BABYLON
TIMES OF ISRAEL – US officials on Wednesday returned to Iraq 3,800 ancient artifacts that had been smuggled into the United States and shipped to a nationwide arts and crafts retailer.
The items include cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals and clay bullae. Many of the tablets come from the ancient city of Irisagrig and date back to 2100-1600 BCE, officials said.
Packages of cuneiform tablets were initially intercepted by customs agents and falsely labeled as tile samples for retailer Hobby Lobby.
The company last year agreed to forfeit thousands of ancient Iraqi artifactsand pay $3 million to settle a civil suit brought by the US government, attributing its purchase of the illegally imported items to naivete.
The Department of Justice says thousands of cuneiform tablets and clay bullae were smuggled into the United States via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in packages shipped to the Oklahoma-based company.
Hobby Lobby said it had been acquiring artifacts “consistent with the company’s mission and passion for the Bible” with the goal of preserving them for future generations and sharing them with public institutions and museums.
Steve Green, the billionaire evangelical Christian who founded Hobby Lobby, is chairman of the Museum of the Bible, which opened last year in the US capital.
US Attorney Richard Donoghue said Wednesday that US officials “are proud to have played a role in removing these pieces of Iraq’s history from the black market of illegally obtained antiquities and restoring them to the Iraqi people.”
These pieces “are very important to us and they should be returned home,” said Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Fareed Yasseen.
The ceremony, which took place in Washington, was the first US repatriation of cultural property to Iraq since 2015.
Since 2008, ICE has returned more than 1,200 items to Iraq, whose cultural property was heavily plundered in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Hobby Lobby calls itself the largest privately owned arts-and-crafts retailer in the world with approximately 32,000 employees and operating in 47 states.
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Stop calling Hobby Lobby a Christian business
“We’re Christians,” Hobby Lobby’s president Steve Green proclaims, “and we run our business on Christian principles.”
That is music to the ears of many conservative Christians, who rallied around Hobby Lobby when the retail chain argued at the Supreme Court that ObamaCare’s contraception mandate unlawfully burdened their religious beliefs. But a closer look at Hobby Lobby’s actual business practices reveals this claim to be as hollow as a flute. Turn over just about any trinket in a Hobby Lobby store and you’ll find a gold oval stamped with “Made in China,” a country that is one of the worst offenders of human dignity, unborn infant life, and economic justice anywhere in the world.
As such, those shiny stickers littering every Hobby Lobby from sea to shining sea are more than a statement about a product’s geographical origin; they are also a stinging indictment against the way the retailer has sought to label itself.
Imagine for a moment a nation with nightmarish labor conditions, inadequate workplace regulation, and rampant child labor. You’ve just imagined 21st century China. Seventy thousand Chinese employees die every year in workplace accidents — that’s roughly 200 humans snuffed out of existence every day.
Some provinces in China are raising their minimum wage standards. But don’t rush to praise them. Starting this year in Shanghai, minimum wage is rising to only $293 per month — a paltry figure that is still the highest amount paid in all of mainland China. That’s about $9.77 per day. If you were wondering how Hobby Lobby can sell wicker baskets for next to nothing, now you know.
