Don't be silly. Only poor, dark-skinned people get convicted of inadvertently supporting terrorism. Good White Christians make honest mistakes.
How quickly The Troubles and the IRA are forgotten.
Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having grown up in that culture, worked at HL as my first job and a brother that worked at Mardel, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Having grown up in that culture, and lived in that area before, I'd say he's actually spot on.
This is his original statement:
The terrorists are really only killing other Muslims in the Middle East, so that's perfectly OK with "committed evangelical Christians".
If you've grown up in an evangelical church, you would be aware that evangelicals put a ton of focus on missionary work (evangelical get it) and have a lot of interest in spreading Christianity worldwide and there's also a ton of focus on 3rd world Christians and their persecution (very real). That actually has a spillover where Christians here imagine they are being persecuted.
They care a lot about this stuff. Jim Elliot, Travel the Road, Gospel for Asia, Jesus Freaks, Voice of the Martyrs and other kind of stuff. It's a very separate subculture but by god do they love 3rd world Christians.
I don't think anyone who has been in that culture would agree with the parent post. The truth is really the opposite. It sounds like an uninformed rant.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
True enough, but I always got the impression their customers would skew liberal. But that might be my liberal assumptions about who does craft projects showing through. :)
Oh, no. Hobby Lobby's customers are typically conservative suburban Christians. Liberals with any political awareness at all would know very well of their contraception case at the SCOTUS, and go to Michael's instead. There's no shortage of middle-class evangelical Christians in suburban areas who are perfectly happy to patronize Hobby Lobby and support their political efforts.
I'd say the vast majority of their customers are just people who want crafting supplies and it happens to be the nearest big box store for them. I think a relatively small fraction of the population is as politically aware as you suggest.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#94Don't be silly. Only poor, dark-skinned people get convicted of inadvertently supporting terrorism. Good White Christians make honest mistakes.
How quickly The Troubles and the IRA are forgotten.
I haven't. Donating money to the IRA used to be very fashionable in Boston bars throughout the 80s and 90s (According to my Northern Irish Protestant family). I also remember when a Hollywood actor also publicly donated to the IRA as well.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how did this go down, in your mind? The President of Hobby Lobby got his eyes on some shiny objects, then was told to make the check out to Al-Qaeda, and decided that it was worth funding terrorism to get the items he'd been lusting after? Also, would you arrest someone who purchased an item at a yard sale that had been stolen at one point? Come to think of it, should I be grilling every yard sale proprietor to ma…
Yes, antiquities from this part of the world that are sold on the black market have higher stakes. The DOJ makes it clear Hobby Lobby acted very suspiciously/maliciously. If you're at a yard sale where you're asked to meet the seller at the back to see the "real goods" and pay in unusual ways, you're exposing yourself. Let's not forget, the president of Hobby Lobby isn't naive when it comes to the law... he navigated…
The DOJ makes it clear that they broke laws. I'm not disputing that. Clearly they did something wrong, and are paying a pretty penny for it (pocket change for the CEO, but almost twice what they paid overall).
And as I said, I'd like to think I'd have acted better. People are making good points in this thread. I'm not blindly trying to defend a company I know very little about; just trying to poke some holes in the groupthink here.
A few more points:
1. The BBC article says that they purchased 5,500 artifacts, and the original article says that they forfeited 144 items. So what's the story here - they took some calculated risks and ended up functionally paying 4.6 million for 5,356 items? Or, they were actually careful but unfortunately a little under 3% of the items were bad? Could be either, or neither.
2. Are there any comparable companies/cases? I have no reference point for this story. When someone else bought a bunch of history, what did their buying practices look like, and have they ever been in trouble?
3. Does anyone here know what it's like to buy antiquities? I'd imagine most people who do it legally will have a more rigorous process, but I have to believe that in some cases it's not as clean as going to a Sotheby's auction.
