Joseph Coplin,
co-owner of New York antiquities dealer Antiquarium on behalf of the
American Council for the Preservation of Cultural Property, and James
McAndrew, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s
International Art and Antiquity Theft Investigations Program [made] a joint statement, “There is a great deal of incorrect information
being disseminated by the media, generally groundless numbers generated
by special interest groups that are parroted by the media without the
benefit of fact-checking. Conceiving and implementing military or legal
agenda based on bad data is dangerous.” [...] Coplin and McAndrew told Homeland Security Today
that, “Grantham’s article provides absolutely no evidence that objects
purportedly looted by ISIS have been sold to art collectors --that is
because there is no evidence available. There have been no seizures of
such material at US ports of entry, or by European customs. There have
been no pieces removed from auctions, art fairs or dealers’ galleries
that were proven to originate from the current crisis, despite the
hundreds of thousands of legal and transparent transactions of
antiquities that occur every year in the art market.”
“This is not, as Grantham suggests, because Western
powers are turning a blind eye to such material; in fact, it is exactly
the opposite,” Coplin and McAndrew said. “There have been intense
efforts: legislative, law enforcement, diplomatic, social media, etc.,
to stop the influx of looted material from ISIS. It’s just that none of
it has turned up outside of the region. Another issue that needs to be
stated is that the Western antiquity market is already saturated with
this type of material from the over the 100 years previous to ISIS when
these common objects were freely traded. Anyone who collects this type
of thing can find it in the legitimate market place in the West. Ancient
Near Eastern is not a particularly popular collecting interest in the
current market, partly because it is so heavily scrutinized, even though
the material is relatively common.”
Anthony Kimery, '
Report that Antiquities Sales is Major ISIS Funding Source Disputed by Authorities' Homeland Security Today, Jan 7 2017.
