With bad memories of Rumsfeld’s dismissal of the looting of the Iraqi national museum lingering, I was probably not the only person heartened by this NYTimes note on Saturday (c3:45pm):
Defending the Egyptian Museum:A cross-section of Cairo residents formed a human chain on Saturday to help guard Egyptian antiquities at a national museum.
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Cairo residents helped soldiers guard the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo on Saturday, following reports on Egyptian television that looters had broken in the night before and damaged two mummies there…
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The museum is located close to the epicenter of the protests in central Cairo, between two bridges that were the site of clashes between protesters and riot police on Friday.
Somewhat less heartening, in the next update at the same site:
Speaking on CNN [Saturday afternoon], Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian blogger and journalist appealed to the media to not fall for what she described as a Mubarak regime plot to make the protests in Egypt seem like dangerous anarchy. “I urge you to use the words ‘revolt’ and ‘uprising’ and ‘revolution’ and not ‘chaos’ and not ‘unrest, we are talking about a historic moment,” she said.
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Moments later, as Ms. Eltahawy suggested that looting and damage to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo shown on Egyptian television was the work of “the police and the thugs of Hosni Mubarak,” the lower third of the screen displayed the banner headline: “EGYPT IN CHAOS.”… The network then displayed video from Egyptian state television of damage to the museum, which has been shown around the world on Saturday.
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Ms. Eltahawy told CNN: “The Mubarak regime has never cared about the museum. If the Mubarak regime cared about the museum it would take care of the pricelss items there. They don’t care about it. They care about the pyramids because they took the money from toursm and put it into their own pockets.”
As Tom Scocca added on his Slate blog today:
“There are thugs going around looting and wrecking shops,” an Egyptian army officer told a crowd of protesters in a video clip in heavy rotation on Al Jazeera on Saturday. So the protesters should please obey the curfew and get off the streets at night, he said, so that the city could be protected from rampant violence.
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The officer seemed sincere. But by some coincidence, what the authorities were asking people to do to thwart the looting was also what the authorities wanted people to do to thwart the protests. Obey the curfew, please. Let us get the situation under control.
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But what was the situation, and how was it to be controlled? The Los Angeles Times was willing to buy the claims of theft and anarchy, as Choire Sicha pointed out at the Awl. There is always someone who will pick up the story about the looters. The truth is, in times of unrest or disaster, the defining crime is not looting but murder—extrajudicial killing in the name of law and order. Theft, or the suspicion of theft, becomes a capital offense, and this somehow affirms civilization. It happened after Katrina, and it happened in Haiti. The idea of looting produces the fact of lynching.
(Emphasis mine.) I hope, most sincerely, that the Egyptian people are able to continue to protect their share of our precious global heritage. It would be nice if the idea of protecting this heritage doesn’t get turned into yet another casus belli (casus foederis) for the warmongers, but it would also be nice if the weather channel would stop predicting another snowfall tomorrow, and I’m not counting on either of those things as I plan for the morning.