Buying Blood Diamonds Isn’t As Bad As…

…drawing attention to someone buying blood diamonds. Apparently.

According to dear, dear Yasmin, anyway:

Granted, Naomi Campbell is not very nice or clever. But I really don't see why the beautiful, sullen, 'dotish' airhead becomes the empty vessel into which the world tosses its scorn.

Because she’s the one who first received the loot, perhaps, Yaz? Though as David Duff points out, it was with no obvious intentions of keeping it for herself...

It has nothing to do with her race – Campbell will always be the dahling of fashionistas to whom her colour has never mattered.

Because only fashionistas are so sophisticated that race is irrelevant, I guess?

OK, so she wasn't the cool, stylish dame last week that she usually is.

I have to say, of all the available adjectives, ‘cool’ isn’t one I’d ever ascribe to the notoriously fly-off-the-handle-at every-opportunity clotheshorse…

Of course, it is an inconvenience for one to whom the meaning of life is make-up, frocks, jewels, cameras, Mammon, smitten men and fawning fans.

Well, of course…

I am not being facetious. She had to be ordered to The Hague to give evidence at the war crimes trial of Liberia's toppled leader Charles Taylor, who stands accused of sponsoring savage rebellions in the region. So, she doesn't know where Liberia is and couldn't care less about his misdemeanours and all that boring stuff. What do you expect? She is who she is – a supermodel, as it says on the tin.

‘We’ don’t expect much else, Yaz, to be truthful…

It is not Campbell that is truly appalling, but the chorus of disapproval we have heard this week from people who showed no interest in the trial until a dumb beauty turned up to entertain them.

Ahhhh, right. It’s not the fact that an airhead has been shown to be an airhead that upsets Yaz; it’s that we’ve paid attention to it.

Huh? Even for Yaz, this is surprising. Surely she can find some way in which the West is to blame for…

Ah:

That is racism – treating massacres in Africa as "natural" or inevitable.

/facepalm

They aren’t exactly unknown, though, are they? Should we ignore the evidence of our own eyes, then? Surely, more publicity for the concept of ‘blood diamonds’ is a good one, no?

The media got excited and took their cameras to the courtroom. At least millions now will have heard of The Hague, learnt a few facts about a Liberian warlord, an African-American, like most of the elite in that West African country, created through colonising land on behalf of freed slaves.

Yes, because native-born Africans can’t organise their own massacres, eh, Yaz?

When he was elected to run Liberia in 1997, the warlord Taylor was bathed in so much blood, few could believe his victory or bear to accept him as a leader.
Yet there he was, that same year with a whole bunch of the rich and powerful invited by Nelson Mandela to tour on a five-star train in South Africa and then on to his presidential residence.

And what are we to make of that, according to Yaz?

State villainy carries on in the world because high-minded leaders can let go of moral principles when the time, cause or price is right.

Even African ones, it seems...