Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
justice.gov
justice.gov
There are cases where simply donating money intended for orphan to the wrong type of Islamic organization has led to jail time.
What more giving millions to buy black market artifacts from ISIS!
I'll try to dig up a link about the charitable donation.
Edit: Supreme Court ruling on providing support to organizations designated as terrorist organizations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-court-idUSTRE...
This is a better article about the same case:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/21/high-court-u...
ACLUs commentary on Chilling Muslim charitable giving in the "war on terrorism funding"
https://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/humanrights/blockingfaith.pd...
And here we go, this is the case I recall. Two "normal" women tried and convicted of providing terrorist support. The government made the case that, despite the intended charity to orphans, the women should have known they were funding a terrorist organization's larger efforts. The Hobby Lobby guys need to be held to the same standards as these (likely poor) women.
http://www.startribune.com/two-rochester-women-get-10-20-yea...
new book on this by Pro Publica reporter:
https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Justice-Department-C...
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2015/07/13/another-terror-arrest-an... http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a47390/alabama-isis-pey...
But actually, it seems ridiculous to me that this only warranted a $3m settlement. They've (almost certainly) been indirectly funding ISIS by robbing a country of its cultural artifacts. Not cool.
Ironically, if these artifacts were from northern Iraq, where ISIS has had its main destructive presence, there's a good chance they would have been destroyed.
Still, gross to see a "Christian" company wanting to get items from the 'holy land' that have been totally plundered to build a bible museum.
I think the "idolatry smashing" propaganda videos are more selective now as ISIS needs to rely more on the sales of those artifacts for funding due the loss of the oil.
Here's one about Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri.
It's largely understood that ISIS destroys archaeological sites so it's harder to notice that they've looted the artefacts to sell them. It also makes the artefacts harder to track and link to their POI.
From the BBC articles;
>'Hobby Lobby said it "did not fully appreciate the complexities" of the import process when it began'
and
>'The company imprudently relied on dealers and shippers who, in hindsight, did not understand the correct way to document and ship these items," Hobby Lobby said'[1]
Its amazing that "committed evangelical Christians" who said religious beliefs barred them from paying for certain kinds of contraception in their employees health care doesn't have the same moral compunction when it comes to stealing or doing business with terrorists.[2]
Sources:
I think it's great to be a Christian in business and try to live out your faith, but I think it's trouble to try to be a "Christian business" and use it as part of your advertising/PR.
And who actually offered that contraception as part of their health care for decades, no problem, until obamacare mandated it, at which point they suddenly realized they had a deep-seated religious conviction against it.
> In 2012, a lawyer for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit Washington law firm, called Hobby Lobby's general counsel to inform him of the health law's contraception requirement and to ask whether the company wanted to file a suit.
> Mr. Green says he was shocked to discover Hobby Lobby was in fact offering in its insurance plan some of the emergency contraceptives at issue. He called for the insurer to revoke that coverage and signed onto the lawsuit.
He only dropped the coverage subsequent to being approached by a lawyer from a conservative group shopping for people to use to sue the government.
Readers will draw their own conclusions but to me that does support the implication.
Also, would you arrest someone who purchased an item at a yard sale that had been stolen at one point? Come to think of it, should I be grilling every yard sale proprietor to make sure that they came into possession of all of their goods legally?
Yeah, antiquities are higher stakes, but I would hope that if I purchased a pair of pants that suspiciously looked like they belonged to the neighbor, you wouldn't be so uncharitable to me in the aftermath.
Look, it's possible that someone did something maliciously. I'd like to think I'd have acted more above board in this scenario. But this thread reads like plenty of people have their blinders on today and are fishing for some kind of hypocrisy story.
"Never attribute to malice...", etc.
