Hobby Lobby and its billionaire owner Steve Green were recently “busted” by US Customs for buying and smuggling several thousand priceless artifacts looted from Iraq during and after the Iraq War.
Only as the result of a civil suit filed by the US Government, has Hobby Lobby and Mr. Green admitted responsibility for this shameful transaction. They also have agreed to a $3m fine and forfeiture of thousands of ancient clay tablets and bricks written in cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing.
Admitting after the fact of this wrongful conduct, owner Steve Green attempted to dismiss his actions as “carelessness”, even though it was revealed through written purchase agreements that he tried to buy thousands of priceless artifacts for a paltry $1.6m. Shipment was mislabeled as merely containing “ceramic tiles”. According to the Daily Beast, shipping documents were also created to falsely show the value of the tablets as only $300, obscuring their true value and origin. To lend further evidence of subterfuge, he then shipped the artifacts to several different locations in the US, using multiple foreign shippers from different countries including the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
This is the company and the family which preaches high religious morality and piety to the world, and who is best known for their successful lawsuit against Obamacare (Burwell vs Hobby Lobby Stores) which ultimately weakened employee rights to receive contraceptives via their healthcare package provided by the mega-chain Hobby Lobby. This suit as determined 5 to 4 by the right wing dominated Supreme Court perversely awarded certain “closely held” US corporations the same religious rights as individual American citizens. But that is another issue.
In the end, justice WAS apparently achieved in the artifacts smuggling case through diligent US Customs investigation and with the bringing of the federal lawsuit. Had Hobby Lobby not been caught, we may never have known about how these many thousands of priceless ancient artifacts came under the private ownership of the Green family.
The Green family’s selfish gain may very well have meant a tragic loss to the rest of the world. In the Guardian, Patty Gerstenblith, professor of law and expert in cultural heritage from DePaul University, indicated the importance of how ancient antiquities need to be treated and controlled. Gerstenblith stated,
“Once an artifact is looted from a site the context in which it existed is lost – its association with other artifacts and its location. And once we lose that context, we lose our ability to understand and reconstruct the past, and in turn our ability to understand ourselves.”
This grossly immoral and multi-leveled illegal scam by Hobby Lobby begs this author to wonder if any other American entity would be permitted to get away with this level of obvious fraud against the US Government and the world without criminal prosecution.
Of course, the pious Mr. Green pleads for tolerance and forgiveness. In a statement to the Guardian, he said it was all innocently done for the family’s private Museum of the Bible, claiming the museum is a “separate not-for-profit entity made possible, in part, by the generous charitable contribution of the Green family” - which is, of course, just legal mumbo jumbo for “we planned to secretly steal these priceless artifacts for our own gain and put them into our private museum where you can all pay to view them.”
Nice Christian family values.
BTW, if Steve Green and friends will be going to heaven, please send me to hell.