Arti-facts

Arti-facts
: David Galbraith points out the hypocrisy of the outcry over the plundering of museums in Iraq:

Curators are outraged by the loss of Iraqi antiquities, but unless they offer up some of their own collections they are hypocrites. Looting during war was the very process by which much of the contents of Western museums was originally obtained. There are two solutions to the loss of antiquities in Iraq: 1. document and try and get back objects as they come on the market; 2. fill the Iraqi museums with objects sitting in the US and UK. Not surprisingly I don’t hear anyone at institutions like the British Museum suggesting the latter.