FTA: Notwithstanding these warnings, in December 2010, Hobby Lobby executed an agreement to purchase over 5,500 Artifacts, comprised of cuneiform tablets and bricks, clay bullae and cylinder seals, for $1.6 million. The acquisition of the Artifacts was fraught with red flags. For example, Hobby Lobby received conflicting information where the Artifacts had been stored prior to the inspection in the UAE. Further, when the Artifacts were presented for inspection to Hobby Lobby’s president and consultant in July 2010, they were displayed informally. In addition, Hobby Lobby representatives had not met or communicated with the dealer who purportedly owned the Artifacts, nor did they pay him for the Artifacts. Rather, following instructions from another dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payment for the Artifacts to seven personal bank accounts held in the names of other individuals.
Source:
"Further, when the Artifacts were presented for inspection to Hobby Lobby’s president and consultant in July 2010, they were displayed informally. In addition, Hobby Lobby representatives had not met or communicated with the dealer who purportedly owned the Artifacts, nor did they pay him for the Artifacts. Rather, following instructions from another dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payment for the Artifacts to seven personal bank accounts held in the names of other individuals." https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/united-states-files-civ...
And as I said, I'd like to think I'd have acted better. People are making good points in this thread. I'm not blindly trying to defend a company I know very little about; just trying to poke some holes in the groupthink here.
A few more points:
1. The BBC article says that they purchased 5,500 artifacts, and the original article says that they forfeited 144 items. So what's the story here - they took some calculated risks and ended up functionally paying 4.6 million for 5,356 items? Or, they were actually careful but unfortunately a little under 3% of the items were bad? Could be either, or neither.
2. Are there any comparable companies/cases? I have no reference point for this story. When someone else bought a bunch of history, what did their buying practices look like, and have they ever been in trouble?
3. Does anyone here know what it's like to buy antiquities? I'd imagine most people who do it legally will have a more rigorous process, but I have to believe that in some cases it's not as clean as going to a Sotheby's auction.
4. Do we know who was responsible for what here? Obviously the buck stops with the CEO so he deserves to be the face of the criticism here, but is it possible that, since this was a process that probably spanned multiple transactions and weeks, he had some help that was less than competent? Doesn't absolve him of anything, and it didn't! His company was fined. But it pokes a hole in the "mustache-twirling" narrative.
From a 2015 article in the Guardian:
"Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul University who is an expert in cultural heritage, confirmed to the Guardian that she was asked by the Green family to explain to them how import controls for ancient antiquities worked in 2010 – a year before the tablets arrived in Memphis. Gerstenblith said that she went to some lengths to set out for them the potential pitfalls.
“I read them the riot act,” she told the Guardian. “I explained to them how the system worked in the interest of trying to discourage them from doing anything illegal. I knew they were building a collection, so I was concerned they might be doing something they shouldn’t, even out of ignorance of the law.”[1]
The "moustache twirling narrative" goes something like this:
"The reason that he thinks the Green family might have broken international law or avoided ethical standards in the antiquities trade is to promote their overtly Christian beliefs — beliefs they fought for and won at the Supreme Court last year in their landmark case on the religious freedom of employers with regards to government mandates on healthcare.
“In their hearts, [I think] they think they’re doing the right thing,” Al-Azm said. “They look at this cultural heritage and they have a close affinity to it. They feel that this is something that touches their deep core beliefs, and they see it in an area or a place that is dangerous or unstable. So they can justify this sort of activity by saying I’m doing something good for posterity.”[2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/hobby-lobby-...
[2] https://thinkprogress.org/experts-believe-hobby-lobby-stole-...
Perhaps around the same time that underlying beliefs supersede reason.
Almost. From the BBC article and mentioned elsewhere:
"But prosecutors said the company was warned by an expert that such items from Iraq were likely to have been looted from archaeological sites and needed to be carefully verified."
and
"Prosecutors said the purchase "was fraught with red flags", and the company never met the dealer, working with a middleman instead, and making the payments to seven private bank accounts."[1]
Any legal counsel or consultants that Hobby Lobby would have used in attempting such a transaction would have apprised them of these red flags. The provenance of the items and the legitimacy of the sale would also have been surfaced with even a modicum of proper due diligence.
