Religious Understanding for Cultural Property

There are a lot of hard questions that we need to ask in the wake of this tragedy:

http://newsfeed.gawker.com/isis-smashes-3-000-years-of-history-in-iraqi-museum-att-1688184667

The Islamic religion teaches that making statues of religious figures or famous people is a form of idolatry.  Therefore, all such artistic mediums must be destroyed.  There are other current examples of believers scratching out the face of the prophet Muhammed from illustrations in the Qu'ran and other examples.

But is it logical to destroy works of art that existed thousands of years before the religious beliefs in question existed?  These are works of art that existed back during the Assyrian empire and various other times; they have nothing to do with Islam or the beliefs of that religion.

In many cases, when works of art are in dispute, every reasonable effort will be made to find the decendents of the original owners, or failing that, attempt to return the work of art in question to the country of origin.  In cases like this, the artifacts are so old that their empires technically do not exist anymore; or are buried under tons of sand.  The inhabitants of these civilizations are likewise dispersed among multiple different cultures and countries.  Obviously, nothing is wrong with any of this.  But is does make the original owners nearly impossible to track down.

In such cases, the artifact is understood to be property of the country in which they were found.  It is then that country's responsibility and perogative to preserve the artifact and share its knowledge, as that knowledge is the cultural property of the world's population.

These men have stolen from the world.  They have acted against the strictures of their own religion.  They have deprived future generations of irreplaceable knowledge of a lost culture.

How will the world respond?

They are historical treasures that belong to the entire world.