Here’s the wildest yarn you’ll read all day, bar none.
US arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby – literally a place you go to buy craft supplies and sewing kits –has agreed to pay $3 million to the government and hand over thousands of illicit Iraqi artefacts. Yes, you read that right: illegal Iraqi artefacts.
not quite like this, but close
The agreement to hand over the goods came after the Department of Justice lodged a civil forfeiture action via a civil suit which the company was almost certain to lose.
Hobby Lobby did what
— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) July 5, 2017
For unknown reasons which may or may not be related to forbidden magic and arcane rituals, the company agreed to buy 5,500 ancient artefacts, including cuneiform tablets, clay bullae and cylinder seals, for $1.6 million back in 2010.
This was just after a lawyer warned them that such a purchase of “cultural property likely from Iraq, including cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, carries a risk that such objects may have been looted from archaeological sites in Iraq.”
Hobby Lobby funding ISIS would be the greatest story of the modern era
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) July 5, 2017
The company also tried to hide the importation of the artefacts to Oklahoma City by incorrectly labelling shipments as “ceramics” and “samples”.
A reminder: this is a chain of arts-and-craft stores. Hobby Lobby was best known to non-US citizens for its vehement opposition to Obamacare‘s employer health insurance mandates, which got them painted as a very, very conservative Christian organisation. Now this.
There’s a lesson in this for all of us, I think: if a lawyer tells you not to import thousands of looted Iraqi artefacts in secret shipments to your arts-and-crafts chain headquarters, do not do it.
Source: The Daily Beast.
Photo: Indiana Jones.
