Clearly marked as tile samples
Huh. It turns out that Hobby Lobby is a tad lacking in the scruples department.
The packages that made their way from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to retail outlets owned by Hobby Lobby, the seller of arts and craft supplies, were clearly marked as tile samples.
But according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, they held something far rarer and more valuable: ancient clay cuneiform tablets that had been smuggled into the United States from Iraq.
Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.
In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq, and that failing to determine their heritage could break the law.
But Hobby Lobby bought them anyway. I guess Baby Jesus told them it would be ok.
Hobby Lobby’s purchase of the artifacts in December 2010 was fraught with “red flags,” according to the prosecutors. Not only did the company get conflicting information about the origin of the pieces, its representatives never met or spoke with the dealer who supposedly owned them, according to the complaint.
Instead, on the instructions of a second dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payments to seven separate personal bank accounts, the prosecutors said. The first dealer then shipped the items marked as clay or ceramic tiles to three Hobby Lobby sites in Oklahoma. All of the packages had labels falsely identifying their country of origin as Turkey, prosecutors said.
Yes but they’re Christians, ok? That means whatever they do is Christian, and thus good. It’s like how whatever Trump does is presidential and legal, because he’s the president. That’s how it works.
Their sincerely held religious beliefs clearly compel them to traffic in controlled antiquities without making that clear to so-called “customs officials”. It is a sad, sad state of affairs when their religious freedom is being attacked this way!
I’m puzzled as to what the owners of Hobby Lobby intended to do with the tablets. The number of epigraphers who can read cuneiform texts is extremely small, it’s unlikely that they would have ever been translated. Presumably the Jesus worshippers would have just regarded them as relics from the ‘Holy Land’.
The earliest translations of cuneiform revealed how the writers of the Bible plagiarized the Sumerian Flood Myth.
RJW, I think they just keep collecting old Bible scrolls and Biblical artifacts to build a collection – I guess they think that will get them into heaven?
As for the tablets, well, they were in a Muslim country, and how in the world could that country have any right to them, when a good Christian wanted them?
Hobby Lobby makes me sick. It makes me nauseated to think of being from Oklahoma where Hobby Lobby was born. It makes me angry that the only place in my new home that you can get certain things (like frames large enough to frame my diploma, for instance, or the stuff needed to put on the Earth Day play) is Hobby Lobby. They are a powerhouse in this area, and everyone loves them, and no, you can’t say anything bad about Hobby Lobby because…god…crochet needles…quilting supplies…god.
Hobby Lobby’s president is building a Museum of the Bible in DC, expected to open in November. That is why he is collecting artifacts.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/us/hobby-lobby-bible-museum/index.html
A Museum of Stolen Objects.
Not the first time.