Transparency Cartoon

ISIS assault on civilization targets relics once saved from looters

When Jabbar Jaafar watched video of ISIS members with sledge-hammers smashing artifacts as old as antiquity, the Iraqi-born cultural activist was outraged over a loss he described as immeasurable.
Jaafar's anger at the destruction of Iraqi artifacts, relics and statues by terrorists prompted him and his colleague, Iraqi archeologist Abdulamir Al Hamdani at Stonybrook University, to protest outside the White House Tuesday with 100 other cultural activists. Jaafar and Al Hamdani work with the group Saving Antiquities for Everyone, or SAFE, an organization founded in 2003 in response to the looting of the Iraq Museum during which thousands of objects were taken -- some 3,000 to 7,000 are still missing.
"I couldn't sleep that night," Jaafar said, after watching the videotaped destruction by ISIS of artifacts in Mosul last month. "These objects are as old as civilization."

Related Image

Expand / Contract

A protester is seen Tuesday outside the White House to urge the administration to stop ISIS from destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria. (Marie Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media)

"ISIS is destroying the heritage of mankind," said Jaafar, who came from Iraq to the U.S. in 2008 and worked for the Iraqi Cultural Center in northern Virginia. "These pieces -- more than 3,000 years old -- are gone forever. They can never be replaced."

Related Image

Expand / Contract

Protesters are seen Tuesday outside the White House to urge the administration to stop ISIS from destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria. (Marie Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media)

The latest target of the Islamic State is Hatra, a 2,000-year-old city and archaeological site in northern Iraq that had parts demolished by ISIS militants last week, according to Kurdish officials. The terrorists damaged and looted the city one day after bulldozing the historic city of Nimrud.
Hatra, located 68 miles southwest of the city of Mosul, was a large fortified city during the Parthian Empire and capital of the first Arab kingdom. A UNESCO world heritage site, Hatra is said to have withstood invasions by the Romans in A.D. 116 and 198 thanks to its high, thick walls reinforced by towers. The ancient trading center spanned 4 miles in circumference and was supported by more than 160 towers. At its heart are a series of temples with a grand temple at the center — a structure supported by columns that once rose to 100 feet.

Related Image

Expand / Contract

In this July 27, 2005 file photo, the face of a woman stares down at visitors in the Hatra ruins, 200 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq's minister of tourism and antiquities told the AP on Saturday that the government is investigating reports that the ancient archaeological site of Hatra in northwestern Iraq is being demolished by militants from the Islamic State group. (AP)

"The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing under way in Iraq," said Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, and Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, director general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in a joint statement.
"With this latest act of barbarism against Hatra, [the IS group] shows the contempt in which it holds the history and heritage of Arab people."
The Sunni extremist group, which currently controls about a third of Syria and Iraq, is bent on demolishing any symbols it says promotes idolatry and violates its interpretation of Islamic law.
A video ISIS released last week shows militants smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum -- the majority of which came from Hatra. In January, the terror group also burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul.

Related Image

Expand / Contract

In this July 27, 2005 file photo, a temple to the Shamash sun god still stands over 1,750 years after the Sassanian empire razed the Mesopotamian city of Hatra, 200 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP)

On Friday, the group looted artifacts from Nimrud, a 3,000-year-old city in Iraq, and bulldozed it in a move United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared "a war crime."
"Ancient Mesopotamia is really the cradle of civilization -- where we saw the first farming, the first cities, the first writing," Jack Green, chief curator at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, told FoxNews.com.
"There's a huge amount of knowledge and that knowledge is being destroyed systematically," Green said. "They’re not only destroying images of things – like artwork – but they're also looting artifacts and then smuggling them away."
The black market for ancient artifacts is a profitable avenue for ISIS as it continues to build its funds.
Green is urging people worldwide not to purchase antiquities, saying, "You may be acquiring objects that were taken from these sites."
"If so, you are supporting ISIS," Green said.

