Monday, January 03, 2005

ROBERT DEUTSCH RESPONDS ON THE ANE LIST. (Via Ralph.) Deutsch says he's innocent, that the IAA has been harassing him for a long time, and that he's going to sue them. I'm confused: has he been indicted or not? Excerpt:
In a news conference the IAA has insinuated that I had "an involvement in a ring dealing with forgeries." They purposely distorted the truth by announcing my name as one of the "criminals," with the malicious intent to connect me in the mind of the public with the fake Joash inscription and the highly debated James ossuary. Even the IAA has never made such charge against me; the IAA knows perfectly well that I never saw either of these pieces before they were published, nor did I have any connection with them what-so-ever. Yet they purposely and maliciously linked my name with these objects and with the pomegranate "forgery" sold to the Israel Museum, with which I also had absolutely no involvement. The IAA never charged me with any involvement with these objects, yet included my name in their announcement of indictments against those that did, to purposely give the misimpression that I had some involvement with them. Again the purpose of the IAA is clear: to destroy my reputation and ability to continue to be a licensed antiquities dealer, and thereby harass, intimidate and destroy all of the antiquities dealers that operate in Israel in full compliance with Israeli law.

If he has been indicted with the other three, this whole thing has gone well beyond the IAA. If he hasn't, the media has royally screwed up its recent reporting. Hopefully the indictment itself will be online soon (see Ralph post linked to above).

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