4. Do we know who was responsible for what here? Obviously the buck stops with the CEO so he deserves to be the face of the criticism here, but is it possible that, since this was a process that probably spanned multiple transactions and weeks, he had some help that was less than competent? Doesn't absolve him of anything, and it didn't! His company was fined. But it pokes a hole in the "mustache-twirling" narrative.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having grown up in that culture, and lived in that area before, I'd say he's actually spot on.
This is his original statement: The terrorists are really only killing other Muslims in the Middle East, so that's perfectly OK with "committed evangelical Christians". If you've grown up in an evangelical church, you would be aware that evangelicals put a ton of focus on missionary work (evangelical get it) and have a lot of interest in spreading Christianity worldwide and there's also a ton of focus on 3rd world Ch…
And his follow-up statement:
> It's obviously not a distorted generalization of the Hobby Lobby owners themselves, and I think they're very representative of that sub-group of Christians. Not to say that all Christians are like this, not by a long shot; evangelicals are only a fraction, and the far-right-wing politically-active ones like the HL owners are a fraction of that, but they're a really awful fraction.
Is very accurate. Sure, not all evangelicals think that way. We can argue over who has the better scottsman all day long, but I've definitely seen many evangelicals who don't care as long as we "those brown people keep shooting each other".
Obviously experiences vary. I don't see why that's hard to grasp.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that in drug cases, there is almost always overwhelming proof that someone committed a crime. Nobody has a kilo of cocaine shoved down their waistband and doesn't know about it. In a case like this, maybe it's a "giant crime," or maybe it's just a customs violation. Unless you have proof of the entity's state of mind, it's impossible to tell the difference.
If you think officers need a shred of proof to arrest somebody and judges need a shred of proof to convict, i've got a bridge to nowhere for sale ... the us criminal system is a machine run for profit, not for justice, simply because SOME of the convicts are murderers is simply correlation
I have a lot of criticism for the U.S. criminal justice system, but I've also got first-hand experience with it and I think your assertion is inaccurate. As a judge's clerk I saw the files of numerous criminal convictions on appeal. I can't think of a single one where there wasn't overwhelming evidence to support the conviction.
The felon caught with a gun in his car, or the drug dealer who tried to sell drugs to an undercover cop, or the guy who was arrested after beating his wife bloody. That's the bread and butter of the justice system. You can argue that two of those three things shouldn't be crimes (and I agree--but at least half the country doesn't) but the idea that people are routinely convicted without evidence is a myth.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#98Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
And perhaps equally infuriating and insulting is this Christian company not taking any responsibility for the theft or funding terrorists. From the BBC articles; >'Hobby Lobby said it "did not fully appreciate the complexities" of the import process when it began' and >'The company imprudently relied on dealers and shippers who, in hindsight, did not understand the correct way to document and ship these items," Hobby…
So how did this go down, in your mind? The President of Hobby Lobby got his eyes on some shiny objects, then was told to make the check out to Al-Qaeda, and decided that it was worth funding terrorism to get the items he'd been lusting after? Also, would you arrest someone who purchased an item at a yard sale that had been stolen at one point? Come to think of it, should I be grilling every yard sale proprietor to ma…
Your yard sale analogy is a little off, unless the yard sale is in the middle of an active war zone.
How do you think this went down? "Hey, let's buy this stuff from Iraq. Iraq, Iraq... where have I heard of that before? Hmm, isn't that where those ISIS fellows are? Well, never mind, they probably have nothing to do with it."
There's also the issue of inconsistent punishment. If you or I had done this we'd probably be in prison and even the cleverest yard sale analogy wouldn't save us. These guys get slapped with a fine equivalent to roughly three tenths of a second of profits and walk away clean.
Re: Ancient Iraqi Artifacts Imported By Hobby Lobby to be Forfeited
#100What boggles me in this case is that the Hobby Lobby people involved are not not already on a fast track for criminal charges. There are cases where simply donating money intended for orphan to the wrong type of Islamic organization has led to jail time. What more giving millions to buy black market artifacts from ISIS! I'll try to dig up a link about the charitable donation. Edit: Supreme Court ruling on providing s…
Don't forget Turkey&co is buying oil from daesh.