"ISIS is destroying the heritage of mankind."- cultural activist Jabbar Jaafar

The international group The Antiquities Coalition on Wednesday called for the U.S. and other nations to crack down on the sale of looted artifacts, acts considered war crimes under international law.
“ISIS is arming its campaign of terror in part by selling the past and robbing future generations of our history,” said Deborah Lehr, co-founder of The Antiquities Coalition. “We must constrict the terrorists’ ability to profit from the sale of plundered antiquities.
“If we don’t act now, there may be no past left to protect," she added. "With each artifact looted and sold onto the international market, only criminals, insurgents, terrorists — and the most unscrupulous of collectors — profit. The rest of us all lose.”
The Islamic State's push to demolish history hasn't hit Baghdad, where officials reopened Iraq's National Museum on Saturday -- more than a decade after some 15,000 objects were stolen during the U.S. occupation of the country. According to the AFP, the museum opened its doors earlier than expected in response to the destruction of artifacts in Mosul last month by ISIS.
"The events in Mosul led us to speed up our work and we wanted to open it [the museum] today [Saturday] as a response to what the gangs of IS did," Qais Hussein Rashid, the deputy tourism and antiquities minister, told AFP.
"This is a very happy day," he said.
The museum, also known as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, contains exhibits ranging from bone and stone tools used 100,000 years ago by Stone Age hunter-gatherers in modern-day northern Iraq, artifacts from the Sumerian and Old Babylonian dynasties, including 5,000-year-old carved limestone statues, and numerous relics and treasures from Babylon, the rise of Islam more than 1,000 years ago and modern times.
Iraqi museums, mosques, churches, schools and government buildings are awash in priceless artifacts, but the embattled nation's historians and archaeologists fear for what is being lost every day. The Baghdad Museum's website features a terse indictment of the terror group on an all black homepage.
"2015: ISIS destroys what is left of ancient history," it reads.

Jews in Baltics fear creep of anti-Semitism

Jews in the Baltics fear a series of disturbing events in the three-nation region of Eastern Europe may be signaling a revival of the Holocaust-era hatred that once nearly wiped out their numbers.
Across the countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Jewish leaders say their communities are feeling increasingly uncomfortable as anti-Semitism once again appears to be on the rise. An Estonian museum exhibition mocking the Holocaust, a stage musical celebrating the life of a notorious Latvian Nazi mass murderer and the repatriation of the remains of a Lithuanian leader  long linked to Nazis have all contributed to a climate of hate that has Jews on edge.
“We have to say that the support of Hitler and rewriting history to turn Hitler into a liberator of this area is not a western value,” Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, founder of the DefendingHistory.com website, told FoxNews.com. “If you’re repatriating Nazi war criminals to be re-buried and honored as part of national history, that is not behavior compatible with western ethics and values.”

“We have to say that the support of Hitler and rewriting history to turn Hitler into a liberator of this area is not a western value.”- Dovid Katz, Yiddish scholar

