Hobby Lobby, the Oklahoma City-based arts-and-crafts chain, was recently fined $3 million by the Department of Justice for purchasing and shipping artifacts–Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets, among other things, mostly from Iraq–to its headquarters by way of an antiquities dealer in the United Arab Emirates. The merchant was suspected of dealing in stolen goods, and it is not clear whether Hobby Lobby, and its founder David Green, understood that the artifacts’ provenance was in dispute.
On the whole, and in principle, it is largely a Good Thing that historic antiquities be preserved in their places of origin, and it is certainly important for the Justice Department to be vigilant about stolen art and artifacts. Turkey, for example, is notorious for blessing and profiting from the plunder of Christian sites and artifacts in the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus and in historic Armenian territories of the old Ottoman Empire, now part of Turkey.
But the purpose behind Mr. Green’s (and Hobby Lobby’s) acquisition is by no means a Bad Thing. As anyone who reads a newspaper can discern, the survival of pre-Islamic Mesopotamian antiquities is uncertain, at the present time, and perhaps imperiled. The Green family are founders of a new Museum of the Bible, scheduled to open near the Mall in Washington, D.C. in November, where the artifacts were intended to be displayed.
But news coverage of this case, especially in the New York Times and Washington Post, has been unremittingly hostile toward the Greens and Hobby Lobby. And on the very day that the Times featured on its front page a startling photograph of the widespread destruction in Mosul, newly reclaimed from the Islamic State, the Post published an especially snide editorial alluding to Hobby Lobby’s “hypocrisy” and its “claim of running a business according to strict moral Christian principles.”
To be sure, there is little mystery about the attitude: Three years ago Hobby Lobby prevailed in a landmark Supreme Court case that challenged Obamacare’s birth-control mandate. The Greens objected to providing a few of the 20 forms of birth control required by the regulation, which they considered abortifacients
You don’t have to be a “strict moral Christian,” or opponent of abortion, to appreciate the sincerity of religious principles in such instances, and it is striking that comparatively sophisticated publications would allow their own cultural prejudices to obscure an obvious, if uncomfortable, fact: There are times when the purchase of historic antiquities from habitual war zones is key to their survival.
The most famous instance of this, of course, is the Elgin Marbles, acquired in the early 19th century by the resident British diplomat in Athens when the Parthenon was being used as an ammunition dump by the Ottoman government. In my view, if the Marbles had not spent the past two centuries on display in the British Museum, where they have been seen by millions of visitors, they wouldn’t exist. And of course, just two years ago, ISIS wantonly and deliberately destroyed large portions of the pre-Islamic UNESCO World Heritage site at Palmyra, in Syria. The list goes on.
In the Hobby Lobby case, the Post seems especially exercised about what it perceives as the “hypocrisy” of a commendable instinct–the rescue and preservation of precious relics of civilization–in a wealthy family and its business enterprise, whose religious beliefs the Post deplores. But of course, hypocrisy appears in various forms: The Post is owned by Jeffrey Bezos, founder and proprietor of Amazon.com. Perhaps the Post disapproves of the purchase and shipment of artifacts by some means other than Amazon.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
