A "Funny" Story About Looting

                       "Nosy's" funny                      

On Twitter on the back of a news item about a return of items from Hobby Lobby's "Museum of the Bible", Ross-somebody "A nosy archaeologist" (@merovingians 4h) ventures:

I am once again reminding you all that Hobby Lobby purchased Iraqi antiquities that were probably looted by ISIS.

Not quite sure who "I" is, and why he needs to mansplain the Twitterverse on this, but it is not true. It was pointed out to him by ATHAR that the antiquities in question had been seized by US customs in 2011, which means that although they had probably been looted after the US invasion of Iraq, that was several years before ISIS existed in the region. They did not begin rising in the region until around 2014. The response:

a nosy archaeologist @merovingians 3 g.
Yes but 'looted by ISIS' is funnier, plus there was likely a non-zero degree of personnel overlap if we're being real

"Funny" story.  There is nothing "funny" about what has been happening in Iraq and Syria, to people and their lives, in the past few years. While some archaeologists are having "fun" pontificating, others, such as Sam Hardy and myself have been looking at the hard evidence on the ground behind the tales told by the US Department of State and the US media to justify their destructive and disruptive proxy war in the Middle East. As we have shown, the ISIL loot myth as told has very little hard evidence to back it up. But some archaeologists will ignore it to enable pathetic posturing and pontification. Archaeology should be evidence-based, not story-telling.