David Green Hobby Lobby's CEO and the person who oversaw this is worth over 5 billion dollars. It's unlikely they he didn't have the resources to properly vet such a significant transaction.[2]
Its worth noting this glaring excerpt from the recent Atlantic article:
"Law-enforcement officials report that in 2010, Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, visited the United Arab Emirates with an antiquities consultant to inspect more than 5,548 artifacts. The objects—which were precious and collectively worth millions of dollars—“were displayed informally,” the complaint stated, “spread on the floor, arranged in layers on a coffee table, and packed loosely in cardboard boxes, in many instances with little or no protective material between them.” They included cuneiform tablets, which display writing used in ancient Mesopotamia, and clay bullae, or balls of clay printed with ancient seals."[3]
>"Also, would you arrest someone who purchased an item at a yard sale that had been stolen at one point? "
That's a total straw man. To compare buying an item at a neighbors yards sale to buying a large quantity of antiquities from a war torn country for millions of dollar from people you never met is a joke.
The "aww shucks we didn't know" bit of false naivete is insulting. The issue of looted antiquities from the region is not exactly an esoteric subject. A google search using the terms "stolen antiquities war Iraq" shows 3.4 million results.
What's more likely is that Steve Green's legal council explained the downside risk to him was that if caught he would be slapped with a fine in the low millions. A slap on the wrist for someone of his outsized wealth.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40516932
]2 https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-green/
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/hobby-l...
How do you think this went down? "Hey, let's buy this stuff from Iraq. Iraq, Iraq... where have I heard of that before? Hmm, isn't that where those ISIS fellows are? Well, never mind, they probably have nothing to do with it."
There's also the issue of inconsistent punishment. If you or I had done this we'd probably be in prison and even the cleverest yard sale analogy wouldn't save us. These guys get slapped with a fine equivalent to roughly three tenths of a second of profits and walk away clean.
To be fair, it looks like all this happened in 2010—ISIS wasn't in the nation's consciousness back then: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=isis
I'm not saying it was a good idea.
You realize that ISIS is the rebranded Al Queda in Iraq right? Al Queda in Iraq(AQI) began in 2004. The rebranding came in 2011 when Arab Spring protests in Syria resulted in that country being destabilized and AQI was able to move in to Syria to re-supply.
Regardless of the name changes they would have been part of any legitimate antiquities expert's and dealer's consciences.
And AQI was itself a rebranding of a different org that had no prior connection to al-Qaeda.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/08/iraq.alqaida1
Also the structure of Al Queda is that of a franchise:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/sunday-review/the-franchi...
No, its not. The group that became al-Qaeda in Iraq was founded in Jordan in 1999 as “Organization of Monotheism and Jihad” and was not affiliated with al-Qaeda. It affiliated with al-Qaeda simultaneously with it's 2004 rebranding as al-Qaeda in Iraq.
> The structure of Al Queda is that of a franchise
Yes, and just as sometimes a pre-existing unaffiliated business signs up with a commercial franchise, sometimes a pre-existing unaffiliated jihad group would join al-Qaeda.
No you are completely wrong. This is exactly how you become part of Al Queda - you start an affiliate. This is not some grey area:
"As such, AQ’s dominant strategy since 2001 has been to encourage affiliate organizations to attack the West, sometimes with financial or operational support. [40] AQ gained affiliates post-9/11, as several groups either emerged or reoriented themselves to pledge allegiance to bin Laden. These groups included Al Qaeda in Yemen (AQY) (which later became Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP), Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which have been among the most deadly AQ affiliates throughout the 2000s'
Source: http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/group...
Which doesn't change that for the first five years of its existence the group that later rebranded as al-Qaeda in Iraq was not an affiliate, nor, more to the point which you falsely claimed was incorrect originally, does it change the fact that just as the rebranding from AQI to ISIS was a rebranding of an existing organization, so was the rebranding to AQI in 2004.
