Egypt’s Great Pyramids (photo credit: Wikipedia)

An Egyptian jihadi leader is calling for the destruction of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, that is, the Great Pyramids. Also on his target: the Great Sphinx. Those historical heritage sites are situated in Giza, just outside Cairo, Egypt’s capital.

The call was made Saturday night on a popular program on Egypt’s Dream TV by jihadist Murgan Salem al-Gohary who says he participated in the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.

Egypt Independent reveals more about Gohary and his familiarity with the destruction of world heritage sites:

Gohary, 50, is well-known in Egypt for his advocacy of violence. He was sentenced twice under former President Hosni Mubarak, one of the two sentences being life imprisonment. He subsequently fled Egypt to Afghanistan, where he was badly injured in the American invasion. In 2007, he traveled from Pakistan to Syria, which then handed him over to Egypt. After Mubarak’s fall in early 2011, he was released from prison by a judicial ruling.

“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. […]

“God ordered Prophet Mohamed to destroy idols,” he added. “When I was with the Taliban we destroyed the statue of Buddha, something the government failed to do.”

Murgan Salem al-Gohary on Dream TV (via Al Arabiya)

The show also interviewed the vice president of Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda Party, Sheikh Abdel Fattah Moro, who rejected the destruction call, emphasizing that the 7th century Arab commander who led the Muslim conquest of Egypt, Amr ibn al-Aas, did not destroy the statues during his military campaign.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/egyptian-jihadi-leader-says-destroy-the-pyramids/