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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 5412752, member: 110350&quot;]Also the thousands of statues and other works of art looted by the Romans from Greece and elsewhere? What makes them Italy&#039;s cultural heritage as opposed to those other countries&#039;?</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not Jerome Eisenberg&#039;s defense lawyer -- I doubt he needs one -- but the post above is a flagrant hit piece against Royal Athena -- by a poster I know best for staunchly defending Lanz&#039;s fakes, and challenging the veracity of members who&#039;ve told their stories about Lanz&#039;s refusals to issue refunds.</p><p><br /></p><p>Without going through the dreary process of analyzing the citations, story by story, sufficient for the nonce to point out that the majority of the citations are to sources that are as much against allowing people to collect ancient coins as they&#039;re opposed to permitting the legal collection of antiquities. As a percentage of the tens of thousands of objects Eisenberg sold over the years, the number he ended up returning, or that were &quot;seized,&quot; was probably smaller than any major museum&#039;s. Not a single one of the citations even suggests that Jerome Eisenberg ever did anything other than return looted objects voluntarily when they were identified -- without having to be sued -- or failed to cooperate with the authorities, or had any criminal knowledge himself.&nbsp; He bought at least one of the objects he returned from Christies, at an auction! The implicit comparison to known crooks like Robin Symes is absurd.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a salutary corrective to the hyperbole of the subject post, I suggest reading the following article from July 30, 2020:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://culturalpropertynews.org/rand-corp-report-demolishes-assumptions-on-antiquities-and-terror/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://culturalpropertynews.org/rand-corp-report-demolishes-assumptions-on-antiquities-and-terror/" rel="nofollow">https://culturalpropertynews.org/rand-corp-report-demolishes-assumptions-on-antiquities-and-terror/</a>&nbsp; (You&#039;re welcome to suggest that &quot;cultural property news&quot; is biased in the other direction -- I have no idea if that&#039;s the case -- but the underlying report is the underlying report.) Note the references to ancient coins as well as (or as part of) the antiquities trade.</p><p><br /></p><p>The article begins as follows:</p><p><br /></p><p>“We have beautiful heroines, we have bad guys, we have supporters, we have the terrorists.” Deborah Lehr of the Antiquities Coalition, speaking to the Middle East Institute, April 24, 2014</p><p><br /></p><p>The most important story in the art world in the last decade illustrates how social influence, slick public relations, and steady repetition of false information can change the cultural policy of institutions, nations, even whole continents – even if the story is a lie. The lie is attractive, romantic, even heroic at times. There are times when the story is even partly true or just an oversimplification. There are bad apples and criminals in every occupation and the art world is certainly no exception. But the story is a lie all the same.</p><p><br /></p><p>What is this false narrative? It is that the horrific cultural destruction in the world today and the looting of artistic heritage is driven by a handful of art dealers, collectors, and greedy museums. That respectable art dealers aren’t respectable at all – they are working hand in hand with terrorists and well-organized criminal networks that loot to order for unscrupulous collectors in the United States and Europe.</p><p><br /></p><p>This story has already severely damaged the legitimate trade in ancient art and artifacts, including coins. More importantly, it has changed Western political agendas and pushed legislation that will cause permanent harm to cultural institutions dependent on public support for a relatively free circulation of art. It has captured the imagination of hundreds of journalists and influenced the teaching of art history, anthropology, and archaeology to a generation of students. Most dangerously, it has forwarded the careers of dictatorial rulers who play the ‘cultural heritage card’ to cloak human rights violations and even the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage by well-oiled authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Turkey, China, and elsewhere.</p><p><br /></p><p>A major study by the RAND Corporation, Tracking and Disrupting the Illicit Antiquities Trade with Open Source Data, is the first major step in completely overturning current thinking on the size, geographical scope and participants in illicit looting and sales of antiquities. The RAND report was researched with the RAND Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center and partially funded through work for the US Department of Defense. The report shows that the conventional narrative promoted by many journalists and espoused by advocacy and archaeological organizations is dead wrong: the illicit antiquities trade is not a multi-billion-dollar enterprise operating through organized criminal networks, nor is it a significant source of revenue to terrorist organizations.</p><p><br /></p><p>The stark difference between popular assumptions about the antiquities market and the data contained in the RAND report raises questions about how false narratives have driven legislation to regulate the art trade – and misdirected law enforcement activities attempting to curb illicit trafficking. The RAND report notes that different facts require new strategies to address the problem of illegal trade; a working cultural heritage policy must use more accurate data in order to disrupt looting and deter consumers from buying illicit goods.</p><p><br /></p><p>The RAND report blames bloggers, journalists and advocacy groups for exaggerating – sometime ‘grossly exaggerating’ – the problem to attract headlines, funding and to effect policy change.[ii]</p><p><br /></p><p>And it singles out one of the highest profile crusaders against trafficking, New York Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, stating that the widely held but inaccurate belief that antiquities trafficking is linked to trafficking in drugs and weapons can mostly be traced back to him as the source.[iii] The RAND report also notes that figures of $2 billion for Syria and $3 billion to $10 billion for Egypt repeated by the Antiquities Coalition have misled the public.[iv] Interestingly, top staff at this most influential advocacy organization have also volunteered to provide expert advice on high profile criminal cases prosecuted by the New York District Attorney’s office.[v]</p><p><br /></p><p>No evidence was supplied in the #CultureUnderThreat Task Force report that supported the claim that the antiquities trade has brought “multi-billion dollars” in revenue to terrorist organizations like ISIS. The Task Force report noted the oft-quoted $1.25 million estimation from the Abu Sayyaf raid[viii] and warnings from the State Department that “Daesh has earned several million dollars from antiquities trafficking since mid-2014.[ix] But its tenor was wildly alarmist and it called for everyone from National Security Agency to the Peace Corps to dedicate themselves to stamping out the art trade. Despite the obvious difference between “million and “billion,” the description of a “multi-billion industry” in looted antiquities has been repeated often by the Antiquities Coalition’s publications and found its way from that source into hundreds of news articles and academic writings.[x]</p><p><br /></p><p>A Committee for Cultural Policy report, “Bearing False Witness,” published December 2017, lists 95 articles which make specific reference to a hundreds of millions to multi-billion dollar illicit trade in antiquities by in the Mideast. (This was only a partial list of those appearing in the mainstream media over a three year period ending in 2017).[xi]</p><p><br /></p><p>However, as the RAND report notes, even advocates such as Deborah Lehr of the Antiquities Coalition have acknowledged that “[t]he biggest challenge in this field is that there’s no real information or statistics on the size of this illegal trade.”[xii]</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite this acknowledgement, the impact of a tsunami of misinformation and bad data has gone far beyond Mideast policy-making; it has misdirected legislation on import restrictions and money-laundering in the US and the EU and compromised planning for protecting heritage around the world.&nbsp; By describing the actual working of the illicit trade, the RAND report makes clear that antiquities trade in the Mideast is not founded on sophisticated criminal networks but is instead opportunistic, disorganized and far, far smaller than reported. The actual facts, based on the data in the RAND report, should replace the popular myths and be used to reverse damaging policy directions and develop more effective strategies to combat looting.</p><p><br /></p><p>***</p><p><br /></p><p>And so on.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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