A bit of history:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/iconoclasm
"
Iconoclasm noun
Destruction of religious images. In Christianity and Islam, iconoclasm was based on the Mosaic prohibition against making graven images, which were associated with idolatry."
Remember this?
Taliban Dynamites Massive Stone Statues
It's nothing new:
The Reformation in National Context
"Iconoclasm was also a fundamental feature of the French Calvinist Reformation. Going far beyond the traditional, often anonymous and generally limited, gestures, of defiance of the holy power of images, Calvinist iconoclasm was far more aggressively desacralizing. Crucifixes were daubed with excrement and shrines desecrated."
What's left of a wooden panel in Geneva depicting Mary with Jesus (the faces were hacked off):
http://www.lost-painters.nl/wp-cont...h-Child-Geneva-Defasement-910-August-1535.jpg
Similar behavior happened
in the Netherlands:
"they urinated on the chalices which held the consecrated wafers and defecated in the vestments. That which had been most holy was converted for the most base purposes: wooden images provided firewood, an altar became a pig's trough"
And even
in England:
"St. Mary's church at Oxford had a baroque portal with a Virgin whose head was shot off. All the medieval figures in Ely Cathedral were beheaded. At Cheapside the most beautiful cross in London was pulled down. At Lichfield Cathedral they poured tar over the altar. Dugdale says soldiers polluted the choir with excrement."