Chain accused of hypocrisy in artifact smuggling case
Hobby Lobby says retailer made ‘some regrettable mistakes’
Hobby Lobby, the artsand-crafts chain whose devout Christian owners won a landmark Supreme Court ruling on religious freedom, is caught up in an antiquities-smuggling scandal that has opened the company to accusations of hypocrisy.
The Oklahoma Citybased business agreed to pay a $3 million fine Wednesday over its role in what federal prosecutors said was the smuggling into the U.S. of ancient clay tablets, seal sand other Iraqi archaeological objects that might have been looted from the war-torn-country.
Online, many people piled on, with more than one saying things like: “I know Hobby Lobby’s big on the Ten Commandments, but how about ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” and “Hypocritical cretins. Preach one thing and practice another.”
Hobby Lobby, whose president, Steve Green, has been collecting ancient artifacts since 2009 and is building an $800 million Bible museum in Washington, pleaded naivete in doing business with dealers in the Middle East.
“The company was new to the world of acquiring these items and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process,” Hobby Lobby said in a statement. “This resulted in some regret table mistakes .”
Federal prosecutors described a scheme that involved lying and perhaps stealing. It included a number of middlemen and involved the use of phony or misleading invoices, shipping labels and other paperwork to slip the artifacts past U.S. customs agents, prosecutors said.
Among other things, cuneiform tablets were labeled “ceramic tiles,” and items carried paperwork that said they came from Turkey or Israel. Also, artifacts were deliberately undervalued and shipped in small batches to multiple addresses in Oklahoma City to avoid drawing the attention of customs agents, prosecutors said.
Bob Murowchick, an associate professor in archaeology and anthropology at Boston University, cast doubt on the company’s claim that it didn’t know what it was doing.
“It’s like that scene in ‘Casablanca’: ‘I am shocked, shocked, that there is gambling going on here,’” Murowchick said.
Under the settlement with prosecutors, Hobby Lobby must return thousands of artifacts it brought to the U.S. in 2009 and 2010.
Green doesn’t open his 600 stores on Sunday so his 28,000 employees may observe the Christian Sabbath. The privately held company successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 2014 that because of the owners’ religious beliefs, it shouldn’t have to supply birth control to employees under Obamacare.
U.S. law makes it a crime to possess or traffic in Iraqi archaeological treasures if they were illegally removed from Iraq since 1990, or if there are reasonable grounds to think so.
The Museum of the Bible said that none of the artifacts in the settlement was ever part of its collection and that the institution is still on track to open in November.