I saw in the tweet she tagged Guardian, BBC, NatGeo and NYTimes. Was there just a slow news day that they all picked up that one claim and ran with it.
She explains it towards the end of her story:
Why does brouhaha over Arabic on Viking textile matter? Three reasons
One, context: story likely went viral because of recent events. Charlottesville revealed to all what has long been known among medievalists: that white supremacy uses medieval imagery & symbolism. At Charlottesville we saw medieval banners & chants with Crusader phrases like Deus Vult.
So the Viking Allah textile exhibits what Stephen Colbert once called ‘truthiness’ but is not supported by scholarship. But ‘truthiness’ cannot be enough for news media, especially in this age of accusations of Fake News.
And when medieval & particularly Viking age is used as ideological weapon by white supremacists & scholars are risking careers to fight white supremacist appropriation & not just white supremacists use medieval to further contemporary agendas: same tactic used by ISIS, alQaeda who kill thousands. Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship. But we need news media to be our allies, consult experts, and get facts right.
Sweden is historically inhabited by europeans who happened to settle there over the course of centuries, and then to their amazement later discovered they are "white". They probably just thought they were people back then.
I haven't heard about Swedes participating in slave trade (vikings aside) and there was nobody else for them to oppress (vikings aside), so it's kind of strange idea that Swedes now has to make up for centuries of white supremacism ("people supremacism"?)
A lot of things which make sense in context of history of USA (when european colonists overran the land and then imported black people agains their will to exploit them) doesn't extend on Northern Europe.
The comment that brought up Dublin was in response to a comment about Sweden.
What if medieval times more often than not were full of racists, irrational crazy beliefs, brutality, killing, hate, all kinds of xenophobia, sexism, and other stuff we find despicable today. Trying to paint that time as a happy period, where everyone was integrated, and they lived together peacefully will backfire unless there is solid evidence to prove it.
> Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship.
Exactly. I think there were areas at the intersection of trade routes where cities had multiple nationalities and faiths living together. One distinct feature was that it was tied to economic prosperity. As long as everyone was not starving and had a place to live, and trade was flourishing, living together worked well. I think picking one of those example might have worked better in this context. But in general if the audience was white supremacists, it's better to just ignore them and not engage, it's waste of time debating with crazy people.
Dubai is pretty diverse today.
The question, what happens when wealth runs out?
I guess here the idea wast to politicize this "discovery". It backfired, now the crazies will say "See, these scientists have to make up facts,what else are they lying about!"
So I thought, if politicizing and PR was the main purpose, there are better example out there to pick from than Vikings as an example of a peace loving integrated society.
Not quite. What happens is that people pose hypotheses, based on available evididence, that are later strengthened or weakened by new evidence. What happened here was that the authour had the same evidence that we have, they just took the liberty to add data that wasn’t actually there, and drew conclusions based on that.