods," though he only describes the project at first as "a statue of a lion." He eventually identifies it as the Lion of al-Lat, but even he can't figure out just how pagan it is, conceding that "There are several trains of thought regarding al-Lat.
Unruh mentions only in passing that the statue was "damaged by ISIS," but he doesn't admit that the reproduction was completed three months ago, meaning Unruh is a little late to this story. Instead, he quotes a Daniel Ashur, member of Israel's self-proclaimed Sanhedrin -- whose extremism WND has previously praised -- to freak out about the "alarming series of events, meaning the statue's reconstruction. He apparently did not consider ISIS' wanton destruction of a priceless piece of antiquity to be alarming.
Because UNESCO helped fund the restoration, Unruh uncritically quoted Ashur ranting that the restortation was some sort of anti-Israel New World Order maneuver, despite the fact that the statue has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel:
“The entire mission of the organization is to blur the differences between the nations in order to bring them all under one roof and one authority in a New World Order,” he said. “The truth is, as the Bible says, there are 70 distinct nations. The U.N. believes they can create nations out of thin air. Once they do that, they can say that there are many gods, even ones you can create by 3-D printing.”
He pointed out the U.N.’s long-standing and dominant anti-Israel bias. After all, it has voted to condemn the state of Israel more than all of the human rights offenders around the globe combined.
“Because Israel stands as proof of what a nation is and the concept of one God, the U.N. has a vendetta against Israel and is irrationally biased against us,” Rabbi Assur explained to BIN.
“They have a messianic vision of a unified government that will fix the world without God and without the Torah. This has always been the goal of idolatry, beginning with Egypt and continuing with the attempts of Rome and Greece to spread paganism across the world. Now we are seeing its modern manifestation.”
He warned: “The New World Order promotes that everything is one, genders are all the same, there are no borders between nations. They believe everything is one, except God.”
The fact that WND gives an uncritical platform to this kind of paranoid, fact-free ranting -- not to mention falsely reporting the motives behind these restorations and reconstructions, giving the unmistakable impression that it's on the side of ISIS in destroying priceless antiquties -- is one reason it's in deep financial trouble.