The arguments you make seem to be directed against the claim that the Zarqawi organization was not, at least when it was called AQI, really part of al-Qaeda. This might be a fine point to argue against, but for the fact that it's not an argument anyone has actually made in the thread, and your arguments against it are completely irrelevant to the comments they actually respond to.
>To be fair, it looks like all this happened in 2010—ISIS wasn't in the nation's consciousness back then:
You are suggesting that since the name "ISIS" hadn't yet become part of popular lexicon that there might a legitimate claim to ignorance.
The fact of that matter is it was known that there was a large terrorist organization controlling large swathes of Iraq at that time. And that this group was using looted antiquity to fund their activities. There is not a single expert on Mesopotamian art who disputes that. It does not matter which moniker they were using.
Everything you have written since that is really just you having an endless semantic argument.
One of us is, but:
> Your original statement [...]
No, the statement you quote was not mine, and not one that I have at any point agreed with or supported.
And your responses to me have neither been germane to the posts they repsonded to or to rebutting that point made by a different poster. It looks like you misread my post agreeing with and providing additional context to your response to that poster as disagreement, and responded with argument that wasnt germane either to the points I actually made or to the point someone else made that you thought I must be arguing for merely because I responded to you.
It think it is reasonable to expect an organization to take reasonable steps to ensure the legality of its own operations - such as not ignoring the advice of its own legal experts.
This isn't a yard sale. What they're doing is a big boy business and involved big boy money. There's big boy consequences for it.
Only reason executives are not charged with treason is because they are white Christians not brown Muslims.
Well, rich white politically-connected Christians. And the charge wouldn't be treason, because the charge is never treason, because of the Constitutional limits on attached to treason and the fact that any punishment can be attached to some other offense without those limits.
There have been several Americans charged and convicted of treason. Tokyo Rose is a rather well-known one with many references in pop culture:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/world/asia/28rose.html
https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-1904-7.html
and also Robert Henry Best who served a life sentence and died in prison:
Giant crime by a party with a lot of money? DOJ will just slap you with a relatively small fine.
Bag of weed? You're going to jail, buddy!
Really it should just be called "possession of a lot of drugs."
The reason the laws were changed was that it was tough to convict someone if you had to actually show they intended to sell.
the us criminal system is a machine run for profit, not for justice, simply because SOME of the convicts are murderers is simply correlation
The felon caught with a gun in his car, or the drug dealer who tried to sell drugs to an undercover cop, or the guy who was arrested after beating his wife bloody. That's the bread and butter of the justice system. You can argue that two of those three things shouldn't be crimes (and I agree--but at least half the country doesn't) but the idea that people are routinely convicted without evidence is a myth.
And plea cases come up on appeal all the time (and in fact are probably the typical criminal appeal). A plea bargain agreement generally precludes appeal of the conviction, but does not preclude appeal of the sentence (because the judge, not the prosecutor, decides the sentence).
I have lots of friends who are public defenders. Almost everyone they work with is guilty (much of the work is hammering out plea deals that ensure that they're convicted of the correct things). Same thing for people who work with Innocence Projects, where filtering out all the requests for aid from guilty people is a big part of the work. If the issue were just not sending large numbers of innocent people to prison we would have fixed it. What makes criminal justice so challenging is the constant fight to protect the rights of the innocent within a system where the overwhelming majority of the accused are not just guilty, but obviously so.
If there is a criminal prosecution, that would certainly affect my outlook for the better, and I would gladly admit that I was wrong to the degree that I was! I really hope that you're correct on the "inevitably," but I'm also extremely doubtful.
That said, I'm not sure that we have the full picture here. With somebody as political as Hobby Lobby's management, and as politically viewed as they are, there's probably an entirely different side to the story that never makes it out.
And my outlook is not wrong. There are two justice systems in America - one for the fairly-to-very wealthy and one for everyone else. I used to be a law clerk to a federal judge (no longer a lawyer). My outlook is unfortunately accurate.
Is that true? More importantly, is there evidence that makes it more likely than not that (1) this is true; and (2) that Hobby Lobby knew about it, or was willfully blind about it?
