How much of your personal wealth have you spent saving these people? 50%? 80%? How do you have time to post on HN when you should be tirelessly working as an activist?

We need to stop shaming people for trying to do good because there is something else we believe is a better cause.

Well, except people who think they are "helping" by forming "prayer circles" to help with disasters or take crates and crates of bibles to starving people. Shame the hell out of them.

Well, the west (you know, those "evil, colonialist, world police"?) already does a lot to protect people from terrorism already, but protecting people from terrorism is quite a lot more costly and morally complicated (well, some people manage to conflate "combatting terrorism" with "racially motivated colonialism" anyway) than protecting artifacts. Protecting artifacts is intractable for reasons of international law and national sovereignty.

From a totally cold, unfeeling standpoint: people are self replicating, ancient artifacts are not.

The fruit of the Other's work--their research, their art, their innovations--is necessarily worth more than the Other's lives to the colonialist.

It's obvious that lives (and memory) are worth more to anyone with compassion who can recognize other people's humanity. That is only a debate and only interesting if you engage in it to remind someone with a colonialist mindset of their own shared humanity.

To be clear, if the OP proposed intervention to save lives, you would no less call him a colonialist.

Please don't put words in my mouth.

That's a rich request in light of your previous comment.