Monumental Mishegas: UNESCO High-Fives Hollywood for Raising Awareness About Stolen Stuff in Syria

The UN agency claims, risibly, that George Clooney's latest flick can have an impact on events in Syria:

UNESCO, the U.N. cultural, education and science arm, has in the past month started to train customs officials and police in neighboring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan to look for the trafficking of cultural objects out of Syria, said Francesco Bandarin, assistant director-general for culture at the agency. 

Bandarin said the new Hollywood film - which tells the story of experts tasked with retrieving artistic treasure stolen by the Nazis during World War Two - would raise global awareness of the illegal trade in artifacts stolen during more recent conflicts, such as Syria, Mali and Libya. 

"I would like to thank Hollywood for bringing this issue to global attention because sometimes Hollywood is more powerful than all the U.N. system put together," Bandarin said of the film, which opens in North America on Friday and stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett. 

"This issue of heritage protection will be on everybody's mind and for us this is a tremendous opportunity," he told reporters at the United Nations in New York. 

The European Union gave UNESCO 2.5 million euros ($3.4 million)this week to establish a team in Beirut to gather better information on the situation in Syria, to fight the trafficking of artifacts and to raise awareness internationally and locally, he said...

Gee, do you get the feeling that UNESCO is more concerned about the stuff than it is about the human beings? With all the savage slaughter occurring in Syria, it's hard for us non-UNESCO, non-Hollywood types to get terribly exercised about "the trafficking of artifacts."

Update: From the movie review linked above:

Largely fictionalized, the film compresses events and cooks up dramatic death scenes, even as it asks the audience to chuckle through a scene of Damon's character trapped atop an unexploded land mine. That scene is followed, abruptly, by the discovery of barrels of gold teeth extracted from Jewish concentration camp prisoners. The change-up is jarring, intentionally. The effect feels misjudged.

"Jarring"--indeed. It would have been nice had they exerted as much effort saving the people with the gold teeth as they did saving the art. But since, sans the gold in their mouths, the people were deemed worse than worthless, the people were murdered while their teeth became valuable "artifacts."