The punks of the self-styled Islamic State murdered a famous archeologist this week. They beheaded him. They mutilated his body. They hung it from a column in the ancient city of Palmyra out in the unforgiving eastern desert of Syria.

The murder of Khaled Asaad was typical of the group’s bravely proclaimed “Islamic” values: The victim was 82 years old. It seems he had been tortured for a month, perhaps in an effort to extract from him the location of ancient treasures that the criminal network known as ISIS could sell on the global black market.

Last May, just as American and other Western governments were trying to suggest that ISIS was on the defensive, ISIS swept into Palmyra, taking over a nearby military base and prison even as it appropriated the ancient ruins of Palmyra where Asaad had conducted a lifetime of study.

In the time of Christ and long afterward Palmyra was an important city on the trade routes to Asia. The famous warrior queen Zenobia, who led a revolt against the Roman Empire, ruled it in the 3rd Century. The ruins of the city and the sands around them are full of clues about ancient cultures, and Asaad worked for the last half-century to excavate, preserve and decipher these keys to the history of not one but many civilizations.

A board set up in front of what is believed to be Asaad’s corpse in Palmyra, as shown in a jihadist video, sets out charges against him that include loyalty to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (no relation), and tending to Palmyra’s graven images.

How absurdly savage, and how like ISIS.

Did Asaad conduct his research with the approval and support of the Assad dictatorship in Damascus? Yes, of course. Such is the nature of any archeological research, whether under democracies or tyrannies: present governments must give permission to excavate past empires.

Was Palmyra, thousands of years ago, a place where idols were worshipped? Of course it was. One of the great standing temples there was devoted to Baal, the god most despised by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, one denigrated in religious texts as Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, a stand-in for Satan.

Any sane, civilized person would understand that Asaad’s work as a scholar and scientist was to unlock the system of beliefs that surrounded such deities, to discover what they could tell us about our understanding of past cultures and our own.

But, of course, ISIS doesn’t care about understanding the past, or about culture of any kind. Like the Taliban who destroyed the great Buddhas of Bamayan in 2001, the acolytes of the new would-be “caliph” have no interest in the past except its devastation or its sale for remuneration.

Soon after news of Asaad’s murder appeared on computer screens around the world, I was talking to my friend Hanan al-Shaykh, a renowned novelist who writes mainly in Arabic, and she summed up the objectives of ISIS very well.

“They are trying to annihilate all culture,” she said. “Why? Because when you have culture you have a society with dignity, with a memory, with consciousness. Without culture, people are like animals.”

But maybe that is giving the group too much credit.

When ISIS isn’t exalting the violent piety of its members, or using the ruins of Palmyra as a backdrop for mass murder, it’s raising money the way most mafias do, through extortion, theft, contraband, human trafficking and prostitution, albeit with the occasional prayer thrown in.

The group is the very model of hypocrisy. And as we have watched ISIS command world attention, especially since the murder of American journalist James Foley a year ago this week, it is ever more obvious that its core values are built around dirty money and brutal whoring.

Probably that explains why it has held such an attraction for low-lifes in the West who start out as wannabe gangstas and wind up taking selfies with severed heads in Syria.

In fact, it is the young men of the “caliphate” who are the true worshippers of Baal, the original Lord of the Flies. They are, precisely, the animals they claim to despise.