Monday, 5 October 2015

Protecting Syria's Antiquities from ISIS


Protecting Syria's Antiquities from ISIS by ABC News Videos 7:03 mins A 2,500-person team has spent the past three years evacuating pieces from the country's national museums. ABC's Alex Marquart reports.

 http://abcnews.go.com/International/fight-save-syrias-antiquities-hands-isis/story?id=33776060

But, no matter how hard they work to protect and track these items, the global antiquities trade in looted antiquities is booming, fuelled by demand from buyers abroad, as far away as London [...] the scale is massive, and it is certainly funding a lot of armed groups in the conflict and that is the great tragedy of this because its leading to the utilisation of the past to destroy the present [...] people are not seeing the connections, antiquities are now funding violence and that is a huge game-changer, this is affecting people's lives".

While some are doing their best to try to protect these things from theft to then appear on the global black market, the ADCAEA antiquity selling and collecting cardboard-cutout numpties claim a Two Wrongs argument to support buying and try to deflect attention away from antiquity theft and smuggling to monument destruction: "This is what happens when people embrace monocultural fanaticism". I think the rest of us see very little difference between that and the monothematic fanaticism of the US antiquities market.

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