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🔖 Arbella Bet-Shlimon, "Preservation or Plunder? The ISIS Files and a History of Heritage Removal in Iraq" –

Kirk H. Sowell, a consultant who publishes the risk newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics (for which Al-Tamimi is a contributor), initiated an exchange with me in response to a defense of the NYT’s Iraqi critics that I had written on Twitter. He opened with a tweet reading, “Point me to the Iraqi newspaper which does in-depth investigative journalism & I’ll happily read it.” Puzzled by the relevance of this comment to a statement about the ethics of removing archives for private ownership, I asked Sowell, “Just to be clear: your take is that Iraqis should stay quiet about their archives being taken to the U.S. because they don’t yet have the means to establish a [NYT]-caliber paper?” He responded, “Absolutely.” (Callimachi herself “liked” this last tweet.)

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