Egypt MOU Philistinism: "Petition News"

Riding with the Black Hat Guys?

The "Stop the import of Undocumented Egyptian heritage objects" petition currently has 1,334 signatures supporting the Egypt MOU. This is 1000 more than the coineys managed to raise against the MOU (the coiney lobbyists' claimed  "91%" drops now to 19.4%).

The "Do not exempt coins from the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act" petition addressed to New York Black Hat allies representatives Charles Rangel and Steve Israel is not doing so well, it has only 94 supporters, and not a single one of them collects dugup coins. This needs more social media advertising than the AIA seem to have given it. Although the measure has not a snowball's chance in hell of getting accepted (and starting a debate on touching the wording of the badly outdated and cumbersome CCPIA could be highly risky for the antiquities trade in general), let's at least have the ambition to raise more than a mere hundred signatures to give politicians the message that more people care about attempting to do something about the illicit trade in antiquities than care about lifting restrictions facilitating such trade. My bet is that Rangel and Israel were told that there are "50 000 collectors of ancient coins in the US" whose lifetime support and gratitude will be gained by doing them the favour of lifting controls on smuggled coins. It would be useful to show populists the political risks of riding with the Black Hat guys.