Katz has been amongst the most vocal objectors to a growing list of questionable events in the Baltics, including the 2012 repatriation from the U.S. to Lithuania of the body of wartime leader Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis. He was re-buried with full honors, endorsed by the Lithuanian government, despite having been a Nazi puppet during his brief tenure. Brazaitis was accused of overseeing the establishment of a concentration camp, and also signed off on the establishment of the Kaunas ghetto.
Although a 1975 U.S. posthumous investigation into Brazaitis’ wartime activities cleared him of Nazi activities, critics suspected his record was scrubbed to spare the U.S. of embarrassment for having granted him citizenship.
After complaints from Jewish groups, Lithuania’s much heralded Museum of the Genocide in the capital, Vilnius, only recently created a section acknowledging the annihilation of the once flourishing Lithuanian pre-war Jewish community of more than 200,000 that was very nearly wiped out, many at the hands of Lithuanians. March 11 marked 25 years of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union and a parade by far-right groups took place in Vilnius, prompting uneasiness on the part of Jews.
In Talinn, Estonia, a highly controversial Holocaust-themed exhibition caused outrage last month when, among its exhibits, was a picture showing the iconic Hollywood sign replaced by the word "Holocaust," which some perceived as a suggestion the genocide was an entertainment event. Another sick exhibit recreated a gas chamber and had 20 naked actors pretending to be Jews playing tag, seemingly suggesting there was humor in the gas chambers experience. The exhibits were eventually withdrawn.
In October 2014 a Latvian musical ‘Cukurs, Herbert Cukurs’ premiered celebrating the life of the ‘Butcher of Riga,’ Herbert Cukurs, who was tracked down and killed by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service in Montevideo, Uruguay, more than 20 years after he fled Europe. He had overseen the murder of many thousands of Jews in his native Latvia where he had been a pre-war national hero. He was witnessed personally shooting more than 500.
Last month’s Estonian general elections saw the far-right EKRE party break the electoral threshold and gain seven of the 101 seats in parliament. Considered by some to have Fascist-Neo-Nazi sympathies similar to many other flourishing nationalist parties in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the EKRE’s leader Mart Helme is a controversial figure, especially after the party’s “If you’re black, go back” slogan was attributed to him.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Jerusalem, has been monitoring a series of “Nuremberg-esque” marches in the Baltics in recent weeks and has been dismayed by the fact that no western media have shown up to report on the worrying trend.
“The European Union… does not appear to be particularly perturbed by genuinely disturbing phenomena in the Baltic countries and elsewhere, which, of course, in no way would justify Russian aggression, but deserve to be handled seriously and promptly before they get out of hand,” Zuroff wrote in the International Business Times.
Zuroff accused Helme’s party of racism under its slogan ‘Estonia. For the Estonians’ but Helme flatly rejected that interpretation.
“This is a wrong translation of a slogan which was used during our demonstration,” Helme told FoxNews.com. “The slogan really is ‘For Estonia.’ A Russian TV channel mistranslated this because in Estonian it sounds very similar. They use this in their propaganda against us.”
Helme also rejects any accusation of anti-Semitism in his party, pointing out there are very few Jews left in Estonia, and “there is no hatred against Jews in Estonia today”. He admitted though that his party is generally against Muslim and African immigration. “We have seen what happened in France and in Sweden, in Malmo for example, so we don’t want similar slums in Estonia’s cities.”

Sen. Cotton fires back at Clinton on Twitter over Iran nuke letter fallout

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton sparred Wednesday with Hillary Clinton on Twitter, after the former secretary of state slammed an open letter he and other GOP senators sent to Iran's leaders about ongoing nuclear talks.
The Republican senators' statement has become the subject of immense controversy, as it challenged President Obama's authority to strike a nuclear deal and cautioned Iran's leaders that any agreement would need congressional approval in order to necessarily last beyond Obama's term.
Clinton, who is widely expected to enter the presidential race in the coming months, tweeted a warning to those potential Republican candidates who have praised the letter.
Hillary Clinton        ✔ @HillaryClinton Follow

GOP letter to Iranian clerics undermines American leadership. No one considering running for commander-in-chief should be signing on.

2:11 PM - 11 Mar 2015

Arkansas Sen. Cotton fired back.  Tom Cotton        ✔ @SenTomCotton Follow

No, .@HillaryClinton, letter to Iran helps protect USA from bad deal. No CINC should allow world’s worst regimes to get world’s worst weapon

3:00 PM - 11 Mar 2015

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal also entered the fray, tweeting: Gov. Bobby Jindal        ✔ @BobbyJindal Follow

.@HillaryClinton No one who allows Iran to become a nuclear power should consider running.

