“Our heritage is disappearing," said Ralph Mitchell, a biology professor at Harvard. "Whether it's Angkor Wat or the Mayan sites in Mexico or the Native American archaeological sites in the West of this country, they are all under threat. And the question is, can we preserve them?"

No, this is not, as you might rightly suspect, some academic or other railing against the destruction of the human heritage by some mad Muslims, as happened at Bamiyan (before and after and more here), but an altogether more insidious threat. It is a threat, nonetheless, which might deprive us of many of the greatest works of human artifice. Let us hope that people like Professor Mitchell can find the solutions to this problem before it is too late, for we will all be the poorer if they cannot – and the microscopic part of God’s Creation will, all inadvertently, have done the work of the crazy Islamists for them – and, oh boy, how they will crow about that!