Georgetown's Elliott Colla Blames the West for ISIS' Desecration of History

Georgetown’s Elliott Colla Blames the West for ISIS’ Desecration of History

ISIS smashes Assyrian statues in Mosul, Iraq.

Elliott Colla of Georgetown, like many other professors of Middle East studies, downplays the role of radical Islam in ISIS’ attacks on antiquities and even compares this barbaric vandalism to the toppling of the year-old statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in ’03. Writing at American Thinker, Middle East Forum director of academic affairs and director, Campus Watch, Winfield Myers dissects Colla’s absurd attempt to “contextualize” ISIS by shifting blame to the legacy of Western archaeology and the museums that hold its treasures:

Elliott Colla, associate professor of Arabic studies at Georgetown University, has joined the herd of Middle East studies professors who insist that Islam has nothing to do with widespread destruction of antiquities by the Islamic State (ISIS). Rather than appealing to Islamic texts or traditions to defend Islam, however, Colla deploys a two-fold strategy of feigning ignorance about ISIS and contextualizing their horrific acts within the intellectual and material legacy of Western colonial archaeology. As a result, in whitewashing Islamism Colla degrades the worth of ancient civilizations and their artifacts while training his moral outrage on Western colonialism, particularly the archaeological digs it sponsored and the museums these enterprises filled.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.