2:38 PM - 11 Mar 2015

Democrats have slammed the Republicans' letter as a diplomatic no-no, claiming they effectively undermined the U.S. president on the world stage. Vice President Biden said earlier this week that "the decision to undercut our President and circumvent our constitutional system offends me as a matter of principle."
Secretary of State John Kerry echoed those concerns during congressional testimony on Wednesday, while also disputing the senators' assertion that U.S. lawmakers could simply alter any nuclear agreement years later -- because, he said, it is not technically a "legally binding plan."
Rather, he described the pending deal as an executive agreement, which needs no congressional approval.
Republicans, though, have stood by their decision to fire off the letter -- part of a campaign to demand a vote in Congress on any nuclear deal. A bipartisan bill is pending in Congress that would do just that. The senators claimed in their original letter that while the administration is pushing an "executive agreement," the agreement would have more heft if it were approved by Congress.
Clinton, meanwhile, has weighed in on the letter controversy at the same time she's dealing with her own controversy about her use of personal email while secretary of state. She opened her press conference on Tuesday about the email issue by, first, condemning Republicans over the Iran letter.

Two officers shot, seriously injured outside Ferguson police department

Not enough jobs. The Welfare System at it Best.

 You can't work and also have enough time to protest all night long.

Two police officers were shot and seriously wounded early Thursday outside the police department in Ferguson, Mo. amid protests that followed the resignation of the town's police chief.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told a news conference that a 41-year-old officer from St. Louis County was shot in the shoulder at around midnight local time, while a 32-year-old officer from suburban Webster Groves was shot in the face. Both victims were taken to a local hospital. Belmar said both men were conscious, but had no further word about their condition except to describe the injuries as "very serious."
Belmar said that at least three shots were fired and were believed to come from a house across the street from the police department.
"I don't know who did the shooting, to be honest with you," Belmar said, adding that he could not provide a description of the suspect or gun.
He said his "assumption" was that, based on where the officers were standing and the trajectory of the bullets, "these shots were directed exactly at my officers."
The shooting was first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Marciay Pitchford, 20, was among the protesters outside the police department. He told The Associated Press the protest had been mostly peaceful until he heard the shots ring out.
"I saw the officer go down and the other police officers drew their guns while other officers dragged the injured officer away," Pitchford said. "All of a sudden everybody started running or dropping to the ground," he said.
Belmar said that some officers had begun to leave the area due to the lack of activity prior to the shooting.
"I've said many times we cannot sustain this [unrest] without problems and that's not a reflection of those expressing their First Amendment rights," Belmar told the Post-Dispatch. "But this is a very dangerous environment for our officers to work in."
KTVI reported that as many as 200 people had gathered to demand more changes in the city's government after the resignation of Police Chief Tom Jackson Wednesday afternoon. The station reported that at least one person had been arrested and that protesters blocked traffic on nearby Florissant Road.
Jackson was the sixth Ferguson employee to resign or be fired after a Justice Department report cleared white former officer Darren Wilson of civil rights charges in the shooting of black 18-year-old Michael Brown this past August, but found a profit-driven court system and widespread racial bias in the city police department.
Mayor James Knowles III announced Wednesday that the city had reached a mutual separation agreement with Jackson that will pay Jackson one year of his nearly $96,000 annual salary and health coverage. Jackson's resignation becomes effective March 19, at which point Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff will become acting chief while the city searches for a replacement.
Jackson oversaw the Ferguson force for nearly five years before the shooting that stirred months of unrest across the St. Louis region and drew global attention to the predominantly black city of 21,000.
Jackson had previously resisted calls by protesters and some of Missouri's top elected leaders to step down over his handling of Brown's shooting and the weeks of sometimes-violent protests that followed. He was widely criticized from the outset, both for an aggressive police response to protesters and for his agency's erratic and infrequent releases of key information.
In addition to Jackson, Ferguson's court. clerk was fired last week and two police officers resigned. The judge who oversaw the court system also resigned, and the City Council on Tuesday agreed to a separation agreement with the city manager.