Like, what percentage of unprovenanced antiquities sales are used to support terrorism? It's like saying buying drugs (or diamonds, or products containing certain metals) finances terrorism. Yeah, some does. But the percentage is not such that it would be reasonable to try and pin someone who bought a back of weed as being responsible for funding terrorism.
Thanks for trying to improve the level of discourse here.
lol. Don't ask don't tell, amirite?
It's funny to see HL running through the motions defending themselves on this one. Surely nobody there is stupid enough to think that we actually buy their excuses.
The linked article says that the most we know for sure is that "an expert on cultural property law retained by Hobby Lobby" warned the company of some things and the company ignored those things. It doesn't say who heard the warning, who called the final shots, or what their motives were.
Do you know something these we don't? Perhaps you read a source that I didn't here.
When you spend millions of dollars on antiquities, you are at least casually interested in their provenance... Especially when you've hired an expert.
If you knew the provenance of an item, what it was worth, and how it was obtained, why waste money on hiring an expert?
Did you not read the part of the article
"The acquisition of the Artifacts was fraught with red flags. For example, Hobby Lobby received conflicting information where the Artifacts had been stored prior to the inspection in the UAE. Further, when the Artifacts were presented for inspection to Hobby Lobby’s president and consultant in July 2010, they were displayed informally. In addition, Hobby Lobby representatives had not met or communicated with the dealer who purportedly owned the Artifacts, nor did they pay him for the Artifacts. Rather, following instructions from another dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payment for the Artifacts to seven personal bank accounts held in the names of other individuals."
HOBBY LOBBY WIRED PAYMENT FOR THE ARTIFACTS TO SEVEN PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNTS
LOL. THIS MUST BE HOW THE BIG BOY COLLECTORS DO IT HUH? Just hit up the western union and transfer some cash to a few different bank accounts.... of course. Nothing funny going on.
And there's more
"All of the intercepted packages bore shipping labels that falsely declared that the Artifacts’ country of origin was Turkey."
As long as there is a compelling narrative and complicit media, literally absolute bullshit can be accepted as valid discourse or even valid history.
"Oh so sorry, we just didn't know. First time collectors, you see."
It's about giving talking points to "defenders".
Hey Hobby Lobby, you should also build a conflict diamond collection. If you want to take a chance you could also get into human trafficking or organ smuggling.
Not definitive proof of anything, as they could be losing money, but that's a big enough number to suggest that plenty of people don't know, don't care, or know but don't care about their extracurricular activities.
It's probably just you (or more precisely, those like you).
It's quite possible that your values are not typical of their customers, or their customers don't care about the values of the owners of the craft store they patronize.
The current situation in northern Iraq is exactly what was predicted would happen if the US withdrew before the Iraqi government was stable enough. In response, Democrats said that the anti-government AQ forces were "freedom fighters" and said that what happened there was "none of our business."
This is the "peace" Democrats wanted.
The invasion of Iraq and the bungling of early phases of the occupation are the main reason AQI, as such, existed and began the process by which it metastasized into ISIS.
While some Democrats do near some responsibility for that as enablers, they weren't the ones directing the relevant policies.
it is extremely difficult to avoid stores/businesses owned by religious groups.
I recently avoided purchasing an item from Yakima due to the coming across the following [0]. In reality businesses like Marriott Hotels and Chic Filet irritate me and I avoid when I can (business uses Marriot for work)
if there was a list of athiest or agnostic owned businesses I would likely spend more money at these locations than any others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcapita#Compliance_with_Shari...
Luckily, there's a lot of other options there, depending on exactly what product you're looking at. Thule is a very big competitor here, plus there's lots of other smaller name-brands too.
But I agree, someone should compile a list of religious-owned companies to avoid, and a list of atheist/agnostic owned companies to choose instead.
However, I do have to ask what your beef with Marriott is. I looked through their Wikipedia page and couldn't find anything about them being religious, except for a mention that they include a copy of the Book of Mormon along with the Bible in each room, but that could be just a PR thing (pretty much every hotel in the US has a Bible in each room after all, and they aren't all religious, they're just catering to America's population). The company itself is publicly traded, unlike privately-held Hobby Lobby.
