HNN Editor  This story reports a disturbing development. We are bringing it to the attention of our readers to show how the nefarious disease of anti-Semitism leads some people, even historians, to fall back in times of crisis on shopworn scapegoating and conspiracy thinking. 

An Iraqi historian and archaeologist as well as the director of Syria’s Palmyra Museum both claimed Wednesday that an “international Jewish mafia” was plotting to loot the Middle East’s most treasured antiquities. They said the so-called Jewish conspiracy is part of an effort to destroy the region’s Arab heritage.

The two discussed the “Zionist mafia” in a video posted Wednesday on YouTube and translated by the Middle East Research Institute, or MEMRI, a not-for-profit press monitoring and analysis organization with headquarters in Washington, D.C. The two-and-a-half-minute video can be watched below.

“The Jews are always looking for antiquities -- especially Middle Eastern ones, and particularly Iraqi ones – in order to prove that the Torah is true,” Ali al-Nashmi, Iraqi historian and archaeologist, said in the video. “And so they extort, steal, and establish mafia gangs.”