President Trump’s Threat to Bomb Iranian Cultural Sites ‘Must Be Condemned,’ Say Outraged Museum Directors, Politicians, and Scholars

The US President Donald Trump
has threatened to target major cultural sites in Iran if the
country retaliates after he ordered the killing of a top Iranian
military leader by drone strike. Heritage experts,
including two leading museum directors, are among those who were
swift to criticize Trump’s comments, which ignore international law
protecting cultural property and historic sites during
conflict.

In a tweet on Saturday night,
Trump warned that the US will hit important cultural sites in Iran
“very fast and very hard” should the
Iranians kill any
Americans or attack American assets. 

Iran and the US have been in a
tense standoff ever since a US drone strike killed the Iranian
military commander Qasem Soleimani shortly after he had arrived at
Baghdad airport in Iraq on Friday.

Trump tweeted on Saturday that
the US has 52 Iranian locations within its sights. The president
said that some of these sites are “at a very high level & important to Iran
& the Iranian culture.” The number is symbolic. Fifty-two
diplomats were seized in the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held
hostage during the Iranian Revolution.

While the US has not named the
targets on its radar, Iran has 22 cultural sites on the UNESCO
World Heritage List, including the ruins of the ancient city of
Persepolis, as well as the
site of Meidan Emam, and its Royal Mosque in Isfahan, and the
Chogha Zanbil complex. The country has numerous other important
cultural sites, such as the historic “pink mosque” of Nasir al-Mulk
in Shiraz.

Cultural Leaders Speak Out

Cultural figures and scholars
around the world have condemned Trump’s
statements. Speaking to Artnet News, the renowned
Polish archeologist Barbara Kaim, who specializes in the
archaeology of Iran and Central Asia, compared Trump’s threats to
that of a “barbarian.”

“I completely do not understand how modern man can let himself
even just to think about destroying cultural goods,” Kaim says.
“How is this different from some known ISIS activities?” she asks,
referring to the cultural vandalism of
Islamic extremists.

Abbas Milani, the
Iranian-American historian and author, says he
is “profoundly shocked
and dismayed” by Trump’s words. Milani, who is the
director of the Iranian
Studies program at Stanford University, tells Artnet News:
“It is an idea that is not
just against international law and cultural civility but it is
politically counterproductive.” He points out that Iranians are
rightly proud of their cultural heritage. “Threatening to destroy
these sites only serves to strengthen the narrative of the most
retrograde forces in Iran labeling America as the Great
Foe.”

Tristram Hunt, the former
politician who is now the director of the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London, tweeted his dismay. Trump’s threats “must be
condemned,” he wrote, “just as the bulldozing of Palmyra &
significant heritage sites by ISIS was abhorrent.” Hunt adds: “This
is a worrying step towards the normalization of cultural
destruction as a war aim.” The V&A is planning a major
exhibition of Persian art and design in the fall. 

Thomas Campbell, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art who is now at the helm of the Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, has been unusually outspoken. He posted a powerful
response on Instagram along side a map of Iran’s most important
heritage sites. He explained that normally museum directors “remain
behind the scenes… But when the President of the United States
inverts every value system our country previously stood for, and
calls for destructive attacks against cultural sites in one of the
oldest civilizations of the world, you have to speak out vehemently
and urgently.”

A War Crime?

Politicians were also quick to
condemn intemperate Trump’s words, including the Democratic
presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren.
She tweeted
that the US President was
“threatening to commit a war crime.”

Iran’s foreign minister Javad
Zarif responded to Trump on
Sunday, also arguing that targeting cultural sites is a war crime,
and writing that such a breach of international red lines is “a
big(ly) ‘no no.’”

But Trump has doubled down on
his statements, telling reporters as he returned from vacation in
Florida on Sunday, “[The Iranians are] allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to
torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs
and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their
cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.”

The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat
tells Artnet News that Trump’s threat recalls the Taliban’s
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. “Now we see how far
Trump has lowered his standards; where the president of the most
powerful country in the world shares the same values and strategies
as a terrorist group,” Neshat says. “The irony here is that Trump’s
irrational assassination of the head of the Revolutionary Guard of
Iran last week, and consequent threats, makes the Islamic Republic
of Iran, one of the most dangerous and vicious governments on the
planet, suddenly look like the ‘good guys!’”

The post President Trump’s Threat to Bomb Iranian Cultural
Sites ‘Must Be Condemned,’ Say Outraged Museum Directors,
Politicians, and Scholars appeared first on artnet
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