On Sunday, the iconic Louvre Museum in the French capital played host to a speedy heist in which eight items of precious jewellery dating from the Napoleonic era were spirited away from its second floor. . . .
International news outlets reported the theft with predictable drama; CNN, for example, blared the headline: “Historic jewels stolen in ‘national disaster’ for France”. The article went on to note that one of the looted diadems “features 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1,083 diamonds that can be detached and worn as brooches, according to the Louvre”.
The sensational hand-wringing was almost reminiscent of another contemporary “national disaster” in Paris – namely, the April 2019 fire at the Notre Dame cathedral that broke the hearts of politicians worldwide, even as they remained apparently unmoved by such objectively more tragic events as Israel’s recurrent slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
And now that we have just witnessed two years of all-out genocide in Gaza courtesy of the United States-backed Israeli military, it seems that the loss of all those sapphires and diamonds might ultimately not really be so “disastrous”, after all – at least in terms of, you know, the general state of humanity and the future of the planet.
In fact, many of us might even find ourselves rooting for the thieves, to some extent – if only as a symbolic middle finger to a world predicated on obscene inequality and misplaced priorities. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.