I don’t know about you, but when stories about ISIS come on the news, I tend to change the station. It’s all dark, depressing stories of beheadings, cultural terrorism and people being cruel to people. But.
What I’ve seen happen in Facebook during the past week about Syrian refugees makes it obvious that we as a nation can’t have civilized dialogue about the situation and instead need to polarize it into an us versus them situation: Democrat versus Republican, conservative versus liberal, good Christian versus bad Christian, good religious person versus hypocritical religious person.
On the one hand, I’m over it and it’s barely started. On the other, this is clearly going to be a big issue for all of presidential candidates so I don’t want to check out too quickly. I want to be an informed citizen who can intelligently engage in the sort of healthy debate that our democracy was founded on.
And so, last night I attended one of the Insights Lecture Series at the Cincinnati Museum Center: “The Fight Against Cultural Terrorism: Disrupting the Trade in Blood Antiquities.” There was a lecture by Marion F. Werkheiser, a founding partner of the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners. The goal of the talk wasn’t to inform people about ISIS in general. Rather, it was to discuss how ISIS makes used of cultural terrorism and racketeering to fund their efforts and make their mark in communities they invade. I learned a lot and wanted to share some of that.
One of the first things Werkheiser shared was this video from ISIS destroying a museum in Mosul. It’s s terrible video in terms of the culture and history being lost, but it’s safe for work and includes no violence.
Werkhiser also introduced me to a new label for ISIS: Daesh. This is an acronym for Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham, the full Arabic term for what English speakers translate as the Islamic State. Doubly offensive to folks in ISIS. Acronyms are rarely used in Arabic so they sound ridiculous to Arabic speakers. AND, Daesh sounds a lot like the Arabic word “dais,” which means something that crushes or tramples. To folks in ISIS, that’s a horrible connotation.
Following Werkhiser’s lead, I’ll refer to ISIS as Daesh in the rest of this summary of her talk.
Because of my open-minded stance on news stories about Daesh, I was not familiar with what they were doing beyond terrorism to people. I had no idea that they were funding their work through the looting of antiquities. Shame on me for this because I was vaguely aware of hearing about the murder of archeologist Khaled al-Asaad a while back but didn’t put the pieces together on why he was killed. If you’re like me and need a recap, the overly abbreviated version is that al-Asaad had been leading work at Palmyra and was doing his best to preserve and protect that site. (Get more details about Palmyra and why it’s such a big deal.) Daesh doesn’t want to encourage dialogue between cultures or people identifying with an era before they were in power and so are destroying things pre-them and in the destruction of a place like Palmyra, they were able to loot antiquities, which they can later sell and fund their work (think weapons and ammo).
When Daesh takes over an area, they often charge taxes in the form of antiquities instead of cash. It’s more valuable. When they start looting a historical site (many UNESCO World Heritage Sites), one tactic they use is to build homes on top of the site and then do their digging through living room floors. Activities occurring in someone’s home are much more difficult to monitor.
All of this is terrible, but what does it have to do with those of us in the US? Guess where the stolen antiquities are being sold? Lots of places, but the US is high on that list. And the amount of antiquities being sold? It’s gross.
As one example, Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham “and her colleagues examined satellite images taken before and after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution of two major sites in Egypt, el Lisht and el Hibeh. The team measured the extent of looting holes in each image and compared the results. In a case study published online by DigitalGlobe, Parcak “found a 400 to 500% increase since the events of 2011.”
– from “New Evidence Ties Illegal Antiquities Trade to Terrorism, Violent Crime” in National Geographic
If you want an example that’s a little closer to home, how’s this? The FBI is investigating the owners of Hobby Lobby, who are in the process of building the Museum of the Bible. (Source, Source, Source) While I applaud the museum on a very clever logo, it’s remarkably irresponsible if the museum is filled with stolen items whose purchase inadvertently funds international terrorism.
Werkhiser proposed a few things that could curb this cultural terrorism and racketeering. The one I most understand is a move to referring “blood antiquities,” building off of the success around encouraging to buy conflict-free diamonds. By using familiar terminology, it will be easier to help people to understand the problem with buying antiquities that aren’t certified as being an authentic, legitimate sale. Another is to not purchase antiquities, which to me sounds obvious but apparently more people buy them than I know. The last, which is potentially the biggest and most effective, is for the Arab League members to form a regional coalition that calls on countries like the US where antiquities are sold and to ask them to assist in stopping those sales. I’d like to think that countries would be super cooperative with this, but getting issues like this through our government has proven harder than it sounds.
In the meantime, organizations like CyArk are making 3D scans of precious heritage sites so people can see simulations of them. It’s not the real thing, but it’s something. Another preventive measure being taken is that museums threatened by Daesh are being emptied with items being sent to safe havens to protect them.
Comments are closed.