Atheist-for-hire and Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins has managed to outrage yet another religion after calling Muslims “barbarians,” the Daily Mail reported.
Dawkins, whose “The God Delusion” declared that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion (“when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”), Dawkins was condemning the severe damage caused by Islamist extremists to a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, telling his 600,000 Twitter followers on Tuesday: “Like Alexandria, like Bamiyan, Timbuktu’s priceless manuscript heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians.”
On Monday it was reported that Islamists burned down the Ahmed Baba Institute library, with its priceless manuscripts and artifacts. The source for the reports was Timbuktu’s mayor Ousmane Halle, who said: “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”
But a source in the University of Cape Town insisted on Wednesday that the extremists had only had time to damage or steal a few manuscripts, before they were forced out of Timbuktu.
Timbuktu residents reported that there was no destruction of any library or collection, according to Cape Town U., which has sponsored a modern facility to house the precious manuscripts.
Richard Dawkins is an equal opportunity insultor, and last year U.K. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks last year condemned a “profoundly anti-Semitic” comment in Professor Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” which likened the God portrayed in Jewish texts to a fictional villain.
Dawkins responded at the time that he was “anti-God,” not “anti-Jewish,” calling Rabbi Sacks accusation “ridiculous.”