Two wrongs make a Right for collector?

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The Americans are not renowned for knowing much about the world outside the frontiers of their own country - so Peter Tompa gets a "D -" for knowledge of foreign affairs with his repeating verbatim a story about the "brother in law of the Prime Minister of Iraq" who according to a tale "circulating in the internet" was arrested at Dubai with "Sumarian" (sic) antiquities in his luggage which he was allegedly on the way to the US to sell. The problem is that in Tompa's version of the story the name given was that of the current PM the shoe-dodging Nouri Kamil al-Maliki. This story is in fact, in the roughly translated version Tompa uses, lifted verbatim from the Iraq Crisis list which clearly reports it as unconfirmed. Strangely, instead of coming clean about where he got it from, Tompa instead cites as his source an Arabic version - can ancient coin collector Tompa read Arabic as well as Greek?

Tompa's conclusion is surprising:

If true, this article demonstrates the continued hypocrisy of the Iraqi Government when it comes to antiquities. During Saddam's reign, common people were executed for dealing in antiquities while the Baathist elite collected and sold what they wished. Today, no one is executed, but they are punished when found with such items. Yet, connected people still apparently continue to deal in them. We will see if the Iraqi PM's family members are ultimately treated like everyone else, but the article already suggests that will not be the case. If harsh laws cannot be applied equally, perhaps it is time to loosen them for everyone!

Everybody: "Yay!!!" So who was BUYING these antiquities then in the US (they would not be ACCP people would they)?

Now let us suppose a US Democrat senator is found one morning asleep slumped over the wheel of a car in the bushes at the side of the road out of Washington, dead drunk and wearing nothing but women's underwear. Now, although you can't get much more "connected" than that, does this mean (applying Mr Tompa's logic) that the USA would suspend its drink-drive laws? Or would there be calls from people like Mr Tompa and all his like-thinking friends for that democrat to step down from office? So... why would Mr Tompa wish to have the consequences of the Iraqi Prime Minister treated any differently?

I did post a comment to Mr Tompa's website pointing out who Mr Nouri Kamil al-Maliki was and suggesting this was faulty reporting - and of course pointing out that the buyers here were as much at fault. Nobody will be much surprised to learn that he rejected the comment. He corrected the spelling but left the accusation of a head of a foreign goverment up on his blog.

Although this story has not been picked up by the western press so far (so is it the Iraqis giving him special treatment?) other sources suggest that the allegations might concern Abu Ali Al-Asfahani, the son in law of the PM. Let us see how the story develops, but I certainly do not think many will be joining Mr Tompa's gleeful calls to loosen the "retentive laws" put in place to prevent the commercial use of looted and stolen Iraqi artefacts. Maybe the Collectors' Guild would like to stage a "test case" of that too?

Photo: accused by Peter Tompa (Nouri Kamil al-Maliki is on the right).