The ones that irritate me are ChicFilA and In-and-Out Burger, as they're both overtly Christian.
This BTW shows why it's a good idea to, in general, avoid buying from American companies and instead buy from Japanese or western European ones. Japanese ones are probably easily the safest bets, since Japan has an extremely non-religious society, and the Abrahamic religions in particular have almost no representation there. And Japanese companies aren't in bed with Middle Eastern ones.
http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/5-things-to-know-ab...
What's the point in that? what if you're right,is it a surprise that hypocrisy exists? it only speaks to the character of the individual(s) not the quality or correctness of their belief. A person did something criminal. period. what point is there to be made with respect to their religion? Did they claim their religion mandated the importation of the artifcats or the ignorance of the laws involved? or is the expectation here that people of certail beliefs or moral values are incapable of committing crimes?
Regardless, I hope the people making this about religion also hold other corporations who commit crimes to the same standard and associate their beliefs or religion with their crimes.
I for myself won't correlate an unrelated moral or ethical stand someone is making to a separate crime they've committed. Would you call a theif a hypocrite because he said he was against murder? or the same accusation to a murderer because he was against rape?
Come on... leave some room to reason.
There's no need to fish. See my comments above, they Green's were well briefed on this before they started their collection. They were briefed by a well-known legal authority. Honestly you sound like a shill.
>"Regardless, I hope the people making this about religion also hold other corporations who commit crimes to the same standard and associate their beliefs or religion with their crimes.
Why wouldn't they?
>"Come on... leave some room to reason." Except that none of the actions or claims by the Hobby Lobby stand up to reason, which is why they lost in court.
> Why wouldn't they? Because it happens all the time and nobody says "Oh, <insert corp> are atheists,that's why they're so bad, hypocrits!" maybe that's just because their beliefs has no moral standards at all.
>"Come on... leave some room to reason." Except that none of the actions or claims by the Hobby Lobby stand up to reason, which is why they lost in court.
I wasn't defending hobby lobby, "reason" in that context means accusing someone of a different crime when the evidence/context is for a present crime. You're calling a thief a hypocrite because he said he doesn't approve of murder. that is unreasonable.
The themes of Snow Crash include anarcho-corporatism, psychological hacking, and virtual reality. Which of those involves ancient artifacts, smuggling, and Christian craft stores?
>Yes. These practical Kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic alphabet', derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets, which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to the alphabet as 'eye-writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles, which resembled eyes. [2]
1. http://deoxy.org/aleph/nam-shub.htm
2. http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/impact/f93/students/tracy/tracy_m...
I can see the connection... it's fairly vague though.
Title is bad. There's a civil suit attempting to take the artifacts, but the government hasn't won yet.
Here's just one small tip, of many: If you're buying antiquities from a war-torn region, and the seller tells you to instead wire the money to eight different people, none of whom is him, it's possible that this transaction is not on the up and up.
Oh, and a second tip: if you're legally exporting things you think you bought lawfully, don't disguise them as something else.
But yeah... I get it, you're not really interested in the truth of the matter. You're just trying to pretend that you're smart or some crap like that.
This is factually incorrect (though perhaps difficult to prove). I am interested in the truth of the matter.
If you are so quickly and incorrectly judging my motives, perhaps it's possible that you are doing the same to the people in this article as well?
Do you think this article is on the front page of a bunch of news sites if it's a boring B2B with a boring CEO who bought the same stuff in the same way for her personal collection? I feel pretty confident that if President Obama was buying these (he wouldn't, but let me make the point), the arguments would be the same but the people arguing them would be reversed.
And that's my prevailing interest in commenting today. This is the forum where people will give Uber and Tesla every benefit of the doubt, so it was disappointing to click into the comments and see a mostly one-sided pile-on.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14719496 and marked it off-topic.