I’m not going to make a comment. This is the definition of "cognitave dissonance." I love the ladies, and I despise the people using them for their own ego boosting and enrichment,
A GLOSSY picture book featuring French screen siren Emmanuelle Beart on charity missions has highlighted the use of an unlikely new weapon in the war on want - the "humanitarian playmate". While the United Nations has recruited celebrities as "ambassadors" for decades, its current preference for stars with sex appeal is prompting disquiet in the aid world. Beart - who won fame dancing naked in the 1986 film Manon des Sources, co-starred with Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and modelled for Christian Dior - has a history of involvement in social causes. But while no-one doubts her good intentions, the book published in Paris last week with the UN’s blessing looks more like a fashion catalogue than a call to end cruelty to children. She takes her designer wardrobe to settings from Mauritania, where she witnessed the ravages of water shortages, to Vietnam, where the scourge is malnutrition; from Mali, where she helped to promote health care among children, to Thailand, where she was shocked by their sexual exploitation.
Not that she is the first celebrity UN ambassador to have put her impressions into print. With the growth of the anti-globalisation movement, the record of a star’s journey to a pocket of want is becoming a publishing fashion. American actress Angelina Jolie produced a book about her travels on behalf of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Ex-Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell and Colombian singer Shakira have also toiled for the UN cause.
Beart’s book, Sous Nos Yeux (Before Our Eyes), shows her tearfullly consoling a Thai woman who told the actor her mother sold her into prostitution at age 10. Elsewhere, she is seen cuddling babies and helping vaccinate children in Mali. It is these artistic images of a soulful-looking Beart in the wilds that prompted murmuring in Paris about humanitarian playmates. "Emmanuelle Beart has no credibility or legitimacy in the task of reducing malnutrition in Mali," said Rony Brauman, founder of the Nobel prize-winning aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres. As for Beart, she said she wanted more than a sinecure. "It is much more than a question of making available my name," she writes. "I agreed to give my time and my soul." |