Pope Bullies Benetton Into Pulling ‘Imam Kiss’ Ads

Benetton’s “Unhate” campaign lost all meaning after Italian clothing company crumbled to the Vatican pressure over a picture of the pope kissing an imam.

The United Colors of Benetton made a global name for itself with controversial ads featuring people dying of AIDS, newborn babies sporting umbilical cords and death row inmates.

Then it basically went away for a long, long time, only to be revived, quite unintentionally, by Pope Benedict XVI.

Hoping perhaps to reclaim the spotlight, Benetton today unveiled its latest marketing campaign. Called “Unhate,” the photoshopped series features typically antagonistic world leaders, including Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez or North Korea and South Korea’s Kim Jong Il and Lee Myung-bak, locking lips.

Another image shows Pope Benedict laying one on Egyptian Sunni theologian Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb. The men fell out after el-Tayeb refused to help Benedict advocate for Egypt’s Christian minority, and showing them “kissing” was an unforgivable offense, according to the Vatican.

The Associated Press reports that the Pope’s posse called Benetton, an Italian company, and complained that the image “shows a serious lack of respect for the pope.” Now Benetton has pulled the image from its website — a mere few hours after first publishing it — and has thus totally undercut their campaign’s entire purpose.

“Unhate” should have deflated the intensity of international animosities. It should have encouraged understanding and human resilience in the face of seeming insurmountable differences. It should have had a spine.

Standing strong against their neighbors at the Vatican would have shown that Benetton had courage of its convictions. By buckling, it does the opposite, proving the clothing company has no faith in the message they attempted to send.