Iconoclasm
One who destroys images and idols. Opposition to the religious use of images. Veneration of pictures and statues symbolizing sacred figures. Semitic "My-Godism" described as Monotheism has another dimension: Iconoclasm. In fact, the two are two sides of the same sides of the same coin. When worshippers of the Semitic God came into contact with their neighbors, it was not clear what they abhorred more, their Gods or their idols. In point of fact, they made no such fine distinction. Trained as they were, they made war on both indiscriminately.
The Judaic God commands his worshippers that when they enter the land of their enemies, they will "destroy their altars, and break their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire." (Bible. Deut. 7.5). Wherever, these creeds went (Christianity and Islam) temple-razing followed. Christianity destroyed shrines of the Pagans with un paralled thoroughness and self-satisfaction. When America was discovered, the Benedictine monks destroyed single-handed 170,000 images in Haiti alone.
Juan de Zummarage, the first Bishop of Mexico, writing as early as 1531, claimed that he destroyed 500 temples and 20,000 idols of heathens. In our own country, in Goa, Jesuit father destroyed many Hindu Temples.
St. Francis Xavier, who participated in this meritorious work, wrote back home: "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village, when all are baptized, I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done."
Islam did the same. Temples in India were destroyed not for the "hoarded wealth" as Marxist historians propagate - but was part of a larger policy of religious persecution. To destroy Hindu pride and self respect, and to remind them that they were Zimmis, an inferior breed.
Hindus were great temple builders because their pantheon was prolific in Gods and Goddesses and their society rich in schools and sects, each with its own way of worship. The cradle of Hindu culture on the eve of the Islamic invasions included what are at present the Sinkiang province of China, the Transoxiana region of Russia, the Seistan province of Iran and the sovereign states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Muslim historians, in India and abroad, have written hundred of accounts in which the progress of Islamic armies across the cradle of Hindu culture is narrated, stage by stage and period by period. The two giant stone Buddhas of Bamiyan province who have watched over the restive plains of Afghanistan for many centuries were recently destroyed.
(source: Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them - By Sita Ram Goel Volume 1. p. 37-46).
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